It’s my Vineyard

In between lorries coming to pick up the order for Holland and another lot for the U.K today, we dashed across beautiful countryside to the cool and relative calm of the water mill I spoke of in the Auvergne region of France.

The geology is volcanic and before Beaujolais we became quite used to the wines there, which are little known elsewhere, they have a piquante taste and a hint of the minerals of the volcanic terroir. We became very fond of wines such as St Pourcain. We enjoyed a bottle with an excellent meal in Thiers, the knife capital of the world.

Our mill wheel was used to grind the steel for knives after it had served its life grinding corn when the landscape here was all wheat, now it is pine trees. Now, for us, Fred has, with patience and mechanical genius made it make electricity, the river supplying our water. 

Fred gets on his beloved tractor [memories of childhood on the farm in Canada]and rotivates the vegetable patch in our field where I swiftly planted potatoes beans and beetroot, hoping they will not mind my absence and that the dreaded yellow and black striped beetle does not attack the leaves of my potato plants .

We supply some regular customers with more Regnie and enjoy seeing old friends.

Back in Beaujolais the paper work has to be done for the U.K order, another complex piece of French administration. The worst of these tasks is the completion of the Register of the cave every month without fail! Here we must record every single bottle of wine that leaves our cave, personal consumption, gifts, export and French sales and if the figures don’t add up….. well they have to and it is a nightmare. 

Tomorrow I take this months records to the lovely Madame at the customs office in the next village, will I get my long awaited ten out of ten, no errors? We will see.