After my adventures in cosmopolitan Lyon, it was time for a change of pace. I present to you with WWOOF-ing** at Les Dessous du Cep or "the bottom of the vine", the organic vinyard I volunteered at for a week. I know I usually put the "things I have learned" at the end, but i feel I need to get a couple of these out from the get-go:
- always read your train ticket. Even though I bought it at one station, the ticket started at a different one. And of course I realized this when I was at the wrong station and had 10 minutes to get to the right one. Needless to say I missed my train
- always check the ENTIRE departures screen for your train and platform. There may be more than one leaving from the same platform in a 20 minute period. Needless to say, I got on the wrong train. I gladly realized this before I left Lyon and made arrangements for the next one.
- Skype does not work for numbers you are not contacts with and foreign numbers. I discovered this while trying to call Denny and Jeanne to let them know I had missed my train twice and would need a pickup at a later time. Also, pay phones are no help AT ALL.
- Romaneche-thorin is a lovely vinyard town. Especially the train station. I got a good look at it for about 45 min before I got picked up.
Okay, now that we have THAT out of the way, the week at the vinyard was amazing. Jeanne ( a french artist raised significantly in English speaking countries) and her spouse Denny (an Italian dancer and musician) together have a 400-hectare organic vinyard consisting of 2 Plots: one behind the house and another a short distance away. Of these grapes they make 2 red wines each fall which they rename every year. 2011's season was "Cleopatra", which is made from grapes from the far section of the vinyard, and "ErotiKa" made from a blend of the two plots. Both are delicious, with ErotiKa being softer and a little fruitier.
They also run a small, reservation-only organic restaurant out of their home, and I was grateful to get a daily sampling of their French-Italian fusion cuisine. (Anything I owed that was fitted however, not so much)
(ALL THE BREAD AND WINE AND COFFEE)
We didn't work in the actual vinyard so much because spring was late and the vines were juuuuust starting to bud. At that point they are so delicate the slightest brush can cause the buds to fall off, so the more we left the vines alone the better. We did however clear out the garden and help tidy the yard, preparing it for a season of guests.
On the day before I left, Denny also gave us a tasting of last fall's wine in the making, called "ISIS". He told us often times large wineries will taste the wine over the course of the fermentation and make changes to shape the taste and feel. He prefers to think of the wine as a baby still in the womb, and tasting the wine is like looking at a 5 month ultrasound-- it looks like a baby and has all the parts of a baby, but still needs time to fill out and develop, so making changes is pointless because its not done growing. And babies are exactly what each cask are to him. You can tell by the passion and care he puts into each one.
It really makes me want to come back to Europe and exclusively wwoof ** my way across the continent, tasting local cuisine and learning what people are doing around the world to put a dent in the industrial food crisis. I also want to see what wwoof-ing opportunities there are in Canada. Might be nice to go away to kelowna and pick fruit or pierce trees in Quebec for syrup. Road trip anyone?
**Note: okay, WWOOF! The World Wide Opportunities of Organic Farming. Basically it's a volunteer work-stay program. You get paired with an organic farm and work there for a week or two in exchange for food and board. I have included the link below, as well as the link to Les Dessous Du Cep. There is way more about my stay there that I could write about, but you'll just have to take me out for wine for those details...
WWOOF: www.wwoofinternational.org
Www.wwoof.ca
Denny and Jeanne's: www.lesdessousducep.fr
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