The chai was eerily quiet as I started my final week at Domaine de Chevalier.
With the Merlot all picked, the staff had been cut by about half and the walls no longer echoed with the buzzing and whirring of machines and sorting tables. But, as ever, there was plenty to do with the white wine still needing constant, sedulous attention and daily pumping over being required by the macerating Merlot. However I was told that my first job was to “soufrer les barriques” (treat the barrels with sulphur). I probed further, still unsure of the task, but all my early-morning French comprehension could make out was that we were burning something. Indeed, what it turned out that we were doing was suspending a lit disc of sulphur inside a barrel to disinfect it ahead of its reception of this year’s wine. As with all jobs at Chevalier, some sort of strange gas or odour had to be arresting my sinuses and this time it was freshly burnt sulphur. Not completely terrible but these discs won’t be penetrating the incense market.
Lighting a sulphur disc
|
20 remontages and a bit more thumb-twiddling later and it was Tuesday night and I was delighted to hear from Olivier Bernard that an oenologist had informed him that his Cabernet Sauvignon was currently the best he had seen in Bordeaux and that he should begin harvesting.
Cabernet Sauvignon grapes arrive at the sorting table on their way to the de-stemmer
|
So the next day the Cabernet began flooding in and we were drowning in grapes once again. As such, there is not much to tell as my last couple of days were filled with the same harvesting process as with the Merlot. The Cabernet did indeed look good and an optimistic Olivier has been telling me that it is an auspicious sign for what he believes will still be a good vintage. Perhaps optimistic is just that and I sympathise for Olivier being currently in the midst of creating a wine that has already been thoroughly damned not just at Chevalier but across all of Bordeaux. However Olivier seems as confident and in control as ever and I would have reminded him that “haters gonna hate” if the language barrier had permitted it.
Olivier Bernard
|
I did feel a twinge of sadness as I bade farewell to the team at Chevalier whom I had come to know really well, a bond they all seemed keen to form despite all boundaries of language or age. My parting gift to them is already hanging on the winery wall, A Crystal Palace shirt signed by local Bordeaux boy done good, Marouane Chamakh. I joined some of the later-working staff in their dinner break and as I sipped the 1998 La Mission Haut Brion that I had re-corked in my first week I felt a nice feeling of circularity to the whole experience. Regardless of my solipsistic view of it all, the harvest continues in full flow without me and I am very excited to see how it turns out. However, I’m extremely grateful and fortunate to have been part of the process irrespective of the end product and to have been in the company of the overwhelmingly generous Bernards and everyone working at Chevalier. I knew that drinking wine could bring about joy, camaraderie and friendship but never knew that making it could do the same to such a higher magnitude.
Bordeaux Boy Marouane Chamakh
|
