I've been to a few parties throughout my teenage years but before now have only worked at one; I was the photographer at my friend’s Mum’s 50th. However no amount of taking pictures of middle aged couples dancing to Kool & The Gang could have prepared me for working at the Ban des Vendanges. Everything was on a grander scale; at the former I would photograph couples as they arrived a few minutes apart while at the latter I was directing throngs of cars into parking spaces in broken French with such urgency that I had no time to worry about so many people driving to a wine dinner. This time, instead of nicking the odd glass of Sainsbury’s Chablis, I was skimming the top off bottles of La Mission Haut Brion to “check they weren’t corked” before being sent out to the 1000 guests who attended the event.
The spectacular wine list
|
The red and white wines offered were restricted to being both Classed Growths and from Pessac-Léognan but this was obviously not a restriction in terms of quality. Having conducted quality control on all of them myself, I can tell you that each one was stellar, Pessac-Leognan being, as it is, so densely populated with excellent châteaux. The party, celebrating the beginning of the harvest and the 30th anniversary of the Bernard family’s acquisition of Domaine de Chevalier, went off without a hitch with the guests more than content to spend an evening drinking copious amounts of exquisite wine accompanied by equally delicious food. Indeed, as I directed the zigzagging cars out of the car park in the early hours of the morning, I saw only smiles on the faces of those who had attended.
Not your usual party wine-box
|
Work continued on Monday with the daunting task of cleaning up. It was similar to clearing up your standard party, except this time I was picking up things such as empty canisters of argon which had been used to serve the imperials of Château Guiraud Sauternes by way of the argon sinking into the bottle, causing the wine to rise out of the bottle through a thin pipe.
Imperials of Guiraud on draught, with the help of a little argon
|
Whilst there were a lot of empty bottles to throw out there was also a large amount of unused and half-full ones. These were combined together to make full bottles for drinking at a later date and then recorked with Olivier Bernard’s new, apparently cork-taint-proof corks which are also being used with certain Chevalier wines. He tells me that they are made of cork but have been taken apart and then essentially glued back together with the elements responsible for cork taint removed. As such, it is now possible for wine producers to have their cork and eat it too (I’ll show myself out). Other than that, it was just a matter of a lot of heavy-lifting and floor-sweeping.
The great La Mission Haut Brion 1998
|
Harvesting of white grapes is expected to begin next Monday as we are expecting some good weather at the end of this week so vendange preparations are currently in full swing. More updates to follow but now I must go and clean some barrels. À bientôt.
Re-corking the left overs for future drinking
|
