Our Blog - Fête des Vendages

This year we decided to participate in the Fête des Vendages at the Château Guilhem in Malviès. It is about 90 minutes South-East of Toulouse, and it is a Château that we have known about for several years. We participated in the Fête des Vendages in 2017 here as well, our first fall in Toulouse. Each year, this vineyard has a little "harvest" that is done by volunteers (it is a very small portion of their grape vines), and then a wine tasting, and then a little "party" with a different charity organization receiving the proceeds of the event. This year, it was a kids theater organization. It is a nice day and always great food and friends.

A few pictures of the vineyards and the panorama. The harvest this year was 1.3 hectares of a grape variety called "Cabernet Franc", one of the major black grape varieties worldwide. It is principally grown for blending with Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in the Bordeaux style, but can also be vinified alone, as in the Loire's Chinon. After giving out the information on the harvest, all of the volunteers headed out to walk up to the top of the hill to the area that we would be picking.

And a few of the grapes themselves. There were LOTS of grapes out there!

Last time we did this, Tom was a "porter", or the guy that carries the grapes from the pickers to the truck. I have pictures of them later. This year, Tom decided to actually harvest, or a "picker". You go down each row, with people on each side of the vines. You find each grappe, or bunch of grapes, and you snip them off. They explain that you hold one hand under and clip the stem with the other hand, allowing the grape bunch to drop into the hand. In practice, it isn't that easy as sometimes, the grapes are wrapped around the wires and vines and you have to somewhat work them out.

Once the picker has a full bucket, they empty their buckets into a larger bucket that is carried around by a "porter". The porters then climb up a ladder and dump their buckets into the truck.

Once we were done with the harvest, the trucks took the grapes back down to the château, where they were dumped into this machine, which separates the grapes themselves from the stems. In the video, you can see the grapes going in (upper-middle), and then the grapes come out on one side (bottom middle) and the stems come out on the other (bottom left).

They had various tables setup to do tasting of various wines. Masks were required through the whole evening, and we had to buy our glasses (instead of borrowing) due to COVID-19.

After the tasting, we all filtered into the garden of the château for lunch with live music. This year, the music was REALLY good ... two French guys who did mostly American blues and folk songs, with a little Elvis and the Beatles thrown in. We all had tables that we sat at and went to go get our lunch .... a salad of duck gizzards (very typical SW France), Cassoulet (also very typical SW France), and dessert. They also had several bottles of wine (including bubbly wine) on each table. Overall, it was a really great day. We did the event with 3 friends ... another American and a British couple. Several differences between 3 years ago and this year, although not sure how much was done specifically due to COVID-19 and how many were done differently last year (we were not able to attend last year as Lucy had just arrived).

Lucy did not go with us, although there were a few dogs there. She spent the day at a friends house with 4 other dogs (Gus, Opie, Swiffer, and Elmo). She got to play all day with Opie and Elmo, who she has played with before. Gus normally doesn't play, and Swiffer was a new dog that our friends were also watching for the day. Needless to say, Lucy was exhausted at the end of the day.