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A year in the vineyards: from first green shoots through harvest and back again
September 26th, 2006 | 
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When we arrived here, I thought that it would be a nice idea to take a photograph of a single grape bush each week throughout the year. Well, I finally got around to starting on that project last February and the photos you see alongside this article depict the changing aspects of that particular plant.The thing that most struck us about this region during our first Winter was just how stark the landscape is during the Winter months. The top photo is how the landscapes looks from around December when the plants are prunned to about mid-April when the first shoots of green appear again.
From then, things really happen quite quickly here with the first appearance of the baby grapes in early May until the grapes are pretty much fully formed about mid-June. During this time, the farmers are busy in the fields getting their plants attached to the strings holding them up (the plants in this field are quite old so aren’t tied up).
Once into June, things generally slow down. The plants have all been sprayed and it’s the time for the work inside the winery to get underway in preparation for the harvest. Although you don’t see so much activity in the fields, things are far from quiet inside the various wineries.
In our area, the harvest gets underway towards the end of August (the date varies depending on the weather) and it’s pretty much over by mid-September. As you can see, the plants deteriorate pretty quickly after the harvest but the surroundings remain green well into November. In fact, garden plants and the like don’t start growing ’til it cools down a little so the burnt appearance of gardens is replaced by greenery (except in those gardens maintained by very keen gardeners).
Things change pretty slowly in the wine business with the local vines being replaced over a cycle of 40 years which means that you get about 36 years worth of wine from each plant as it takes four years before the first grapes appear. The bulk of grapes are still harvested by hand though this year European money has obviously arrived in big dollops as there are an awful lot of brand new grape picking machines. That does seem a little bit counterproductive in that those machines are generally used for the grapes producing lower quality wine which is the bulk of what makes up the growing lake of unsellable wine in Europe and, of course, doesn’t really help the unemployment statistics either.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
I’m not going back to school!
As expected, James would rather have stayed in the original class. Every day, of the week he wanted to go to school. In fact he could hardly wait to get there, at least until last Thursday when they moved him to the class with the 2 and 3 year olds.
Now he doesn’t want to go at all and every day he comes out crying which is no good. Nursery school is supposed to be a fun place to be, not somewhere you hate to go.
Why the change in him? Well, lots of reasons but mainly down to two: 1) all the activities revolve around those for 2/3 year olds and 2) they’ve sat him with an older mentally handicapped child who absolutely terrifies him.
We were expecting the first aspect to cause problems. After all, the toys and activities are, understandly, targetted at a much younger age group so few of them interest him and, more to the point, those of the original class were really attractive to him. Not only that, but whereas the kids in the first class were talking to him all day (and he was starting to understand what was said), the younger kids are only just learning to speak so the only person that talks to him now is the teacher. Consequently, we think that it will take him much, much longer to learn French in the new class. My guess is that it will be years rather than the months that it should have been.
The second aspect is typically French. James can’t speak French, the other child can’t speak, so they lump them together. In effect, it’s the nursery school version of CIPPA (see First day at school in France).
So how come they were expecting James to be speaking his first French words within 2 or 3 weeks? Well, it seems that all their previous experience of non-French speaking kids has been with Spanish (and, possibly, Catalan) speakers. Spanish is very similar to French and therefore it’s relatively easy for a Spanish speaking child to pick up French in a few weeks. English is a totally different language. It will probably take a few months before James starts coming out with the odd French word or phrase.
Anyway, we’re taking our own advice and going to the school on Monday to have him moved back into the proper class. If they won’t do that (and we don’t expect that they will), we’re changing schools as he’s definitely not going back to that class anymore. However, as Wendy points out, now that they’ve labelled him as as a problem, it’ll be harder to get him into another school and perhaps impossible.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Just when does your body’s temperature gauge get set?
We were fully prepared for it to feel warm and indeed hot down here in the Summer.
No great surprise there, of course. What we did wonder was whether John would feel the temperature in the same way as we did. After all, he was born here, so we sort-of thought that he’d feel it as a “natural” kind of temperature. It doesn’t work like that though and he spent the remainder of his first Summer wearing next to nothing.
What we found really peculiar was the attitude of all the healthcare professionals to this. In the hospital, they insisted on putting at least three layers of clothing on him in the maternity unit. Now bearing in mind that he was born in pretty much the peak of the Summer heat with outside temperatures in the shade of getting on for 40c and something similar to that in the maternity ward, that did seem rather crazy to us. OK, I know that newborn babies in the UK need to be wrapped up but that’s because they’re lucky if it hits 20c. What got me was that they didn’t think it odd when the sweat started pouring out of him when they wrapped him up (which apparently doesn’t happen to French babies).
A little further down the line, he’s way behind in his vaccinations because if we go to the clinic anytime from about March to October, they think that he has a fever and won’t give him the injections. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that me & Wendy are also sweating and perhaps he’s just hot because it’s 30+ degrees.
Our latest craziness is that we’ve been mildly rebuked for letting James go the nursery in shorts. After all, it’s under 30c and everyone else in the school is wearing long trousers, jumpers and coats. They’ve now taken things into their own hands and have started sending him in a subzero type of coat.
Anyway, being born in France isn’t enough to set your body’s temperature guage.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.What exactly IS French food?
“We thought that English people couldn’t cook French food but this is fantastic”.That’s typical of the comments we received when we hosted a reveillon break for a French family. The interesting aspect of that is that the comment was first made as the family were eating a roast turkey dinner which we considered typically English! In fact, although they had chosen all the dishes that we served over the three days all but one were what you would think was an English dish rather than a French one. Even the “French” one (duck, of course) isn’t something that’s completely unknown in the UK. Whilst the French are known for undercooking food, we found that this group not only didn’t complain that we had “overcooked” (ie cooked to UK standards) but complimented us on how well the food was done. As in other things, it may be that the French don’t actually like the food as cooked but just take it because that’s how it’s given to them.The undercooking is pretty much across the board and food hygiene laws in the UK would result in a number of the caffeteria type restaurants being closed if those laws were applied in France. We all know about the virtual impossibility of getting a steak “well done” in France (which seems to mean “not quite raw” to them) but consider how dangerous it is to undercook the likes of poultry.
Visiting the local cash and carry is an eye-opener in terms of French cuisine. Almost all of the local restaurants only serve food that’s available in a pre-prepared form in the local cash and carry. Consequently, the “French food” that the English can’t prepare is 90% reheated meals from the cash and carry and, of course, the menus are just about identical. In fact, there seem to be only three exceptions to this approach to French restaurant “cooking” locally: one haute cuisine French restaurant (with, of course, prices to match) and two owned by foreigners.
The snag is that this approach to food preparation changes the expectations of people. We had one very bad review because it took 30 minutes to get the meal on the table when they were used to having the meals on the table within 5 to 10 minutes. Of course, that 5 to 10 minutes is taken up with lifting the meal out of the freezer, heating it up in the microwave and emptying the contents onto a plate whereas our 30 minutes is made up of preparing the food and cooking it. Related to this, it can be quite rare for a French person to know how to read a menu because they’re used to reading the standard dishes listed on the “cash & carry” menus used by the bulk of restaurants here.
This “cash & carry” approach to menus combined with the attitude that nobody but the French can reheat meals means that the French, on the whole, are very unadventurous with what they will eat. If it’s spicy, it’s always refused so it was no great surprise that the “Nigel & Nippy” Indian restaurant folded as the locals won’t even try meals that look like they might be spicy. Net effect of this is that Indian restaurants have to tone down their offerings considerably and offer a very bland selection compared to what you’d get in the UK. Not only that, but they need to adjust their spices to those that the French know about so seem to stick to the curry powder from the cash & carry. What are the “French” dishes though? Well, for the most part they are the same as you find in the freezer sections of supermarkets in the UK. There are other things, of course, such as the local cuisine in the various regions which, in our area, is cassollet which is effectively tinned stew although since it’s considered a regional dish the price is correspondingly inflated.
So, basically, French food is the same as reheated and undercooked English food, less any spices.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Do the French not understand how reservations work?
As in most things, the French assume that hotel reservations work the way that they worked in France 50 years ago.
Of course, they rarely use the internet to make their reservations (although, to be fair, that is changing) and generally phone. In fact, it’s not unknown to receive a letter asking for a reservation and expecting a reply by letter too. Out of the peak seasons, that’s not too bad but we just ignore any letters received like that during the peak season as we just can’t afford to hold a room on the off-chance that they may actually confirm the reservation a week or two later.
The use of debit/credit card numbers as a guarantee is virtually unknown to them and they almost always ask to pay a deposit by cheque. Their lack of experience of using their card to guarantee a room means that it’s quite common for them to think that they’ve paid for the room when they make a reservation online and have quoted their card number which often requires considerable explanation at checkout time.
One major cause of friction is that they assume that it’s fine to cancel a reservation at anytime without charge. Everywhere else in the world, you need to cancel a hotel reservation before the arrival time you quoted and often 24 hours or more before that. Here, they assume that if they’ve not stayed in the room, then it’s OK. After all, the room isn’t costing the hotel anything, is it? It might not be costing anything, but when we get cancellations well into the evening, we’ve often turned people away because with a card number guaranteeing the room we are obliged to hold the room. This year for instance we had two days when we were completely full and turning away numerous people yet had hardly anyone who actually stayed!
Abroad, it’s even worse for them though. By and large, the French only have debit cards and severely limited ones at that. Whereas in the UK the cash withdrawal limit on a debit or cash card is around £250 (EUR 500) per DAY, in France the standard limit is EUR 300 per WEEK. Not only that but whilst you could, in principle, buy a house on a debit card in the UK, there is a spending limit of, usually, EUR 3000 per month on French debit cards (which is why they continue to use so many cheques). For most purposes, that’s OK. However, consider someone booking into a hotel in the UK. The first think that is done is that the card is run through for an authorisation of, usually, £100 per day (ie about EUR 150), even if the hotel actually only costs about £50 a night. So, a French person can stay a maximum of 20 days in UK hotels and, of course, that’s before you consider spending elsewhere.
This is why France is one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t pre-authorise payments.
So, no, the French don’t understand hotel reservations work unless they’re in France with a hotel that only operates in France.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
