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The Natural Wine Controversy

On February 8, 2010, in Blog, Natural Wine, by ngorevic

What if there was a vast, big-business conspiracy in wine, a dirty little secret that no one wanted to talk about? What if the wine you'd been drinking your whole life and thought of as a natural product was actually made in a laboratory full of test tubes, centrifuges, and other nefarious industrial devices?

If you're the kind of person who cares about eating organic fruits and vegetables, who is concerned about the proliferation of genetically modified food and beef injected with hormones, you might want to know if this conspiracy existed. Most people I talk to have no idea that such a controversy could exist in the wine world. People drink wine they like, and they don't think too much about how it was made, and there's nothing wrong with that. On the other hand there is also a very small niche of the wine world that talks about "spoofulated" mass market wines that all taste the same and don't display any real terroir. So who's right?

My answer to this question basically is, it depends. It's not a simple question, so naturally the answer won't be simple.

Let's start by laying out a few basics of winemaking. First of all, you should know that most wine in the world today is made with the use of sulfur during the winemaking process. If you took grapes right from a vineyard and let them sit in a vat, the natural yeasts living on the skins from the vineyard would start to eat the sugar inside the grapes, converting it into alcohol--fermentation. But the modern method of making wine is to put some sulfur in the vat, which kills off those natural yeasts. The winemaker then adds a synthetically produced strain of yeast to the vat and lets it do the job of fermentation.

The key question at this point is: why? If you talk to the majority of winemakers today, they'll tell you it's because synthetic yeasts are predictable and controllable. In fact, there are many many different synthetic yeasts developed for this purpose, each one subtly changing the flavor of the resulting wine. It used to be quite popular for Beaujolais nouveau winemakers to use a certain strain that gave the wine flavors of bubble gum and bananas, for example. Modern winemakers say that using natural yeasts can be dangerous. Sometimes, the yeasts will be weak and they'll die before all the sugar has been fermented, leaving a sweet wine no one wants to drink. Other times, fermentation might take months to finish, or maybe it'll never finish at all. If you use a synthetic yeast, you can be quite sure fermentation will happen in x number of days, every time.

If you talk to most natural winemakers and enthusiasts though, they'll tell you that making wine is not a science, it's really an art, and the winemaker needs to be willing to step out of the way and let nature do its thing, to make some really amazing wine with special terroir. They say the natural yeasts add another element of individuality and terroir to the wine. Sometimes their wines might turn out a little funky in a bad year if they\'re made this way, but other times they might produce something totally amazing. Either way, they say, each wine will taste a lot more different than the way it did the year before, and each vineyard will produce it's own unique flavors, satisfying palettes yearning for uniqueness.

Modern winemakers also like to fine and/or filter their wines. They pass the wine through very fine metal mesh, or they might also add a soluble material like egg whites, which collect solid bits and help to clarify the color of the wine. This makes for clear wine that looks nice in the glass. Natural winemakers often don't filter their wines at all, and you'll find the wine quite cloudy, with a fair amount of gunk sitting in the bottom of the bottle. They say the filtering removes another level of unique flavor from the wine.

Then you have lots of other modern techniques, which modern winemakers hail as the benefits of scientific advancement, and natural wine fans declare chemical and artificial. There's micro-oxygenation, in which little bubbles of air are slowly introduced to a young wine, to speed up the aging process and soften harsh tannins. And there's reverse-osmosis, where wine is put into a huge centrifuge, where alcohol or tannins can be removed if there's too much.

And on the natural side, you have biodynamic winemakers burying cow horns filled with manure, talking about the importance spiritual frequencies, and deciding when to harvest based on the cycles of the moon.

Modern winemakers say there's nothing wrong with any of these new advances. They point to the stainless steel tank, which many natural winemakers use, as a scientific advancement that everyone is ok with, and say fear of the other techniques is just fear of change and advancement. And the biodynamicists say that while some their stuff sounds a little crazy, it actually has some scientific basis. That cow horn is mostly calcium, which is a natural pH balancer and fertilizer, so it helps the soil when they grind it up and spread it all over the vineyard.

So who's right here? Well, in my opinion, they're both right, in their own world. I've tasted a fair amount of natural wines, and they can be very different and unique. Sometimes they're not my taste, and sometimes I absolutely love them. But they're usually interesting. I've also tasted a fair amount of wines that weren't made naturally that displayed a remarkable amount of terroir. And there are plenty of wines that claim to be made naturally, with organic grapes, but for a variety of reasons, they're just impostors and they're not that interesting.

I tend to prefer natural wines, but having worked in retail I can tell you for sure that some people just don't like a lot of them. I don't really believe there's any intentional conspiracy to cover up the natural wines' existence, but I also don't think anyone is being very open about all the processes they use to change their wine, because they're afraid of what people might think if they found out. And there's definitely a niche of foodie people out there that wouldn't like what they heard, if they knew all this stuff was being done to their wine. Is it as bad the semi-secret Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO's) that may be responsible for creating e-coli? No, definitely not. But does it remove some terroir and uniqueness from the wines? Yes, I believe it probably does.

I think the answer here, is that you just have to go taste some and see what you think. If you're like me, and you're the kind of person who gets sick of something pretty quickly, even if it's really good, you might really love natural wines. Other people love to find a good bottle, buy it again and again, and never get tired of it. They might not like the craziness of some natural wines. There's just no accounting for the difference in taste, and I think there's room for all kinds of palettes in this world.

But until you try them, you won't know where your palette lies. And to be fair, you should probably try a bunch to give it a fair shot until you're sure you don't like them. Because one huge benefit about natural wines is they tend to be really cheap! There are a few cult natural winemakers out there that command high prices, but even those are nothing compared to the Premier Crus of Bordeaux. The mainstream, critic driven wine world really hasn't grabbed onto this natural wine thing yet, and they're the ones that often bring the outrageous prices. That explains why you may have never ever heard they existed yet. So if you like them, you can have wines with a lot of complexity that won't break your budget. It's one of the few bargains for really high quality out there in the wine world right now.

So now, you're probably wondering how to find these wines right? Well, I don't have time to discuss it now, but stay tuned and I'll be writing more on that soon!

The Tongue Taste Map Does Not Exist!

On October 29, 2009, in Blog, wine geeks, by ngorevic

If you've ever taken a wine class, there a good chance you've seen this map of the tongue. Wine experts love to talk about which areas of the tongue can taste sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. But the truth is, the taste map is a total fallacy. Scientists have known the taste map is wrong for quite some time now, but for some reason the myth persists in the wine world. Wine people, it's time we woke up and kept up with science from the 1970's! Please, lets stop confusing people with all this useless pseudo-scientific dribble that doesn't even make sense when you try to demonstrate it.

For example, the taste map says that you can only taste sugar on the tip of your tongue. Iif you stick sugar on the back of your tongue without letting it touch the tip, how come you can still taste sweetness? When I took classes at the WSET certified International Wine Center, at that point they preached this stuff like it was the gospel (Just so you know, they don't teach it anymore because they do now know it's not true). We were supposed to feel a tingle on the tips of our tongue when we tasted the sugar, because supposedly all the taste buds that perceive sugar are concentrated there. When none of us really felt anything, we were told that was normal for Americans, because we eat so much sugar that our tongues are numb to the effect. Try it in Japan however, they told us, and people will freak out at the new-found tingling effect. Sounds pretty good right? I certainly bought it. I've heard veteran sommeliers discuss the map. And once I went to an American Sommelier Association presented cigar seminar at Davidoff of Geneva and they busted out the good old taste map. I always had a hard time sensing the different tastes in different areas, but I just chalked that up to my inexperienced palate at the time.

So where did this myth come from exactly? It seems that the original research was done by a German scientist named D.P. Hanig in 1901. He was trying to understand taste, so he designed an experiment to measure the sensitivities of tongue in certain areas to different tastes. He have his volunteers things to taste, and mapped out the areas of the tongue that responded the most to each taste. Then later, in 1942, a Harvard scientist named Edwin Boring used Hanig's research to plot a graph of these sensitivities. It seems that the tongue does have a very slight concentration of tastes in certain areas, so the tip of the tongue does sense slightly more sweetness than the rest. People saw this graph, and for some reason took it to mean that the tip was the only place that could sense sweetness, thus the taste map was born. Then in 1974, Virginia Collings came along and re-examined the data. She realized that while there were concentrations in some areas, all areas of the tongue could still taste each of the 4 primary tastes. The difference in sensitivity to sweetness in the tip of the tongue compared to the rest of the tongue is, in fact, negligible.

So if scientists have known this since 1974, what's taking us wine folks so long? I personally feel like wine snobs love having something complex and vague to hold over less knowledgeable folks heads to ensure their own superiority. But maybe that's being a bit conspiratorially minded of me. I guess wine people just aren't that into science. But we love to talk about the science of vinification, fermentation, and such things. It just seems like we've lagged behind on the science of taste. Apparently there are really 5 tastes, and possibly even 6, when you add Umami (the savory taste of glutamate, like in MSG) and perhaps the taste of fat. Ever see that in a wine text book? I bet not.

In the interest of science, I'm going to list a bunch of sources to prove that the taste map should be abolished from wine education. Spread the word, down with the taste map! Here's a wikipedia article talking generally about the taste map. I know, you're thinking Wikipedia, that's not an authoritative source! But it cites this article from livescience.com, and this one from Scientific American. Still not convinced? Well, maybe you should head on down to the library and look up Collings\' original research paper, titled Human taste response as a function of location of stimulation on the tongue and soft palate. In the meantime, here's a very sciencey document discussing the reasons for the persistance of the myth, to tide you over.

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Domaine LaPierre

On October 13, 2009, in Blog, Natural Wine, by ngorevic

Domaine LaPierre was a place full of natural wine wonders sometimes difficult to access. When I was there the Domaine was in the thick of Harvesting and the start of winemaking, so things were a bit hectic. Marcel himself was a flurry of constant motion. Wine, and I mean amazing wine, flowed like water. The food was stunning. And the partying was some of the most intense I've ever witnessed. But in the end it was all a bit daunting for someone whose French was just ok.

As soon I met Marcel, he whisked me off on a whirlwind tour of whatever he was doing. This involved driving quickly out to a vineyard to look at some grapes for about 7 seconds, tasting half fermented wine straight from the vat, picking up some harvesters from other fields, inspecting wine samples with a biologist, and tasting some aged wine in the cave (you really have to pronounce that the french way, like cahhhv, much cooler).

What does half fermented wine taste like, you might be wondering? Really sweet. But delicious. While I harvested, I had snacked on grapes that tasted a lot like that juice, so it was a pretty familiar flavor to me. You wouldn't really want to drink this stuff on a regular basis because the acidity was through the roof (we spit it out) but it was really interesting to taste. We then took some of the wine back to the lab, where Marcel's friend's wife, a biochemist specializing in wine, could examine the samples under a microscope. Here I got to see what indigenous yeasts look like (a lot of little clear stationary oval shaped things). She was checking for bacteria that might be a problem. When you make natural wine without sulfur, you have to be super careful that there are no bad bacterias that might ruin the wine. Cleanliness is paramount.

The picture up at the top of the post is Marcel's cave. It's a big room full of barrels, and as you can see they use one of the barrels as a bar. Marcel fetched a couple different bottles for us to drink. One was a 2004 Marcel LaPierre, and the other was his special cuvée from 2006, which actually is made with sulfur (and, if you're curious, is not exported to the United States). I got a brief peek into the room where Marcel cellars all these bottles, and I noticed he had a lot of Saucisson Sec hanging in there too. I wish my cellar had that! So yes, Cru Beaujolais can age, and it ages really really well. The 2004 still had the quintessential Beaujolais fruit driven flavor, with an extra dash of leathery aged wine taste that I found completely bewitching. The 2006 cuvée is a very concentrated wine, undoubtedly a careful selection of the best grapes. But it was somewhat lacking in that natural wine floral department, which I would think is due to the use of sulfur.

Ok, now that the wine geekery is out of the way, here's an interesting tidbit about French politesse. They don't introduce themselves like we Americans do. Marcel and I tasted these wines with the biologist, another portly French guy with a huge curling mustache who gesticulated wildy when he talked, and another guy wearing shorts who looked to have just emerged from the fields. I have no idea really who any of these people were, because they never introduced themselves. That doesn't mean we didn't shake hands though. That happened right when someone entered the room. People do everything else the same-- you talk about why you're here or who you are, but it's quite possible you never get the person's name. I later learned from Guy that the portly guy was the biologist's husband, and that he worked off the grid, so to speak, making charcuterie and selling whatever goods he could get his hands on. These were the kinds of characters you could expect to run into at Domaine LaPierre.

After we tasted a drank a heck of a lot of the beautiful Marcel LaPierre wines in the cave, it was time to eat. Dinner could not have been more different from Chateau Cambon. At Chateau Cambon we mostly drank Beaujolais Nouveau, and Rosé, and we were only given 6 or so bottles for 20 people. At Domaine LaPierre, case after case of the LaPierre cuvée sat ready to be opened. And open them they did. This is a wine that costs about $23 in the States. I have 12 bottles of it sitting in my cellar, and I'm planning to savor them for special occasions over the next several years as I watch them age gracefully. At Domaine LaPierre, they chugged them down like water.

The food was delicious, and plentiful. At Chateau Cambon, the kitchen was behind closed doors, and the bosses ate behind those doors. The "chef" would emerge to plop down a tin pan full of the latest industrialized reheated creation. At Domaine LaPierre, the kitchen was open, and I saw the cooks emerge on several occasions to dance with Marie LaPierre (Marcel's wife). Marcel, his wife, son, daughter and friends all ate in the same room with all the harvesters. An 8 year old boy ocassionally wandered in banging loudly on a drum, accompanied by a slightly older boy blaring notes out of a trombone, to cackles of laughter by the crowd.

The crowd of harvesters was also different. At Chateau Cambon, almost everyone was between the ages of 17 and 21. At Domaine LaPierre, I talked to one man who was 70 years old. He said it was something like his 20th year of harvesting at Domaine LaPierre, and his 35 year old son was with him. By the way, they didn't make him cut grapes, he drove the truck to take the grapes back to be vinified. His son was cutting grapes in the field.

The harvesting was also different at Domaine LaPierre. A few of my fellow vendangeurs from Cambon had switched over to Domaine LaPierre, and I asked them what the field work was like. They said the work was much slower, because they were actually selecting individual grapes from each bunch to use. This was the careful picking I had heard Marcel was renowned for. The quality control in these fields was unbelievable. They threw about half the grapes they cut right onto the ground, just because they weren't good enough.

Oh yeah, and the parties? As I mentioned before, at Chateau Cambon I thought it was a stretch to stay up talking and drinking until midnight when we had to get up at 6:30 in the morning. At Domaine LaPierre, they didn't stop partying until 5 AM. Now some of those people partying didn't have to get up early, but I'm pretty sure some of them did. I went up to sleep at around midnight, when there were already a few others asleep, and the sounds of the partying continued at a fevered pitch, despite the fact that people were trying to sleep just one floor up. And when I say fevered pitch, I mean that people were laughing and screaming at the top of their lungs non-stop until 5 in the morning. On more than a few occasions several of the partyers would barge into the sleeping room, still yelling and laughing, at full-voice. They'd turn on all the lights, come in for a few minutes to chat (not whispering, again in a full voice) and then leave. On one occasion someone had apparently drunkenly fallen out of their bed, and several partygoers came in to laugh and point at him sleeping on the floor, again with the lights on. Needless to say, I didn't get very much sleep that night. I guess the only way to really sleep there was to drink yourself into a stupor so deep you wouldn't even notice you were suddenly on the floor instead of in your bed.

When I woke up the next day, after 8 days of harvesting, copious wine drinking, and very little sleep, I realized I had to get out of there. I spoke with Marcel, and he told me winemaking wouldn't really begin in earnest until the harvest was complete anyway. He said if I returned in a week, I'd really be able to learn some thing. So I packed my bags and ran back to quiet and comfortable Paris.

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Marcel LaPierre

On October 9, 2009, in Blog, Natural Wine, Working the Harvest, by ngorevic

Ahh, yes the promised land, Domaine LaPierre. It's been a while, so you might have forgotten that originally I wanted to end up at Domaine LaPierre, but had to settle for his second vineyard, Chateau Cambon. Domaine LaPierre sits in the Cru vineyards of Morgon, while Chateau Cambon is just normal old Beaujolais. But Marcel makes both the wines, so Cambon was a great place to work with natural grapes.

But Marcel LaPierre lives at his Domaine, not at Chateau Cambon. I saw him from a distance while we were in the Cambon fields, but never got to talk to him. I'd met the man in New York, but I had a feeling he didn't remember me. As you can guess from the title of this post and the picture above, I did finally make it to Domaine LaPierre, and I did manage to hang out with the man who practically invented natural winemaking. How? Well, keep reading and you'll find out!

After the party at the end of harvesting, I met a funny character, named Guy. Guy was the maintenance guy at Chateau Cambon and he fixed everything at the winery, including the complicated machinery like the vinification tanks and pumps, all the way down to broken windows on tractors. We got to talking and after I told him I was certified as a sommelier, and a student of wine, he realized I needed to ask a lot of questions to Mr. Marcel directly. So from that point on, Guy made it his personal mission to get me everything I could possibly need.

The next day, Guy insisted on taking me to see all of Beaujolais in his little white compact French car. We drove the entire length, which is really only about 15 miles long, so definitely feasible in an afternoon. He showed me the mountain of Brouilly (where the Cote de Brouilly Cru appellation gets it's name), the Cote du Puy, and this pretty Church in Chiroubles. Now keep in mind that the end of the harvest party was the night before, and Vendangeurs really know how to party. I think I finally went to bed at 4 am, and Guy had instructed me to get up promptly at 8 am so we could get started. As we zipped along Beaujolais country roads in the tiny french subcompact, my stomach barely satiated with the traditional French breakfast, and a pretty severe gueule de bois (direct translation-face of wood aka hangover), I began to feel a little nauseous. When we returned to the winery, I confessed to Guy that I couldn't eat and had to lie down. I expected him to be shocked, thinking what a silly American I was who didn't want to eat lunch like a normal French person. But instead, Guy quickly brought me to his bedroom, tucked me under the covers, and gave me some strange French medicine disguised as paté de fruit (fruit paté) to settle my stomach. Did I mention that Guy was the nicest guy on the planet? At this point he had spent 4 hours with me, having only met me 8 hours before that, and now he had given me his bed. I don't know if this is just the typical Beaujolais country hospitality in action, the vendange esprit de corps, or if he's just the nicest guy in France.

After I awoke from my nap, much refreshed and healed, Guy and I continued on with our plan to go to Domaine LaPierre and find the man with the answers. We drove over there, and to my dismay, we were told that Marcel was out in the fields, and was not to be found at the Domaine. Guy decided to give me a little tour, and we ran across Marcel's son, Mathieu, who I had actually emailed with briefly before. Mathieu was very busy loading freshly picked grapes into giant wooden foudres (the french term for really large old wooden barrels) for fermentation so we didn't want to disturb him with too much chatter. Guy and I were getting ready to leave, when I turned around, and voilà! There he was, the great white whale himself, Marcel LaPierre.

Mr. LaPierre walked right up to me and shook my hand firmly. Guy explained that I was a student of wine, and wanted to learn about Vinification. Marcel insisted that I stay and have dinner with them that night. At last, the fabled food of Domaine LaPierre would be mine! The secrets of natural winemaking would open themselves up to me! Or so I thought. That all deserves its own post, so you'll have to tune in next week to read the rest.

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Esprit de Corps

On October 5, 2009, in Blog, Working the Harvest, by ngorevic

The Harvest was a lot of painful manual labor, the food was just average, and it was sometimes really hard to understand the language. Sounds like something I'd never want to do again, right? Well, no actually. It was probably the most connected I've ever felt to a group in my life. There's a special quality to being on a harvest team that it took me a while to understand, but it something that brings everyone together. Now that I've been away from it for a few weeks, I find myself strangely longing to go back and toil in the mud with an aching back again.

The thing about working the grape harvest is that it's way more than farming to french people. They even have their own word for the grape harvest-- Vendange. La recolte is the real word for harvest, but Vendange refers to only the harvesting of grapes, to be used to make wine. Wine is part of everyday life in France, and working the harvest is something a lot of people do. The closest thing I can think to compare it to is the Israeli military service, although it's not required by law. But it's something a lot of people do, and it brings them together into a team to do something that is traditional and very French. We don't really have anything like this in the US that I can think of, so it's hard to describe, but let's see if I can in the rest of this post.

The realization hit me on about day 5, as I was cutting grapes and tossing them into my bucket. The way this works is you normally cut the vines that are on your left side. Everyone cuts to the left so that way no one doubles up on a row by accident. The person to my right in the next row of vines was leaning pretty far over to cut a bunch of grapes on my right, in his row. He was cutting the grapes over my bucket, so instead of bringing all those grapes all the way back over to his row to drop them in his bucket, he just dropped them in my bucket. My first response was to think a bunch of typically American thoughts, something along the lines of, "hey that's my bucket!" After all, I'd have to shove that bucket ahead every time I needed to move up my row, and eventually I'd need to hoist those grapes up for the porter, while the other person's bucket would be that much lighter.

But as I thought about it, I realized it really didn't matter that much. So I had to lift a little more, big deal. The end result, and the important thing, was that the other person got to work a little bit more efficiently. If he had to cut one bunch and bring it all the way over to his bucket, then go back 3 or 4 more times to do the same, it would take way longer for him to finish his row. It's more efficient to just cut and drop, cut and drop.

This started me thinking about whether or not it really mattered how quickly we finished the harvest. I mean, we all got paid the same amount per day right? It's not like we got paid by how many grapes we cut. But then I realized that people there cared about doing the work well. It wasn't because they'd make more money, or get some kind of special individual recognition for being the best worker. They just wanted to work hard and be part of the team. I realized that this is not really something I've ever personally encountered in the US. Not in this way anyway. I think most of the American way of life is too individualistic to allow something like this to happen (or maybe I'm just jaded, you tell me). In America you're supposed to go out and make something for yourself, rise above the others and stake out your part of the dream. In reality I think a lot of times that turns into figuring out how to keep everyone else down around you. This harvest thing seemed to be different though. I started to look back on a lot of the things I'd observed throughout the harvest and see them in a different light. Here's a list of things that pointed out to me that there's something special going on with this grape harvest thing:

No one ever slacked off. Think back on all the jobs you've ever worked in the states, manual labor or not. There's always someone who everyone thinks is a slacker, right? Never happened at the harvest, not once. Sure, there were people that were slower cutters than others (I was one of them on more than one occasion), but those people were working as hard they could. And no one cared if someone was slow because they knew everyone was working their hardest. There was one exception to this, which underlines this point. When we all finished a section of vines, there was always a brief pause in the work. At one of these pauses, as we finished off the last few vines, several people were standing waiting for the rest to finish. Our boss saw this and reprimanded us. It was the first and only time she had to say anything. She told us it was not right for some to stand and rest while others were working, and that we should help finish the rest of the vines and then everyone could rest together. We worked together, we rested together, always. I think that this one slip up was really just a collective mental error, rather than people trying to slack off. Once we realized the mistake, it never happened again. There were plenty of times when people could have slacked off and the boss never would have noticed. But no one even thought twice about it.

When the porters came to collect the pickers' grapes, they'd thank the picker for dumping the grapes in. Really the pickers were just doing their job, and a job that made the porters pretty darn miserable, as I saw later on! But they thanked them sincerely. Because we were a team, and by throwing that heavy weight on the porter's shoulders, the pickers were helping the team.

There was one guy on our team who was Polish, and didn't speak a single word of French. But no one excluded him because of this. In fact they made every effort to make him feel at home. On Sunday, our day off, this guy was feeling really ill with some kind of gastrointestinal problem. While all of us lounged at the beach, our boss took him to see some Polish farmers that lived near by so he could be comforted with some food and a language he knew on his day off. She did this not being able to communicate with him in any way. She spoke no English or Polish, and he spoke no French. She just did whatever she could to help him, because she knew he was part of the team.

On Saturday night, we went to a party in the town of Viellé-Morgon. The party was at a bar in the town center, with a band playing outside. You could buy beers from the bar, or you could bring your own, and there was a park right next to the bar, so there was room enough for as many people as could possibly come. Everyone there was a Vendangeur (grape harvest worker). This party was the most extreme example of exuberance and pure happiness I've ever been a part of. I've been to some pretty wild parties in the states, but I'm telling you there was something different about this vibe. Everyone, down to the last single person, was ecstatically happy. There was no worry about anything. I really don't think I can put it into words, but it was a representation of this special harvest energy I'm trying to communicate.

Everyone was always happy with everyone else. Doesn't it seem a little unusual to think that with 20 people working and sleeping so close to each other non-stop for 10 days, that no conflicts would develop? That's why reality TV is so successful right? But not at the harvest. Not one single argument, fight, squabble, or disagreement. Amazing right? That's the harvest.

On the first night, our boss showed us a sheet with the rules on it, which were of course all in French. I didn't think much of it, because I never saw anyone else read it. I figured it was probably a bunch of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo that wasn't really ever enforced anyway. You know, things like the typical corporate code of conduct:Employees will refrain from using the internet for purposes other than the direct needs of the corporation or, Employees' behavior must always reflect positively on the image of the company when working on company property. But when I later took time to read the rules, I was found I was wrong. They were the most happy-go-lucky rules I've ever seen. There was a rule about how everyone needed to help clean up the table after dinner. And how we needed to help keep the bathrooms and showers tidy. There was even a rule that work in the fields must be done with a smile at all times, because harvest workers should always be happy! The thing is, no one needed to read these rules, they did all these things naturally anyway. Because there's something special about being part of a harvest team.

It might seem like what I've described is some kind of utopian ideal society. Well, yes, it is kind of like that. There a crazy feeling of equality going on. Even the bosses ate the same food, and basically did the same work. They never sat around and watched us pick. If they had nothing else to do they dove right in and cut right next to us. It seems like a more tribal way of being to me, where whatever is needed is provided by the group and no one is ever left hung out to dry by themselves. At least that what they taught me tribal societies were like in social work school.

In the end, I really liked feeling part of a society like this. Would I want to live like that all the time? No way! But it really is an amazing thing to experience, and I find myself thinking I might be trying to do it again next year.

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What it’s Like to Carry a Whole Lotta Grapes

On September 25, 2009, in Blog, Working the Harvest, by ngorevic

After 5 grueling days of bending over cutting grapes, I was ready for a change. I'd been thinking about the work of the porters, and it didn't seem so bad to me. Sure it was probably pretty heavy, but I've done my share of backpacking, and I knew that my leg strength is built for those kinds of things. I also felt like getting a little bit of real exercise. Cutting is hard on your back muscles, but not much else. And it never makes your heart start beating. I had seen the porters covered in sweat on hot sunny afternoons, and I was starting to get a bit jealous.

So I waited for the right opportunity. One of the porters didn't want to do it anymore, so he switched out to cutting. Unfortuntately, next on deck was a tall skinny guy. Apparently they like to use tall guys because they figure they'll be able to handle it, and it's easier for them to get heat over the bins, making the dumping easier. I continued cutting, grumbling the whole time and wincing every time I had to bend over.

But after lunch, the new porter revealed that he had a giant bruise right above his butt. Apparently the plastic yellow bucket had been banging there the whole morning without him realizing it. He wanted to step down, so I grabbed the opportunity and said I would do it.

The thing I noticed right away after the first couple buckets got flung into my pack, was the inferior contruction of the "pack." Those of you who've backpacked before are aware that a really good back has a belt that tightens around your hips. They're designed to shift the weight of the pack from your shoulders to your hips. The belt can cinch really tight and is nice and puffy so it distributes the weight really well. The effect of this is that your legs do pretty much all the work. Now, these primitive yellow buckets have pretty much zero in common with a nice ergonomic backpack. There is no belt. The straps are made of sharp, rubby nylon. They attempted to cushion the straps a bit by wrapping squishy rubber stuff around them and then taping the rubber to the straps. But after about 5 minutes of work, the tape was already starting to come off. And even with the rubber, the weight of what I'd say was about 40-50 pounds, placed squarely on your shoulders was just way too much. After an afternoon of carrying this "pack," I had some really nice bruises going on both shoulders.

On the second day of wearing the pack, I asked my fellow porter Yann, how his shouders were doing. He'd been doing the porter job for the whole 6 days already, so I figured he must have massive bruising. But he said his shoulders were fine. I decided to study his methods. If you look here, you can see that he's using his hands to pull some of the weight of the pack.

I tried this, but that is a lot of weight to hold up with your hands. In the end I decided to use a combination of this, while also holding the straps a little lower down over my shoulder muscles, which seemed to be able to cushion the blow a little better.

If you look at that picture above, you might notice that Yann doesn't look super chipper right there. That's probably because at this point, the pickers have made there way pretty far down the line, and are far from the bins where the porters have to dump their loads. If you look closely on Yann's right side way behind him, you can just make out two red boxes. That's where he has to go dump the grapes. As the pickers get further away from the tractor, the porters' jobs get harder and harder, because you have to make it all the way back to the bins with the grapes. Because it takes you longer, when you get back to someone, their buckets are fuller, so you have to carry more grapes. Don't think you have a second to take a breather either, because if you delay, someone is going to be calling for you, unable to pick anymore due to their overflowing bucket.

When you get back to the bins, you have to climb a pretty steep ladder. This means you have to use your hands to hold the railings. You can see what the ladder looks like in this picture. With no hands bracing the straps, there's pretty much no choice but to let all 50 pounds of grapes cut their way right into your shoulders. When you get to the top of the ladder, there's a particular technique for getting the grapes out of your pack. Assuming you're right footed, you leave your right foot on the last step of the ladder, and put your right hand down on a bar that runs across the bin. Then you bend over as far as you can, and lift your left leg as high into the air as you can. Having just one hand on the bar makes your body twist to the side while your left leg rises, and this action sends the grapes shooting out of your basket into the bin over your right shoulder. Sounds acrobatic right? It does look a bit like ballet actually. Unfortunately I was unable to get any photos of this technique. The first few times it's a little scary, but you get used to it eventually.

The last day of work, Yann and I had a little competition. We would each take 10 pickers, and start at the same time. The objective was simple-first porter to empty all 10 people's grapes into the bin first would win. We counted down to three and then we were off. What complicated the race was that the pickers didn't know one was happening. I smartly had asked Yann how to say race before we started though, so as I sprinted down the line, I yelled, "on fait la course!" at the top of my lungs, to let the pickers know to get their buckets ready to be emptied. The race was incredibly even. Yann is a lot taller than me with long legs, but fans of track and field know that usually shorter runners are faster (except Usain Bolt). Yann made great big strides but I think my speed down the vines was faster. I got held up on the very last bucket by a charming young french boy that always liked to affectionately mess with me by tossing the grapes as hard as he could into my basket. But it was pretty much neck and neck coming down to the finish. The trouble was that there was only one ladder, and Yann just barely beat me to it. I struggled in vain to climb the ladder at the same time as him. There was no getting up there though. Yann descended the ladder victorious. If only the trickster young Frenchie hadn't held me up, I probably would have won! But then, what's this, a last minute reprieve? It turned out in his haste Yann had forgotten one entire person's bucket full of grapes! Claim one victory for the Americans there.

So what’s it like anyway, working the harvest?

On September 24, 2009, in Blog, Working the Harvest, by ngorevic

At this point, I'm sure that's the question you all have running through your mind. Enough about all the food and French way of life, what's the work actually like!?

The simple answer is it kinda sucks. Now that I have a bit of distance from it though, I find myself feeling like I wish I could go back. Or maybe I'll try to do it again next year. I'll get to why I think that is a little later.

But first, to start, take a look at this:

That's kind of what you see when you first stand next to a vine and look down. I tried my best to get some good pictures of this stuff, but there really weren't too many times when I had a free second, when my hands weren't also totally covered in grape pulp and sticky juice. But basically that's what it looks like, with a lot of times the grapes being even harder to see underneath the leaves. The covering of leaves over the top of the grapes is called the canopy, and it helps protect the grapes from getting too dried out by the sun. It's also a giant pain, because it means you really have to get in there and get dirty to find the grapes. Our lesson on how to do this the first day took about 20 seconds. Our boss brought us over to a vine, gave us each a sécateur (pruning shear), like this:

And showed us how to clip the grapes. You just have to find where the bunch is attached to the vine, and clip it with your right hand, pulling the whole bunch off with your left, and then you toss the bunch into your bucket.

Now for those of you who haven't been totally geeking out on wine education, you might need a little review on vine training techniques, specifically the gobelet or bush training technique used in Beaujolais.

Now that you've done your review and/or dozed off from sheer boredom, I can explain what vines actually look like in Beaujolais. The root comes out of the ground, and about 4 or 5 gnarly looking wood things come out of the root. You can see what that gnarly looking stuff looks like in the bottom right corner of this picture:

Every year, after the harvest is complete, they will remove everything green and leave that gnarly looking part. Then the next year, out of the wood sprouts little green shoots, which wind there way up, down, and sideways. There are little wires running around each vine, and when the shoots get long enough, someone will come along and train the shoots to the wires, to keep things relatively tidy. If you didn't make them start all over every year, the shoots would just take over. You wouldn't be able to work the vines, and they'd produce a ton of grapes that would all be very diluted and wouldn't make very good wine.

Out of these shoots come grapes and leaves. For the most part the leaves are on the top, and the grapes are underneath the leaves, but there are some leaves mixed in between bunches of grapes, to ensure the canopy coverage gives adequate protection from the sun. Generally the grape bunches hang down from the shoots, like this:

But sometimes the bunch ends up growing sort of up from the shoot, and the grapes fall around the shoot, so you have to hunt out where it's connected. Then sometimes leaves get mixed into the bunch, and you need to get those out of there, you don't want any leaves in your bucket, because leaves don't make good wine. So while it might seem a simple job to cut bunches of grapes and throw them into a bucket (and it is really, I mean it only took her 20 seconds to explain it to us) it can get pretty complicated. A lot of the time when you first approached a vine, you'd be staring at a thicket of leaves and shoots, with no grapes in site, so you had to tear through them to find the yummy grapes underneath. You also have to keep an eye out for rot, and cut out those grapes that were rotten. I personally found it really satisfying to find a bunch like this one, without any rot. Such a perfectly beautiful little entity. Every once in a while I'd have to just stick a bunch in my face and suck down 20 or so grapes at once. And oh my god, you have never tasted grapes as good as that in your life! Just bursting with flavor and juice. Very, very sweet, also. And the skins were much thicker than what you'd find in the grocery store. Sort of more like a concord grape skin. What I'd usually do was suck out all the juice, and then spit out the skins and seeds. It made for a great energy pick me up while you were working.

The highest part of the vine stands at about 3.5 feet, so that means you are leaning over 60% of the time. Standing and leaning over the vine was the best way to get to all the grapes near the top, but often you'd run across a bunch of grapes very close to the ground. You could get to them from a standing position, but try tying your shoes for about 15 minutes straight and you'll realize that this puts an enormous amount of strain on your lower back. Eventually everyone has to take a knee, or like me, Mr. Smarty Pants, sit right down on the ground. My first day I was totally convinced I had figured the whole thing out, and was going to emerge from the vines victorious, back unscathed. I thought the rest of the Frenchies just didn't want to get dirty on the ground, but I wasn't afraid to get a little muddy (actually I got really muddy). But then the second day when I started on the ground and tried to raise my arms up, I realized I'd almost pulled all the muscles in my upper back. Try sitting on the ground cross-legged, extend your arms in front of you, and lean forward as far as you can. Now waive your arms all over the place and repeat for about 8 hours and you'll see what I mean. In the end I decided a combo approach was best, some bending over, some on one knee, and occasionally sitting for the very low grapes.

When we first started, I thought, ok, this is no big deal, I can do this. We weren't, as I had fantasized, in the mountains, lugging anything heavy, the fields were nice and flat. The weather was pleasant enough, and the job was pretty simple. But as the hours built on, this became a mind and body numbing experience. Actually my body wasn't really numb, it was really just in agony. Particularly on the second day, having to deal with soreness in newfound muscles that were being forced to do what they had just done to get sore in the first place. Don't be fooled people, there is no in-shape for this kind of activity. You can not prepare for it. The first 3 days are complete physical hell, until your body adjusts.

The system of grape harvesting is very simple, and probably hundreds of years old, but it is pretty brilliant in my opinion. There are 20 grape pickers and 2 people who are porters (there will be more on their job later in a second post), that get to wear giant plastic yellow bins in a primitive sort of backpack setup, who each take 10 of the pickers. The pickers all start at the same point, and make there way down the line of vines. Some pickers are faster than others, either because they've done it before, they're shorter and therefore closer to the ground (ladies definitely tended to have an advantage here) or maybe their row of vines was a little sparser than someone elses. If one person fell really far behind, the boss would jump into their row a ways ahead of them and pick for a while. Then when that picker caught up to where the boss started, he or she could jump ahead and be back in line with everyone else. As the pickers fill up their buckets, the porters would come along, and the picker could empty their bucket into the yellow bin. The porters bring their loads back to a larger bin attached to a tractor at the edge of the vines, and then return to the vines for more grapes.

The brilliance of the system to me seems to involve some math that works out just right. Each porter's yellow bin could hold about 3 people's full buckets of grapes. So the porters would have to make 3 or so trips out to empty everyone's buckets. If there were 12 people per porter, it wouldn't work, after you emptied your bucket you'd have to wait too long to empty it again, and you'd be stuck for a while with an overflowing bucket, unable to pick any more. Also, the vines were divided up into rectangles about 130 yards in length. When the pickers got to the middle of the vines, the tractor would move to the other side of the vines, so the porters didn't have to walk too far to empty their loads. The system pretty much worked perfectly so your bucket was almost never too full, and you could always keep picking. It seems to be that someone was thinking when they chose to divided the vines up in the size they did. Not only that, but the room we all slept in was just big enough for 22 beds, and the dining room had just enough room to sit 22 people. Pretty smart, right?

Daily Schedule for Harvest Work

On September 23, 2009, in Blog, Working the Harvest, by ngorevic

There's only way to describe our daily schedule-- grueling. There was technically enough time to sleep 8 hours, but most people stayed up late enough to make that impossible. This made it difficult for me, as one of my primary motivations was to speak as much french as possible. There were a couple of nights when I went to bed early, but for the most part I felt I'd be missing out if I didn't stay up with everyone and try to integrate. Here's the schedule:

6:30 AM

Every morning, our kind but firm boss would flick on the light switch promptly at 6:30, and say "Bonjour, il est l'heure!" in an all too pleasant sing-songy way. If you're trying to translate that, you might think it means, "hello, it is the hour." But really it means, "good morning, it's time." I think it's a rule that any kind of sound, no matter how pleasant that sound is, becomes intensely annoying after it wakes you up earlier than you want a few times. That's the way we all felt after a few days of hearing this pleasant voice for a few days.

7:20 AM

This was when we started work for real. You might be thinking, "wow, that's not much time for breakfast!" and you're right, it's not. Especially when you're going to working hard all day and need to fill up your stomach in anticipation. But, think again, French people don't eat large breakfasts. Ours consisted of Bread, butter, salt, confiture (jelly), and a choice of café au lait, hot chocolate, or tea. That's it. French people like to drink their coffee out of bowls for some reason. I guess so you can easily dip your buttered bread into the bowl. Needless to say, for me this was a very small breakfast, but I really was never that hungry, considering I had just gone to bed 6 hours before. The first day though, after working for a few hours, I was freaking out as I started to get really really hungry. Everyone knows Europeans don't snack, right? That's one of the reasons we're so fat and we're not, right? Well, maybe.

10:30 AM

Break time! I was stunned the first day, when we were called over for a break complete, with coffee, wine, saucisson sec (dried sausage), Camembert slices, more bread, chocolate, and some kind of portable dessert, like a madeleine. Apparently snacks are allowed when you're working your ass off. This break quickly became my favorite meal of the day, as it was consisently reliable. The Camembert was usually nice and warm, as it had been sitting out in the sun, and I never really get tired of saucisson sec. Maybe you're thinking it was cray that there was wine at 10:30 in the morning? Well, truthfully, there were always 2 bottles for 20 people, and neither was ever emptied during this break. It's just a little. You know, because it helps digestion. Duh.

This break lasted about 10 minutes, then it was back off to work.

1:00 PM

Lunchtime!

You'll notice that at this point in the schedule we've already worked about 5 hours, before lunch time. I think the reason for this is that it allowed us to avoid most of the hottest part of the day, during lunch time. Lunch would be waiting for us when we got back, and was very similar in content of food to dinner. About the same amount of wine too. For the most part I would say people drank less wine at lunch than at dinner, although there were a few exceptions. I remember one particular day when two guys dueled it out and ended up drinking 11 glasses each. That was a fun day of work for everyone after lunch! Lunch lasted until about 2:20, when we would return to the fields.

5:30 PM

Every day, our boss would say the same thing when it was time to stop- "Prenez vos seaus!," which meant "Take your buckets!" That was the signal that it was time to bring the last of our grapes over to the bins, empty them out, and return to the Domaine. This became the most coveted line of the day to hear. When we returned, we had about an hour or so before dinner to relax, and potentially shower, although there were only 3 showers for 20 people, so sometimes you had to wait until after dinner. Dinner finished up around 8, and then the rest of the night was prime time for socializing. Most people stayed up until 11:30 or 12, so you can see that's not a lot of sleep for 8 days straight of work.

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Dinner at the Harvest

On September 21, 2009, in Blog, Working the Harvest, by ngorevic

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.

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The Reality of the Harvest

On September 18, 2009, in Blog, Working the Harvest, by ngorevic

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.