After a week and a half of grueling work, I'm back in Paris after finishing up the grape harvest. The experience was sometimes brutal, and sometimes joyous, and in the coming days and weeks I'm going to try and relate everything I learned and saw through this blog.

At the beginning, I came into the experience of working the Harvest with a lot of expectations. For someone who works in wine, I think there's a certain mythical quality to picking grapes. In the months leading up to coming here, as I told other wine professionals what I was going to do, I could see their eyes glaze over with jealousy and fantasy about what would happen. Us wine professionals study winemaking a lot, so we know quite a bit about what happens in the vineyard. But there's also a thought (or even a fantasy) that getting in there and getting your hands dirty will somehow be amazing experience that will change everything. And to get to work the harvest in France, the home of all things good in wine, well that's just icing on the cake. Did all that turn out to be true? I'm not sure yet, but maybe by the time I finish writing about it, I will have decided.

Aside from wanting to learn about winemaking firsthand, I had other reasons for wanting to pick grapes. I'm determined while I'm living here in France to improve my french, and I knew that I would have no choice but to be totally immersed in the language, especially in the countryside of Beaujolais, where it's quite common for people not to speak English. In the same vein, I wanted to immerse myself in French culture. I know that it would be quite easy for me to live in Paris for 10 months, and only associate with expats. To me, that would be a shame, because I really want to understand what it's like to be French. But there's a great deal of discussion out there about how hard it is to make friends with French people. The word on the street is that they can be guarded and reluctant to meet new people. But I knew that working the harvest with them, I would have to have lots of contact with them. We'd be sleeping in bunk beds all in one room, and eating all our meals together. Not to mention working hard all day together.

So basically I had a lot riding on this Harvest. I expected to have some kind of mythical connecting experience with wine, to improve my French speaking and comprehension skills dramatically, and to understand what it means to be French. In retrospect I guess that was a pretty tall order! In the coming days and weeks on this blog, if you stay tuned to the blog, I think you'll get a good look into all 3 of those things though.