St Vincent — we need all the help we can get!!!

Welcome to the next instalment of the #barrelandvine blog, chronicling our adventures whilst launching a distillery and vineyard #Domaine de Bembeno. Situated in the heart of the Breton countryside, #uncoindeparadis has stolen our hearts and continues to inspire us with a visceral connection to nature and weather.

More about St Vincent later…

Today was an epic day…

It may have ended with…

but it started with the slightly daunting prospect of beginning the trellising in the vineyard.

We have over 100 alleys of vines, which means we need over 200 2.5m stakes, some at the heads of the alleys, and some between. This entails, auguring 200+ holes (in ground with more pebbles than Felixstowe beach), and then sinking, heavy, horse chestnut stakes, then… getting the petrol post whacker to a height of 2.5 metres (think step ladder, wet treads and slippy wellington boots).

Oh… and they have to be spirit levelled into place. It’s at this point that I must share how awesome #wheresjayne (my partner in life and the project) is! The petrol whacker is loud; heavy but Jayne did an amazing job at guiding them in. To be fair, we could only manage 49 end posts, before we needed to take a break for tea and biscuits!

It was at this point; Jayne decided to dress up as a ghostbuster and begin the organic treatment for mildew…

You may notice she is wearing my “cooking fish” respirator, but it works for spray treatments too. We timed the process and it came in at 1h30 to treat all the vines. Which means, when we have another 6000 (in spring), we can multiply this by 6 #gulp = 10h30 to treat the vines (by hand)… I wonder why Jayne is hankering for a mini (vine) tractor??? hmmm???

This difficult day, did not end there… we also had to treat for caterpillars. These are particularly nasty little suckers, called processional caterpillars and they kill trees particularly firs, (Sapins). We are running preventative measures at the #barrelandvine, so, in the words of my nephew Max, aka the next Bundee Aki, “time to go full jedi and use the force to destroy these little suckers!!!

The bad news is… we ran out of stakes, we miscalculated! We are 60 short, how did that happen??? I blame the Breton whisky, I think it interfered with our sums :)

That being said, we did manage to get an enormous amount of work done. Still to be tackled: 60 stakes, 2 training wires down each row and a bunch of moveable wires, also on each row, this could take a while…

Back to St Vincent…

Many moons ago (around 40 years), #EnoSenior, aka Vince, aka French wine afficionado, used to take us all to the Beaujolais region to sample and taste each of the grand cru’s. Chenas, Julienas, Morgon, Brouilly, St Amour, Fleurie, Moulin A Vent, you name it, we tried a phenomenal amount of wine, and in all honesty, dad, bought a lot of this wine. Dad’s favourite of them all was Chenas by Daniel Bouchacourt, and I estimate that he must have bought well in excess of 2,000 bottles over the years of our visits!

It was on one of these visits that my dad was informed that St Vincent was the patron saint of wine. That was like music to his ears, as he has always had an affinity to wine, especially French wine. It was from this point on, that he decided any wine from any other country was not worth considering. Something which we joke about even today, to the point that I buy him Italian wine and then cross out the label with permanent marker and then write Chenas on it.

We have been looking for a stone #StVincent statue ever since we moved to #langonan, someone who can watch over our family and currently the newly planted vines.

We finished the night with a glass of white wine (from Brittany, sigh of relief from #EnoSenior) and achy hands and backs. Tomorrow is a rest day, fingers crossed it might be a research day, and we get to visit another vineyard!

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