L'heure bleue

This is the south of France. It's raining. It's been raining all day, but having seen the scenes of devastation in Spain, I don't feel I can complain.

This evening was the village fête des vendanges. It was a bit of a damp squib, given the weather. There were maybe twenty people there; we sloped off home early.

When we first moved here, September was a month full of liveliness and colour. Whole families arrived from Andalucia in buses, bringing whole hams and vats of olive oil with them. A month or so of grape harvesting in France would pay their living expenses for several months in Spain. They would install themselves in houses that stood empty the rest of the year; granny would stay at home to look after the kids and cook the meals, while the rest of the family worked 8 or 9 hours a day in the vineyards. At 7 a.m. the streets would be full of people and rumbling tractors. In the evenings, there was singing, dancing, and guitar playing in the square. We didn't need an official fête des vendanges, because there was a party every Saturday night.

With the arrival of machines, that has all changed. The economics of it are unarguable; harvesting by machine can be up to 50% cheaper, and a lot faster, so grapes can be harvested at the optimal moment. It's hard to find people prepared to put in the hours of hard manual work for minimum wage; for the last few years, Poles have been more common in the vines than Spaniards. This year, there are maybe a dozen Spanish grape harvesters in the village. The square is quiet; during the day, all that can be heard is the distant whine of machines à vendanger churning up and down the rows. A lone operator wearing ear protectors, and a man waiting with a tractor to cart the grapes to the cave.