Domaine Carret: Bully, Beaujolais and Big Bellies

”Yeeeowww!” exclaims a voice from behind a vine. Helen drops her bucket and secateurs and runs to the first aid kit to patch up someone’s cut finger. The grape harvest (les vendages, as the French call this frantic and jovial time of year) has its fair share of occupational hazards – nettles and briars lurking in the grass, sunburn, aching backs and bums, and the sharp secateurs with which the stubbornest grapes are clipped from their vines. These secateurs are well-used, but the clean snip they make illustrates their sharpness. We later compare cuts. Ant: 4, all self-inflicted. Helen: 1, caused by Ant.

Working in pairs, the workers methodologically make their way along rows of vines, taking every ripe bunch of grapes from one side or the other. Bunches in the centre are fair game for each member of the pair, and occasionally both reach for it simultaneously, in this case with one taking more than just grapes. Wine-coloured liquid begins pouring from fingers and, with such a clean cut, it is sometimes hard to stem the flow.

Working on the vines

Despite the occasional discomforts during the four hours or so of work per day, life during the vendages is far from unpleasant. Two hours after a huge but simple breakfast consisting of bowls of coffee or tea and as much bread, jam and butter as you want, coffee and brioche appears around 10am. We stop, chat, try to wipe our sticky fingers on the grass still damp from the morning dew, and admire the stunning views over the village of Bully, an hour’s drive from Lyon. The rolling hills, tall slender trees and fields of vines dotted with picture-perfect villages are somehow classically French in their composition. In the early morning or evening, when the sun is low, the edges of the vine leaves are illuminated, giving a hazy bright orange tint to each leaf as it hangs from the branch.

Eary evening at the vineyard

Lunch and dinner, especially the latter, are long and loud communal affairs. Rarely less than four courses of hearty and delicious food are prepared for both meals by Collette Carret, mother of the family vineyard’s head honcho, Vincent. Boisterous conversation between fifteen or so hungry WWOOF volunteers, family members and friends is fuelled by a seemingly never-ending supply of wine from Domaine Carret’s cellar. Wine, here, seems to flow freer than water, to the extent that we almost begin to take the glorious taste of the wine for granted.

Vincent testing the part-fermented 2011 vintage

In 2005, Vincent Carret took over the family vineyard after a long period of travelling and working on vineyards in wine-producing areas such as France, South Africa and Australia, and having worked for several months as a sommelier in London. Yet his skill and experience seem to have developed mostly through his work on his own family vineyard. We ask how long the vineyard has been in the family.

“We don’t know,” he shrugs. “Maybe three, four hundred years?”

The short and almost blasé response is suggestive of a heritage in these parts that is so long that it is almost no longer worth counting. However, the new phase of this farm under Vincent’s direction has seen a notable shift to traditional organic forms of production that have seen other vineyard owners, even organic ones, mutter disapprovingly. A focal point of this is the ‘terroir’ – the quality and position of the soil in which the vines grow. In recent times, farmers have doused this with chemical pesticides and herbicides, and other organic growers dredge as much of the life out of the soil as possible. But Vincent is a firm believer in what he calls “living soil,” allowing the plants and insects (almost) free rein at the feet of the vines. This, he argues, enhances the quality of the terroir. Novices as most of us are, we nod in agreement with his argument, and continue to slurp appreciatively at more offerings from his seemingly bottomless cellar. (Much like Winnie the Pooh and his jar of honey, we tried to find the bottom of the wine cellar by drinking our way through it, but as yet still have no proof that there is indeed an end to his supplies… perhaps in the future we will be able to continue our noble quest.)

The bottom of the cellar still eludes us...

While Vincent’s distinctive style of growing seems to have won him only a few close allies, it is apparent that there are shared traditions and values that are far stronger than differences of personal flair. The Beaujolais name is closely guarded, as are the process of double fermentation involved in Beaujolais production and the precise methods used to produce the Beaujolais Nouveau. Informal kinds of mutual aid develop – one grower lends Vincent his specialised vineyard tractor in exchange for harvesting and producing wine from his small organic vineyards; a number of growers have pooled their resources into a kind of consortium. Among Vincent’s peers, there is a tension between their (sometimes fierce) intra-local competition, and collective protection and promotion of their way of wine-making in the face of the ongoing assault of the New World growers on their old world ways. For Vincent, it seems that reinventing Beaujolais for a new generation must begin, perhaps ironically, with a re-establishment of the ancient organic traditions that made the region one of the best in the world.

It's true - this still happens

Indeed, the area is so proud of its Beaujolais heritage that a prominent example of Lyon’s many vast murals scattered across this energetic city features as its centrepiece a life-sized fictitious wine bar, Le Pot Beaujolais, including a rosy-cheeked customer and proud chef at its front door. On the window declares a sign: Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivée! Overlooked by the imposing Art Deco cathedral and located on the banks of the graceful Saone river, this wall at the western end of Rue Saint Vincent brings us full circle back to our own Saint Vincent, a Beaujolais heretic in the far south of the region.

St Vincent in overalls floats above Bully

Back at the dinner table, however, a storm is brewing.

“I’m a WHAT?!” an American WWOOFer spits in disbelief across the dinner table as the dozen other diners erupt in raucous belly-laughter.

Elliot, a typically brash but loveable Kiwi, repeats his phrase, feigning innocence but knowing its impact. Out come more guffaws, this time with greater gusto as some onlookers cotton onto his peculiar use of the dreaded C-word.

‘Good cnut’, it is eventually explained, is apparently a rather masculine term of endearment in New Zealand, suggesting the subject is of an all-round pleasant and reliable character.

“Wow, um… it’s a really bad word where we come from,” a fellow American interjects.

“A really really bad word,” another stresses, and although used regularly throughout the rest of the fortnight, the less abrasive abbreviation of “GC” becomes the preferred nomenclature.

Moses from San Francisco: one of many GCs from around the globe

A French vineyard housing seven American, two Kiwi, one Hong Kong and two British WWOOFers makes for an interesting cultural exchange. Even among the English-speakers, everyone has local expressions of, and meanings for, words we all assume to be universally and uniformly understood. More differences are discovered – ‘comforter’, ‘suspenders’, ‘hose’, ‘pissed’ – and new expressions, too.

Someone cracks a joke. In place of laughter, many of the Americans simply exclaim: “that’s so funny!”

With so many Anglophones on this little vineyard, very little French is spoken, except bursts of broken French to Vincent and his mother. The latter appears to speak very little (if any) English, but understands very well the goings-on among the Anglophones – in a way only such a quietly knowing matriarch could. Without a doubt, she knows the precise meaning of “GC,” a term thrown about with gusto at the vineyard’s raucous end-of-harvest celebrations. Vincent’s harvest finished first in the area, and parading slowly through the narrow streets of Bully with a vine and a bouquet of flowers hanging from the tractor is met with applause from passers-by who know that it is a traditional symbol of the end of the vendages for a vineyard.

Celebrating the end of the harvest

Although it seems impossible, an even more gargantuan feast appears, along with even more wine and even more friends and family, eager to celebrate the climax of the previous year’s work. For most of the WWOOFers, it is the end of two weeks of hard labour, but for everyone there is a story – some came specifically to learn about the methods of wine-making in the region in order to transplant ideas into their own wine-making, whereas others have simply come for a fortnight to glean an alternative perspective on this much-visited country. Some are near the end of their trip, and others have only just begun. Some – such as two Seattlites, Andrew and Rose – have been here for months and will return more or less straight home. For Vincent, this is just another year in what will (hopefully) be a lifetime of producing excellent organic Beaujolais.

Pondering the 'nose'

The vineyard has for two weeks been a convergence of cultures, stories and trajectories. It is a living example of how places are created through intersections from elsewhere. Yet it also has distinctiveness beyond the various individuals who have descended upon it for this short time, crafted partly by Vincent’s steady hand and the family’s long-standing affiliation with the land. Leaving Bully, and France, it is clear that not only do vineyards have their own terroir, but also places – neither produced exclusively by external factors nor by localised conditions.

No more grapes to harvest this year

We leave Domaine Carret for the bustle of Lyon with Kiwi Elliot and his girlfriend, Liz. We wave them off at 9.30pm as they head to Munich for Oktoberfest, and begin our three hour wait for our coach to Bologna, Italy. Lyon’s Perrache gare routière is cold, functional and virtually empty, a stark contrast to the frenetic and boistrous community that briefly flourished during the vendages. As we depart the hard, industrial lights and lines of the bus station, we do so with sadness that we are leaving so many memories of France, but also with eager anticipation of Italy and beyond, safe in the knowledge that we have been blessed with the unofficial New Zealand label of appreciation: we are GCs.