Sunday, July 31, 2011

blossoming

This is a year of anniversaries and initiations.  Fifteen years at the restaurant, twenty years of marriage, a first vintage of wine.  First real pruning in the vineyard.  First harvest of our own fruit.  First blossoming.   

My work at the restaurant is to tell the stories of the wines I have curated, tales of the landscape, the vineyards, and the people who tend them.  I have long worked to talk about methods of winegrowing and the work that happens in the cellar and how that translates into the glass, how the wine corresponds in an intimate conversation with the food with which it is being served.  I became interested in making wine because I talked so much about the process of making wine and having once studied forms of dance, I felt that to truly understand the alchemy of that process, I had to physically go through the choreography.  Once I had accomplished that, or rather failed in my first few attempts, I understood better something that I have always believed: wine is made in the vineyard and is a true expression of a complete landscape, that notion of terroir being all that encompasses a particular parcel of land from geology to botany, to the microclimate that embraces it, to the varietals that grow on it, to the human hand that husbands it and harvests it into wine.  Little did I know the desire to understand the rhythms of growing  wine would became much greater than the initially planned experiment of simply physically making wine in the cellar (or rather the bathtub as those first few years attested), and that in a three year period, Caleb and I would have a licensed winery with a fledgling vineyard and be producing our first negociant vintage. 


There have been many firsts on this journey and many surprises.  I have gone many times to other vineyards to taste wine and walk the land, to see the vines, to examine the shapes of their trellising.  But these visits exist somewhat in a vacuum.  For me the process is never fully understood until I experience the actual doing of it.  I am envious of two friends who have taken a sabbatical to work at another friend’s vineyard in France.  While they are a bit stunned by the hard manual labor and the difficulties and beauties of a living in a foreign culture, I crave to learn the repeated motions that they practice every day to the protest of their aching bodies.  While I have many mentors in many places willing to discuss the mechanics of the work I must do, I have no one who stands next to me with years of experience  guiding the way the hand prunes the vine here, ties the vine there, thins the shoots here, pulls leaves there.  I have pruned at this friend’s vineyard in France and had his tutelage working forty to ninety year old vines, but I have never pruned two-year old vines, nor have I ever shoot-thinned vines, or pulled leaves.  I have never lifted wires; I have never hedged.  


I have never watched the buds turn to the smallest looking grapebunch you can imagine, or seen how they lengthen and extend with each day until they become the flowers of this majestic and earthy plant with small threads of white pistils coming out of each supposed grape waiting for pollination.  I have never smelled grape blossoms before, the sweet jasmine of the Marquette, or the white pepper of the La Crescent.  I have never witnessed how these scents might translate into the fruit.  I have never noted when blossoming arrives and how long it lasts and if the sun graces the period or if the rain confounds.  This all happens for the first time here and now in this year. 


And there is some sun.  There is rain.  We’ve had strong breezes.  The flowers seem to have pollinated themselves as the pistils fade and the berries begin to grow.  But there are violent thunderstorms while I hide in our bedroom downstairs that is built into the hillside, hide with two cats fearing that the wind will blow the windows in the house out.  I watch out the French doors the hail, pea-sized and so pretty, ride the wind and drop to the ground bouncing like a broken string of pearls.  I find that I pray.  This is the first hail that I have feared.  


In the vineyard, there is cause for alarm.  This is the first time I’ve understood how dispirited a local orchardist felt after losing all the leaves on his apple trees to hail the size of a snowball; without leaves there is no photosynthesis and the plants will die.  This is the first time I understand why the woman in Bordeaux cried when half her fruit near the time of harvest was destroyed by hail.  This is the first time I’ve seen the sly shredding of the leaves and the gaping wounds even in this smallest of fruit.  This will be the first time I will know if the vines can survive this test, if any fruit will remain after all this brutality.  Will the berries just expire, shrivel and blacken, losing their heart after such a defeat?


But grapevines are absurdly resilient.  Only time will tell over these days that turn into weeks.  Already, after a serious of chamomile, yarrow and nettle teas, the vines and fruit seem to respond putting out new growth to replace the damaged leaves, and the untouched berries grow larger covering the holes in the bunches of the berries lost.  They are now about the size of those hail-pearls that caused the chaos in the first place.


This is the first time we think they will survive, and we will still have fruit for our first at home harvest.  This is not the first time, however, this season we have felt hopeful.  And this is not the first time we are a bit wary of that hope knowing that the next scourge or storm could render us hopeless.  Now, there are black caterpillars with white and orange stripes, and a foul infestation of Japanese beetles.  We pick them off the leaves every day, drowning them in old jam jars filled with water and soap.  We collect them and burn them into dust, their scent, rather putrid, perfuming the air.  But that is yet another story.
--Deirdre    

Friday, July 1, 2011

catching (up)







I am sitting in my newly painted studio which has been physically moved for the fourth time in the last thirteen years we have lived here.  This seems to be the fourth and last time.  Ralph Ward, who’s helped us move it every time, laughs and shakes his head at this.  But really, this is the last time.  We’ve dug a spot in to the ground at the top of the rose garden and covered it all in crushed stone, and have started a retaining wall to surround the building.  There are plans to get some paving stone.  Two potted roses sit at the corners of the front of the little house, tall climbing roses, the William Baffins,  that bloom a deep pink and sneak around the windows.  There are plans to plant the roses in the ground once the hardscaping is finished.  Everything about this move is more permanent, more lasting, a little more serious.  Even though after the previous move, we had planted those self-same roses also, and now they’ve  just been dug up and potted again as if they might be more transient.   As I have to water them almost every day, I promise that this situation is temporary.

This is the room that I write in during the summer.  I wrote my book Libation in this space three summers ago though this little house has gone through some changes since then.  It’s original use was as a shelter for two baby lambs bought by the original owners, a structure to protect them from the coyotes that roam down from the spines of the Chateauguay above us.  This is why it’s been dubbed Lamb House.  Last summer, we bought a pull-out couch, so that we could house extra guests, and when the roof failed while those guests were visiting during a series of torrential thunderstorms last August, we decided to have the roof replaced in the fall which gave Lamb House a whole new look—a single shed that is higher at one end of the building giving it the feeling of a cathedral ceiling on the inside.  Just a few weeks ago, Caleb finished putting a window in that upper story, a window from the old library in our village.  It still needs to be cleaned, but the effect is still lovely.  The top half of the building is shingled and barnboard completes the bottom half, just like our house and just like our barn.  Things look more all of a piece now.  

Out my desk window, I see blooming roses: Belladonna, Therese Bugnet, common Rugosa, Foxy Pavement, blooming borage, catmint, tall spires of Valerian in the distance next to the green house which now has a French blue door to reflect the door of the Lamb House, the door of the cantina, and the front door of the main house.  All of a piece, like I said.  There are also the spent blooms of a million iris that need to be dead headed and pockets of bare ground in the beds that need to be weeded, pots of volunteer raspberries that need to be planted. 
We have taken another long sabbatical from writing here, finding that the doing is precluding the writing.  Everything is about catching up and juggling.  In April, we took a break from the restaurant like we always do and took time to do some early work here on the farm.  When we re-opened the restaurant in May, we thought the season would ease into itself as that’s usually the rhythm in our village.  But the restaurant work started off as if in high season, and it has been that way ever since, and somehow doesn’t seem to get easier even with full reinforcements having come to share the work.  On the farm, all the starts that we got going early in the greenhouse are still getting planted—there are so many!—and there has been the planting of new vines, compost preparations, taking care of the apple orchard, shoot thinning, tying up, weeding, planning for trellising, new fence, new orchard, cleaning out the barn for the tasting room, and the list continues, and while there is the satisfaction of crossing off things that do get done, the list seems to grow-every time one task is completed, three more are added. 

There are many things we’d like to write about here this summer: the first blossoming of our vines, the trials and tribulations of trying to grow radicchio, the dishes we make with the ingredients that we are currently harvesting, the élevage of our first wines in the cantina, what is the meaning of a proper lunch, why do we want to grow natural wine and which winegrowers are motivating us to do so, the surprise of finding nine more bottles of our first cider and the plans for a Sunday lunch under our oldest apple tree that those bottles have inspired.  And we hope to be able to meet you here every week or so with these stories, but farm life coupled with restaurant life is often unexpected.  While it has been difficult to sit down at our desks to write here, we have been very good about “micro-blogging” on twitter, and you are welcome to find us there at @paneesalute.  

Here’s to more time to do everything, and to enjoy the doing—