‘Vines come to life, and the magic begins’

Tradition has it that you should never visit a vineyard while the grapes are being picked – but it’s the best time to go, says Nick Trend

Ripeness is all. Especially if you are a winemaker. The decision to start picking your grapes is the single most critical moment of the year. Too early and the wine will lack flavours and aromas; too late and they will be overloaded with sugar, the wine will taste jammy rather than fresh and it will be hard to control the level of alcohol.

That moment has now come. I’m soaking up the warm, late September sunshine looking down a long gentle slope corrugated with row after row of grape vines. Two or three miles in the distance, the sharp point of St Emilion church pierces a luminous blue sky. This is the view from one of the most famous châteaux in one of the most famous wine-growing areas in the world – Troplong Mondot.

Standing next to me is Aymeric de Gironde, president of the estate. “I only work twice a year,” he jokes, “once during the harvest and again in January when we blend the wines.” It sounds straightforward, but each process is highly complex. Even the angst over when to start harvesting isn’t just one make or break decision. Every parcel of vines will reach its peak of ripeness at a slightly different time.

The weather, of course, is crucial. Long hot summers like this one produce earlier harvests. But the moment to pick will depend on the variety of grape, the type of soil – some retain heat better than others – and the age, aspect and even the altitude of the vineyard. Even within specific plots, there may be variations. De Gironde explains that they discard the grapes at the end of each row, because, exposed to so much more sun, they ripen much earlier than the rest.

On this particular plot the vines in front of us are still hanging heavy with purple-red merlot grapes. These will be the last of this variety to be harvested at Troplong Mondot. But some of the later ripening cabernet sauvignon will still be being picked throughout October. Certainly that will be the case across the river in the Medoc where cabernet is the dominant variety.

The vines are pruned so that the grapes hang from the lowest arms of the vine, and de Gironde shows me how best to snip them off with the jaws of the secateurs – or épinettes as they are called here. Not all the bunches hang easily; some are caught up on the support wires or entwined in the leaves. It can be hard to spot where to cut, so it’s crucial to keep your spare hand out of the way, cupping the lower part of the bunch so that you can’t slice into your finger. Each vine produces about five or six bunches which, together, equate to about a bottle of wine. It’s surprisingly fast work, and within a few minutes my basket is full.

Grapes are selected and picked with precision here in the elite vineyards of the Bordeaux region, but this is not typical of wine making generally. Around the world, most grapes are grown on a vast commercial scale and harvested by spider-like machines, which rumble down the rows shaking the grapes off the vines, before being sold off to large-scale production centres.

But top vineyards such as Troplong Mondot still recruit teams of pickers to ensure that the grapes reach the winery in the best possible condition. It’s that care and consistency that will produce the purest and most concentrated juice and leads to the best wines. And on these estates, this is easily the most exciting time of the year – when the rows of vines suddenly come to life and

Grapes are selected and picked with precision here in the elite vineyards of the Bordeaux region

that magical transformation from grape to wine begins.

The received wisdom has long been never to turn up at a winery when all this is going on. It is absolutely the busiest time and the winemakers will be under extreme stress. The last thing they want, surely, is tourists getting in the way.

That’s still true if you are a small grower, but leading wineries are now much better resourced and much more invested in visitors. My morning at Troplong Mondot was specifically designed to give an insight into the excitement of the harvest.

After the session harvesting grapes and a tour of the estate, we head for the winery itself where three pickers are at the rolling conveyor belt of the sorting table. They discard bunches that look unripe before the rest of the bunches begin their journey through a rattling, faintly Heath Robinson machine, which shakes the berries off the stalks and transports them, by now slightly mushy, to a plastic hopper.

After the machines comes the mystique. The slopping hoppers of grapes and juice are moved next door into a much bigger warehouse – a two-storey cathedral of huge stainless steel tanks. This is where the juice ferments and the wine is made.

Not all processes are the same. It depends on the château, the style of the wine, whether it is red, white or rosé, and the preferences of the winemaker. But at Troplong Mondot the grapes, which by now have formed a thick soup, are kept in the temperature controlled tanks for the next three or four months. The natural yeast on the skins initiates fermentation and, all the while, the juice is gently pumped around the tank so that the extracts from the skins are absorbed into the liquid.

It’s fascinating tasting the wine at this early stage when fermentation has hardly begun. Sampling from different tanks, you can see which have already taken on more colour, and how the intensely sweet juice reflects the different characters – or the terroir – of the individual plots.

After this it is a waiting game. The mush of grapes and pips will be raked out of the tanks leaving the pure juice behind and the next stage will be the blending of the different tanks in January. That is when de Gironde’s taste buds will be under stress again, deciding on the exact proportions that will make up the premier wine and go on to spend a second period of fermentation in oak barrels or barriques, before finally being bottled. With the highest quality wines it will then be years before they are then ready to drink.

So, there is not much more that we can do but head for the shady trestle tables under the trees next to the château where the estate workers are breaking for the traditional harvest

lunch. De Gironde uncorks a bottle of the 2018 vintage. That was another long hot summer – and the wine is only just ready to drink. It will evolve for perhaps decades to come. Meanwhile, in four or five years’ time, a bottle of the 2022 will take its place on the lunch table.