from Vacquieres, France: the arrival of the wine taster

Saturday Afternoon

The wine expert guy, the oenologist, comes, basket in hand. There are little bottles in it and he takes samples from different bins, marking the progress of each grape as it moves from juice to wine at the Chateau de Lascaux.





I spend so much time in the cave that I feel I need to bring in an outside opinion, just to hear another perspective, Jean-Benoit (vintner and proprietor of the Chateau) tells me.

I follow the three of them – the expert, Jean-Benoit and the apprentice (happy birthday to you, you’re just eighteen years old this week, you would not be working as a winemaker’s apprentice in the U.S., but you could be in the army, happy birthday to you) – and taste from each bin, as they do.





Take a Midwesterner who is in love with the wines and Languedoc and ask her to go easy on the tasting rounds. It’s a challenge.

I listen to the comments -- an intricate analysis of how sweet the grape is, how deep in color, how aromatic it is on this day, how over time it begins to mature into something so complex that it's hard to find words to describe what has just happened, all in the space of a few weeks.

Jean-Benoit is completely focused on his wines. His face lights up at the sight of the dark reds, his eyes smile at the vibrant notes in the roses and he looks relieved and happy with the maturation of the oldest (almost three weeks now!) of the whites.



Jean-Benoit sniffs, the oenologist writes


His apprentice fills our bottles and glasses and talks suggestively – noting things, but not asserting yet. He is there to learn, not to educate.

The wine oenologist is brutal. He scribbles things on the board, talks of temperatures and of fermentation, and appears to want to spare no blows, indifferent to a blogger’s presence.





Except there aren’t really any blows. Jean-Benoit’s wines are performing magnificently. It must be like testing the student who does his homework and is equally creative and brilliant.

Towards the end, I am tempted to lead everyone in song and dance right there in the vineyards. Shouldn’t one celebrate the success of all that fermenting grape juice? In the alternative, a nap sounds deliciously pleasant.

I sit down to review my photos instead. I have a few minutes before Jean-Benoit takes me on the next round of visits. The rain is holding back. Terrific luck. They should hire me as a rain-staller.

from Vacquieres, France: from field to bucket or bin

Saturday Morning

Quickly, before the rain comes. Jean-Benoit has the car waiting. It isn’t exactly dark still, but it feels early.

I have helped myself to a real Languedoc morning coffee – from a large cereal-size bowl, as is the custom, along with a fresh baguette (how could it be otherwise? it is part of the table setting) and I am sitting down to the computer, wondering if I could write about a harvest if I never witness a single grape being picked this entire week-end long.





But the rain stubbornly refuses to fall.

The clouds, they are like cotton balls, wavy, I have never seen them like that, Isabelle remarks as we stare at the rapidly moving formations. I can see why they’re saying that when the rains come down, they’ll drench Languedoc good and solid. The sky looks like at any minute it will swallow you, your village and your entire field of grapes. Waves of clouds, waves of vines.






Jean-Benoit and I drive out into a field, bordered by trees, where he has tentatively set a picking truck to work. Should I continue? – shouts the driver. Can't blame him. I'd be tempted to run for cover if it were me out there, in the field, truck or no truck. Still, the drops are hanging back...





Go on, go on! Jean-Benoit turns to me and says, I got up early this morning, looked outside and noticed it wasn’t raining yet. Maybe we can get something done. But I told most of the team not to come in.

The driver works his way slowly. The grapes fall in, efficiently, until the bin is full.

A machine does the job well, but only if all the grapes are mature and good and the vines aren’t too old.
And I suppose you don’t get neighbors to come in and stomp with feet to get the juice out anymore?

Jean-Benoit smiles, not knowing that indeed, I have been asked if, when in France, I will stomp up a storm, dirty feet and all. Seems like not something that the European Union would possibly tolerate, but still, we in the States expect a certain degree of quaintness from those European types, no?

These days, no feet touch the grapes, but tomorrow the two villages – ours and Corconne are having a race in the fields. It’s called La Foulée des Vendanges, after the stompers of the past.

We visit a neighbor’s field – he has taken the chance and sent out a handful of pickers. I watch, take photos, answer questions. Though explaining Ocean to pickers whose language is neither English nor French (they are Moroccan) is a challenge.











This particular vineyard is a father and son operation. The son is assisting dad. Soon, the dad will be assisting the son. It’s how it works here, I’m told.






The sky is still holding it in. Jean-Benoit and I drive toward his own fields of aging vines. I have always loved these vieille vignes best. In contrast to the tall vines that climb high and enjoy the air and the sun and the movement of a gentle wind, these older guys are bunched together in communities of clusters, all tightly held against a thick and beautifully twisted trunk.





A vintner knows what to taste for. We’ll be picking these soon.






In another field belonging to the Chateau de Lascaux, the tall Mouverdre grapes are also almost ready.



Jean-Benoit surveys the vines...

Another day and they will be perfect. Their skin holds so much flavor even now!

What a difference a day makes. To a vintner. To me, the taste is fantastic as we speak. I’d have you picking while the going’s good. That’s why I am left to take pictures and not bottle wine. I’d probably bottle it when it is still grape juice.



...he samples, eyes each bunch critically, nods his head.


fall colors are showing up around the edges


My taste buds are about to undergo some training. That’s forthcoming. Come back in a few hours. I need to pause for a dejeuner en famille. Garlic roasted meat with crusty potatoes, salad, cheese and the very excellent red Chateau de Lascaux, Noble Pierre 2002. Oh, and flan, rhubarb compote and almond cakes for dessert.

from Vacquieres, France: the equinox and the harvest

Friday Evening

The drive to the village of my hosts takes me past vineyards and mixed forests. It’s getting dark, but I can’t tell if it’s the clouds or the time of day.





It’s the same each year. On the days surrounding the equinox, the weather becomes strange. Unusual. Forceful. Jean-Benoit speaks from experience.

It did not strike me to avoid the equinox on my trip here. I aimed for the middle of the harvest. But the weather has taken charge. The gendarme warns the vintners that these are not going to be just rains. These are going to be RAINS.

On this evening of my arrival, I sit at the kitchen table with the proprietors of Chateau de Lascaux -- Jean-Benoit, Isabelle and their three teen daughters, eating the fish tarts, braised celery, salad and cheeses. Stewed peaches, vanilla ice cream and almond cookies finish off the meal.





A Chateau de Lascaux white is uncorked. I hear myself trying to explain what tort law is to the French – a challenge, even without the forty-eight hours of no sleep and travel fatigue.

All this talk of personal injury… I’m resisting the impulse to crawl under the table and check on my own foot. I had dropped a suitcase on it while trying to maneuver it down from the rack on the train. I wonder if the shoe will fit around it the next day. I wonder what Jean-Benoit will think if I traipse through the vineyards barefoot in the rain.

Mostly, I listen and eat and take in the huge Languedoc kitchen with the old fireplace, the copper pots, the wooden table.










Chateau de Lascaux is an old winery. Jean-Benoit’s father was a vintner and so was his grandfather. I ask if the daughters are interested in winemaking. Jean-Benoit shrugs and says “we’ll see.” Daughters can be so unpredictable.


The homestead and the caves are right off the main square of Vacquieres – a village of about 300, just north of Montpellier. The house literally touches the church walls. It is an old place, with winding corridors and large rooms, old stone walls and tiled roofs.





The night is perfectly quiet. Normally, white wine harvest begins at 4 am and ends by midmorning. But that’s over and done with. And the predicted rains are putting the remaining harvest on hold. The equinox rains. How will they effect my week-end here? Check in later, I’ll have an update.

from France: a croissant lasts only a minute

…But the anticipation, the image, the memory – a lifetime.

When I dream up these trips to the continent (sorry, I realize North America is also a continent, but no one refers to it as The Continent, do they?) I immediately place myself into images of desired and desirable venues. One of them will be at a wobbly round table with a café crème and a croissant.

And so when the plane approaches the coast of Brittany, I start thinking – where and when can I indulge my image?

Answer, here:



speeding to Montpellier


In travel, nothing happens as it should. I miss one train because I run to get this very croissant, pause to take a photo…



at the airport, a bakery with a reputation

… and then careen madly to the platform, only to watch my train pull away from another platform (the ticket showed voit. 3, I read voie 3, for you French speaking types who can now laugh at my expense).

So now I am speeding in a very roundabout way to Montpellier.

I had planned on spending the day in Paris, on refreshing myself before la grande visite of the week-end, but I could not sit still. For me, here, every minute counts.

Tonight I am to show up at the doorstep of Jean-Benoit and Isabelle, proprietors of the Chateau Lascaux winery. I feel like an inferior version of the journalist (plus photographer) who was invited to spend a few days at the home of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes to write up something clever about their new infant. I am in awe of winemakers and so I consider my “assignment” to be even more significant – it is to tell a story from the insides of a winery at the time of harvest. I mean, come on – Suri against the Chateau Lascaux. Of course the Chateau is much more intimidating.

For now, I am just loving the return: to speeding trains, to croissants in the morning, to my beloved Languedoc.

off to stomp and shoot

I pack my bags, make sure the batteries are charged for the camera(s), finish my classes and head for the airport.

I have been invited to spend the week-end at a vineyard in Languedoc (in southern France). They’re in the middle of the harvest and I want to see what it’s like to snip and mush grapes all day long.

Unfortunately, the weather homme says rain. Do conditions of rain dampen the spirit? Not mine.

I am exceptionally excited. A bientot!

cut and color

So, you’re going to be leaving in a day or two? Jason asks me this eyeing my hair dubiously – as in, you’re going like that?

Jason, my hair cut and color genius doesn’t like it that I do not tend to my hair. I always mean to tend to it, but the minutes pass, the helmet goes on and before you know it I have indifference hanging down to my shoulders.

You know, if it were a touch longer, I would do a razor cut. I know he doesn’t really expect me to grow it out right there on the spot, but still, I feel that in this, too, I have disappointed him.

Okay, I can do something bolder. Let’s bring it way up in the back and push it straight in the front… and he’s off, snipping away for over an hour.

I am transformed.

Initially I think – too much so. Something is not right. I realize that the haircut belongs to someone who tends to her appearance. A Parisian someone perhaps? It does not belong to a woman who chooses to go to the salon in sweat pants and a frayed t-shirt.

At home, I slip into my silk negligee and put on stilettos…

No, I actually do not do any of that. Ocean is an honest blog.

But as I pack for my trip, I put in the good shoes. Because Mary Janes, the comfy alternative, wont cut it on the other side of the ocean.

watch it, or I may change my mind about foie gras

Oh, I’ll eat foie gras. Put it in front of me and I’ll consume just about anything that is fresh and honest. And foie gras people do not lie about what their product is: goose (or duck) liver through and through.

Still, in the same way that a review of the habits and mores of the meat industry has lead me to not order a hamburger for years and years, so too, I have not gone out of my way to order foie gras in recent times. Typically, there are many other items on the menu that will do equally well.

But today, I reconsidered. Not because I was frantically trying to secure a reservation at any number of eateries in Paris that love to serve foie gras (no luck so far – the entire nation seems to be eating out at my top choices on Tuesday, September 26th). Rather, I have had it with the geese who like to come down for a spa-like visit to Madison on their way north.

Who would not like a respite in this lovely, forward-looking town? We accept all. Including these Canadian birds, who love to leave us numerous mementos of their sojourn. But today they overwhelmed the loft’s driveway. By afternoon, their poop piles almost reached my third floor windows. Almost.

Give it a break, birds. Eat a different diet. Do something to raise your levels of hygiene. I'm fussy, I know, but you guys make it so difficult to keep the soles clean.

where a brand new camera part falls in the lake and a daring rescue effort proves futile…

Splash…it is gone.

It’s been a busy time. In two days, I’m flying off to France. There’s work to be done there, but I also have a few days off in between. But now, on this side of the ocean, I am at a crunch. I have been teaching overtime to make up some class hours and I have been trying to frontload all committee work so that I do not fall behind.

So little time to blog!

This evening, I realize that I hadn’t even taken out my camera, let alone given much thought to a post for the day. And so I go out for a brief stroll by the lake – some two blocks away from where I live.

There is always something great to take photos of out by the lake. In the winter, I have been mesmerized by the ice fishermen. In times of bad weather, watching the clouds move through is as dramatic as anything on TV. And on this early fall day, I am happy as anything just to watch the fisher-people do their thing. This guy hadn’t caught anything all day. Two minutes of me watching and he lands a blue gill.






I am about to go home, but the sky is especially dramatic and so I decide to step out on the little wharf that juts out into lake Monona. I am just messing around, wondering how wide the lens span is and so I snap this…





…and I think how funny it would be if my new equipment somehow slipped from my hand and fell into the water.

No sooner do I consider how funny it would be, when the lens cap wiggles out of my fingers and plunks right into the lake.

Damn.

I call Ed who never thinks anything is a problem.
I dropped my lens cap in the lake – I tell him. I called everywhere and a replacement is not to be had!
Why would you spend money on a replacement cap if the old one is just in the lake? Did you go in and try to fish it out?
I was on the little wharf jutting out into the lake! It’s deep there!
Can’t be more than a couple of feet…
I am not going to go jump in the lake after a lens cap!
Why not? It’s probably there on the bottom, where you dropped it.
The current moved it miles away, I’m sure!
There is no current there.
There’s duck poop in the lake! It’s slimy around the shore!
You said you were on the wharf jutting into the lake…
It’s freezing in the water!
How would you know without testing it? I’ll go jump in the lake for you if you want.
I couldn’t ask you to do that… Maybe I could… Could you do that maybe?




Our best efforts… okay, Ed’s best efforts prove futile.

I knew I should have come with my underwater visor...

I assure him that I do not mind purchasing a generic replacement cap. That I’ll attend to my cameras in the future. That it was an unfortunate accident that is unlikely to happen again.

I’m a lawyer, after all. I can convince anyone of anything.

ah, madison…(and beyond)

Walk to market, note the dominance of the fall colors… take in the cultural heritage of this city (it is vast!)… Hmong farmers are an important presence… A Chinese cultural celebration occupies a corner of the Square… a Mexican-American parade of cars leads up to the Capitol…

The annual Food for Thought Festival, just down the block from the market, celebrates south-central Wisconsin’s commitment to sustainable agriculture. Regional, preferably organic…

Okay, so you need a breath of fresh air after all this – head for the countryside, it’s only a few minutes away…

And then come back to the pleasure of bistro food at Le Chardonnay, where a bottle of chardonnay will chill you out after the "stress" of a warm September Saturday in this town.

Told in photos, below.



putting out the onions



farmer's daughter




bag for the green peppers



September berries




a celebration of Chinese culture




boy dances





Mexican pride: a parade of cars




and flags





Food for Thought Festival: fried cheese



and mango lemon ice





corn field, birds and old wind pumps




hazy blue and shades of green




yes, the middle of September




chardonnay at le Chardonnay

half empty, sometimes full

So much to consider, here, on Ocean.

I'll be more reasoned and steadfast tomorrow. Today -- wiped out.

But I'll say this much before I push back the computer: Madison isn't just anyville, out there, waiting for the sun to set in a perfect arch. It's been said that we are of a certain type. Not so, not so. And that is a good thing.

...I'd rather be fishing... (not)

I watch bloggers come and go, I watch them retreat, get tired, reach some sort of blogger depression, fizzle off and I wonder: why were they blogging to start with?

Probably for the same bungee-plunge reasons we all did: seems fun, why not? Wheeeee!!!!!

Then it gets too boring. Or too hard. Or too threatening. I have adjusted my blogroll countless times for the fallen away types who have … fallen away. Understandable. At other times, Ocean may have sunk right along with them.

But me – I love the concept of blogging. Maybe not on this night. Because tonight, I am preoccupied with nonbloggable thoughts. Like for instance whether this photo of a butterfly, encountered on the bike path this afternoon...




…is as good as the one taken moments later.





No matter. There is the compulsion to continue. And maybe sometimes midnight gets here and the pillow looks so fresh and cool and you still have a sentence to straighten out. Sure. But that’s just a bad weather day. More often you want the minutes to slow down so that you can say it all. So that you can take a million more photos because you know that within you, you have a better one that hasn’t been put forth yet.

Blogging, for the challenge, for the pleasure of it.

paying up

The Nature Conservancy sends me address labels every year in the hope that this will inspire me to make a sizable donation.

I rarely respond to solicitations through mass-mailings. I dislike junk mail and I try not to open or read any of it. Junk mail, junk TV, junk food – I’ve been down that road and I want no more of it.

Maybe it’s the age. On the other side of fifty you look to clean up your mailbox, so to speak.

But the solicitation from the Nature Conservancy is a little different. For one thing, they send those stickers with my address. I use them. I like to flaunt their symbol on mail to gas companies, cable companies and all other possible big-time exploiters of the natural world (and I do not regard myself as a clean green by any means, so there’s guilt there as well). And, were I to throw the stickers away, then a tree would have been plucked in vain.

With all this complicated stuff going through my head, I was actually pleased to move into an apartment nicely situated just across the railroad tracks from the Madison branch of the Nature Conservancy. Today I went in to pay my dues.

You know those great stickers you send me each year? I’ve come to pay up. So long as I have mounting credit card debt, let me add your good cause to the bundle.

Puzzled look. Huh?

Those stickers? You know, with my name, address and your pretty green leaf, alternating with butterflies, on them?
Sorry, not ours. Must be some national mass mailing from the membership drive folks over... wherever it is that they are situated. We don’t do that sort of stuff.

That’s too bad. I live across the railroad tracks. I would like to support your cause and purchase great quantities of those stickers and give you good money for them. But I would like to do it locally. Didn’t I hear that the big Nature Conservancy dudes had some trouble with an IRS audit just a few years back? I want to see my money do its work here in Wisconsin, so that the trails expand and butterflies settle on prairie flowers all summer long.

Sorry, call the national guys – here’s their number...

Maybe I’ll put in some labor hours instead, you know, for the trails and the butterflies.

Outside, the sun is out for the first time this month, it seems. The Nature Conservancy hasn’t a splendid garden outside, but it has a patch of goldenrod, in bloom and radiant in the bright light of the early afternoon. I had my lesser guy with me, the Sony H5, and I asked him to snap up a shot of the bloom outside, as a tribute to the set of stickers I receive each holiday season.

your lesser child

Suppose you had a kid who struggled to keep up with the total success story of the other sib at home. You’d love the kid anyway, right? Of course!

Oftentimes, that kid will bring to the table something so striking, so beautiful, that it will take your breath away. Othertimes, you know, things will be just ordinary.

I took my little guy, the Sony H5 out today when I biked to Whole Foods. On the way back, this lesser child took a good enough shot of the FINALLY emerging blue sky, close to dusk, over Lake Mendota...





And then, my little guy make me chuckle as he focused on the hair clips of the last of the Union Terrace devotees. In color, they matched the chairs and tables at the increasingly less populated Terrace.




Anyway, the camera tango continues.

more on cameras (and the way we live and function is this complicated world)

I can’t let go. Isn’t there a saying about returning to the farm after a year on the Boulevard St. Germain?

I tasted the Sony D-SLR alfa 100 and I am having a hard time packing it up and sending it back.

True, the smaller camera I would use in its stead (the new, far less expensive Sony H5) is lovely. And it takes quality photos. I mean, can you really tell that this…




…was taken by the H5 rather than the Alfa 100? Of course you can’t.

But I can.

But Nina, the world can’t tell. You’ll save money. The H5 is light. The H5 will take on a conversion telephoto lens giving you fantastic capabilities. You’re just clinging to the Alfa 100 because it buys you status. You like the idea of looking pseudo professional, with ten pounds of camera dangling from your neck. When oh when will you use it over and beyond next weekend in France? Give it up! The H5 is the way to go!

All the above has been said to me, to my face, in the past 12 hours. It makes sense. Absolutely.

Nina, do you know what the national savings rate is for France? (high) In Japan? (higher) In the US? (in negative numbers) Are you going to contribute to this national malady of spending more than you have?

If I were living in France, I’d be saving too, to purchase that house in the south where family and friends would come each summer for a protracted six week vacation and I would play and frolic to my heart’s content in the hours that I am not working and I would spend Euro cents for quality local wines!

The cameras, their packaging, receipts, printouts, etc are strewn all over the dining table. I am paralyzed. I feel I am about to capriciously fling an ax of doom on one of two players, not unlike what I have witnessed on Project Runway.

One must go. I love them all. tick tock tick tock…

cameras

This is so important to me: how should I be capturing the world on film/flickr?

Breaking my camera earlier last week in New Haven made me think of this again: how much would I improve were I to upgrade the old (okay, less than a year, but old by industry standards) equipment?

Tons. The new camera behaves beautifully. The shots compensate for light, for speed, for my inadequacies.

IT’S A KEEPER!
Well no, not exactly.

There’s the price. Astronomical by my standards. But I have come to terms with credit card debt for the most important things in life like daughters, travel and cameras. So no, it’s not the cost.

Call me obsessive about matters of weight, but that really is it – the new camera is too heavy.

I am retreating to the world of the Sonys without wonderful interchangeable lenses. I just cannot see myself being at peace with an elephant. You, with the huge trunk. Careful now, I need to change your lens. Let me load the replacement back into the suitcase they call the carrying tote.

Tomorrow I will be packing up the new baby and sending in a bid for a smaller replacement. I feel cheap. I feel horribly unkind to my little dependables. But I have to do it. Goodby Sony alfa SLR – you are too much. I look forward to the new kid on the block, to be tried out as soon as the weather changes from ridiculously wet to pleasantly and safely dry.

One parting shot and I’ll be on my way. With the telephoto lens, of the flowers on my sill, many dozens of feet away: