Ode to toil

Ode to toil

Yesterday was one of the most famous (infamous?) days in the wine world’s calendar – Beaujolais Nouveau Day – so you might expect this week’s newsletter to have something to say on the subject.

And we do. Sort of.

But we’d also like to suggest that the point of Beaujolais Nouveau Day isn’t really Beaujolais Nouveau.

An ancient tradition – worldwide

Beaujolais Nouveau Day really caught the imagination at a sort of vague, hand-wavey point in the mid-20^th Century when wine merchants and distributors would compete to be first to race the new vintage wine back to Paris (and later London).

But really, the fixed day and the various events around it are just an extension of something that has happened in more or less every wine region worldwide, probably since grapes were first deliberately pressed for fermentation.

Beaujolais Nouveau itself, viewed as just the wine, is a lot of fun. It’s young, spritely, juicy, fruity stuff. It’s something inherently joyful in a world which, let’s face it, can sometimes take itself very seriously.

But the real point of Beaujolais Nouveau is that it is a celebration of harvest.

Soil and toil

Amidst the glossy bottle shots, gorgeous vineyard imagery, discussion of terroir and reverence for complex flavours and aromatics (important and wonderful as those things are) it sometimes goes underdiscussed that wine is fundamentally the product of enormous hard work.

The instagram pictures of baskets full of grapes, smiling pickers and sunny weather disguise the fact that harvest is an exhausting, labour-intensive process.

Weeks of hauling baskets, straining muscles, bending over vines, dirty fingernails anxious weather-watching, cleaning equipment, fretting about pump fittings, waking up full of aches and cramps and turning the winery into a living game of tank tetris.

All at the mercy of whatever the weather gods have decided your fate to be in any given vintage.

No wonder, once the last grape is snipped from the vine, the last tank or cask is filled and the last purple floor stain hosed away, you might want to celebrate with a glass of whatever the vineyard has given you that year.

A toast to the harvesters – whatever’s in your glass

So whilst Beaujolais Nouveau is all well and good, today we’re widening the lens and raising a glass to all those involved with harvest across the Northern Hemisphere.

After all, whether it’s Beaujolais or Barolo, bursting with youth or matured over decades, this is how its story began: with the toil and effort of an exhausting harvest.

So to all our winemaking families now taking a well-earned breath – congratulations on another harvest … and cheers!