While I'm living here in France, I've been determined to try to live as much like a French person as much as possible. I have this underlying belief that the European ways of life are older than ours, and although may sometimes seem strange and different to Americans, I'm very willing to believe that they happen here because of some wisdom that's older than what we have in the states. After all, which country is the one with all the fat people and unhealthy relationships with food? So for now I'm doing my best to try and suspend my disbelief, and just become one of them. Then at the end of the 10 months I'll be able to make an educated decision about which aspects I want to keep or drop. The trouble, is how do you know what are the actual French ways of eating? I've heard general things, like that they eat small sugar laden breakfasts, or that lunch is the biggest meal. Or that they always take a digestif after dinner, something heavy in alcohol, after having already drank a bunch of wine with the meal.

In an attempt to ascertain exactly what is this French way of life, I asked one of my French coworkers what I would have to do to live like them. The side effect of this question is that I think it makes them instantly like you. French people love to talk about their way of life, especially food and wine. Let's face it, it is one of the major things they are known for. So I got to endear myself to my companions, as well as learn something at the same time. Win-win! But his answer was a bit cryptic. He said I just had to "mange bien." Now the literal translation of that term means to eat well. But I had a feeling that the meaning goes a little deeper than that. I did a little research, and it turns out that if you say "bien manger," that means something pretty different, closer to eating healthy, or really, eating to live. As opposed to "manger bien," which really means living to eat. In other words, eat food that you love to eat. It's quite possible eating well in America could mean, eating a lot, or really eating enough to keep you alive, probably a little more than you really need to stay alive. But in France it just means enjoying your food. This is a critical distinction to me.

So would we be able to mange bien? The quality of the food was one of the biggest things I was looking forward to during the harvest. I'd heard stories of great things. All the standard dishes of France, prepared by an authentic home cook, with very few repeats. Aperitif, Cheese, dessert, digestif, the whole shabang. Unfortunately for me and especially for my French coworkers, reality fell a bit short of that. The food we ate ranged from dismally uninspired all the way up to just plain bland. This in and of it itself was pretty interesting, because it gave me a chance to observe the French appreciation of food from a different angle. It's one thing to eat great food with French people and see them happy. But it's quite another thing to see what they just absolutely can't stand, and why.

Dinner always started with some kind of salad. Salad is a pretty loose term here, as there wasn't ever anything green or leafy in it. Instead it usually involved tomatoes, tuna, and something like corn or carrots. This stuff was quite bland, but to me pretty inoffensive. As I was usually starving from all the hard labor of the day, I was OK with cramming a bunch of this stuff down, as it was pretty filling, and likely to be less offensive than what followed. But for the French people, they could barely stomach it. I noticed the first night that our salad was full of the kind of pitted black olives you only see come out of a can, and that all the French people were diligently separating them out and not eating them.

They said they seemed to "industrial." This was a general complaint about the food I heard from them. At one other point we were discussing stereotypes of American and French people. When I asked them what the stereotype of Americans was, someone said that they eat a lot of "GM" (genetically modified) food. Now, keep in mind, these are not mid 30's Park Slope trained hippy/crunchy/granola types watching out for the environment. These are just your every day average early 20's French kids. This is a big difference between French people. They don't need Michael Pollan here, because everyone already knows where really good food comes from. I'm convinced that if you mentioned GM (even if you used the full name) to most 20 something Americans, they'd have no idea what you were talking about. To the French, they'd rather go hungry than eat any kind of industrially processed food. Time and time again, I would see French people just refusing to eat, turning instead to their glasses of wine.

The main course for dinner was usually some kind of meat, like this Pintade (basically a breed of chicken), we had the first night:

It seems the French rarely eat just plain old simple "poulet" here. It's usually Pintade or Poulet de Bresse (one of the best breeds) or something more classified than our simple old roasting chicken back in the US. This particular pintade we had was OK. The sauce, while it may look creamy and buttery, had almost no flavor to it. That was pretty typical of our main course. Big pieces of meat in a watery sauce. There was usually some kind of vegetable also, which looked and tasted like it had been boiled for about 15 hours. I did notice another subtle cultural difference here. I feel like in America with this type of food served in large pans, people would take the plate, pass it around and everyone would serve how much they wanted for themselves. But that almost never happened at our dinners. More commonly, people would pass their plates down to whoever was closest, and they would serve everyone. They seemed to me also to take a great deal of pleasure in doing this for each other. Again, this wasn't a hard and fast rule, and I know  the other option is never a hard and fast rule in the states, but they did tend pretty far in the direction I've noted.

The entree, was of course always followed by a plate of cheese. While I wouldn't say the cheese was super high quality examples of each type, and it was often not quite warm enough to give off all of it's flavor, this was one of the most consistently reliable parts of the meal. We usually had Chevre, Tomme de Savoie, Brie, and Roquefort. You can't go wrong with any of those. Then there was always some kind of dessert. The first night we had eclairs, and the filling was definitely the highlight of the meal. The pastry part was a bit soggy and flabby, but that chocolate goodness did not fail to impress. Later on the quality of dessert would vary greatly. One night we had apple sauce which sounds a lot fancier when you use the french translation, "compote." but tasted exactly like Motts from the big old glass jar.

On Sunday, September 6, I packed my bags and hopped on a train out to Beaujolais. It took just about 3 hours to get there, which involved taking a high speed TGV to Lyon, and then a slower normal speed train to Belleville sur Saone. This 3 hour duration is pretty impressive, since we had just driven from Lyon to Paris a few days earlier, and it took 4.5 hours, without really stopping at all. Gotta love the high speed trains here!

Originally, I was supposed to work the harvest at Domaine LaPierre. This was a pretty exciting prospect, as Marcel LaPierre basically started the whole idea of natural wine-making, along with his mentor Chauvet, in the 70's. So the place is somewhat of a mecca for natural wine freaks like myself. I've also had the wine many many times and absolutely love it. Unfortunately, all the spaces at Domaine LaPierre were taken up by people that had been there before. So Marcel's wife, Marie, offered a place at Chateau Cambon instead. The Cambon wine is vinified by Marcel as well, and uses all the same natural methods. I'd never tried it, but what I read said that the wine was very similar to LaPierre's wine, just a bit cheaper. I always like to find a good value, so I figured it'd be fine. But I didn't really know what the differences would be.

I took a couple snapshots right when I arrived at Cambon. First, of our sleeping quarters:

And second, of our dining room:

Then I headed off to tasting room, a really cool room with a bunch of giant barrels (in wine speak we call them foudres) and a table. I introduced myself to everyone seated there by shaking all their hands and saying my name. I realized later I was the only one to do this. There we proceeded to drink wine. And drink more wine. Gradually over the next hour or two, my fellow harvest workers started to filter in to the Domaine. As each person came in, they would say hello, and perhaps even shake hands, but generally people didn't say their names. As I realized by the end of this experience, it seems French people don't really do it that way. They don't say their names and introduce themselves when they shake hands. They often say "Bonjour" or "Bon soir," offer the hand and that's it. It feels really weird to me to shake someone's hand I don't know without offering my name, but that's the way they do it here. And sometimes you shake a womans hand, but other times you have to the double cheek kissing thing. I still haven't really figured out how that works. Anyway, my American etiquette really didn't ruffle any feathers, so all was well.

Our harvest crew turned out to consist of mostly French people, and quite a lot of women. In fact I think the women outnumbered the men barely. The non-French included myself, two Quebecois, and one Polish guy, who didn't know a lick of French, but spoke English pretty well. I got to speak a little, and got some compliments on my French, which was nice. They seemed to be surprised that they could understand me when I spoke. My comprehension though, was another story entirely. When someone spoke to me directly, I could get enough of the gist to reply appropriately. But when I was trying to listen to the conversation around me, I could understand I'd say about 15%.

So I just sat and tried to soak it all in, while drinking lots and lots of Beaujolais. And, hey, the wine was pretty good! Not quite as concentrated as the Marcel LaPierre wines I'd had before, but it did have that subtle floral natural wine quality I find so intriguing and addicting. It's the perfect kind of wine to drink daily with your meal. It's a very versatile wine, it can go with just about any food. And the wine goes for about $16 (as opposed to $22 for the LaPierre) in the States, so I'd say that's a pretty good value.

As I said in the last post, I had quite a lot riding on this whole harvest experience thing. I'd also heard a lot of things that made me either excited, or terrified. I heard that the food would be unbelievable authentic and awesome. Home cooked meals showing off all the classic dishes of France, with no repeats. I also heard that there'd be more wine to drink than I could possibly imagine. One friend told me that a friend of his got so used to drinking beaujolais in mass quantities, that after the winery gave him two cases to take with him, he drank all two of them by himself in 2 days without even realizing it!

I also heard stories of back-breaking labor. Getting up at 5 AM, hiking through the mountains with piles of grapes tied to ones back, stopping only when it was too dark to pick. After that you could barely eat, have a glass of wine, and then pass out and do it all over again the next day.

I told myself that hopefully it wouldn't be too bad. After all, I'm a pretty fit guy. Maybe it's just the out of shape Frenchies who never exercise that would have a problem with it. Maybe I'd be fine.

Someone else had told me that the workers would be young French kids, fresh out of college, and ready to party. In my mind I assumed they would all be male, I guess because of the back-breaking labor aspect of the job. In the United States I think this would be true. There might be the odd woman or two, but I figured in the more sexist France, it would be all men. That brought to mind all kinds of bad fantasies. When I was 16, I went to a private school (Choate) for a summer. Their summer programs were always very international, and there was this one French kid who spoke really poor English. I remembered how all the Americans tormented him mercilessly, thinking, as many Americans do, that anyone with a thick accent must be stupid. I wondered if I'd receive similar treatment?

To assuage some of those fears, I practiced my French as hard as I could all summer. I had a private tutor, a native French speaker come give me lessons 4 days a week. I texted with my wife only in French. At the end of the summer, I felt like I could figure out how to say almost anything I needed to say. Understanding everything I heard was another problem entirely, but at least I wouldn't be stuck not being able to communicate what I needed.

The reality of the harvest, of course, had some elements of what I'd heard, and some that were totally unexpected.

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.