Wine is life

Cultural Lesson # 7: French wine- making it

After a vineyard tour and several wine tastings, I have begun to realize how much passion, sweat, and labor is in each bottle of French wine (figuratively, of course). Le vin et la vie (wine is life). Take for example the town of Chateau-neuf-du-pape where I tourned a vineyard in February. This wine town has roughly 1000 inhabitants and 350 vineyards. For those of you who didn't expect to get a math problem when coming to my blog, that's more than 1 vineyard per three persons.

And linking your life to wine in France means linking your life to mother nature. In France, irrigation, heaters, and any other method that manipulates the earth are forbidden for vignerons (winemakers). This means that the flavor of the wine for any given year is completely dependent on the weather of the region. Wet, dry, sunny, cloudy, hot, cold: every change makes a difference.

The number of facteurs which effect the flavor and depth and color of wine for the proccess of growing the grapes are just as infinite for the proccess of making the wine. The barrel (type of wood and size), the temperature at which the wine is stored during fermentation, and how long the wine is left to mature all influence the final product. At Chateau-neuf-du-pape, they have found their "perfect temperature" which is maintained naturally throughout the year in their underground caverns. There were four different barrel sizes (photos to come, I'm away from my computer right now!) for the different varieties of wine.

I feel so fortunate to have been introduced to this art form at such a young age. It's not hard to understand why, for many people in France, wine is such a cultural staple. There's nothing quite like having a glass of wine with dinner that was made 40 km down the road!