Particularly, and especially, there is wine. Fresh young Graves en carafe, fruity young Médocs and St. Emilions from the lesser vineyards, and the whole impressive, interminable assortment of Grands Crus and great years. The Bordelais never seem to forget that their principal industry is wine; toward the end of September, particularly if the weather continues fine, the forthcoming vintage becomes almost the only topic of conversation. And the vocabulary of these conversations is a very special one indeed.
Will the wine be a vin de primeur, maturing early, like the 1936's and the 1944's, or a vin de garde, slow to come around, like the 1928's and the 1937's? Will it be maigre, like the 1939's, or gras, like the 1943's? Will it be dur and tannique, like the 1926's, or souple like most of the 1942's? Will it be petit or costaud, ordinaire or racé, délicat or puissant? Will the year rank as a grande année or a mauvais mill-ésime, or will it be one of those années jalouses, in which the wines are of uneven and uncertain quality?
The determining factor, of course, is the weather, and by the first of September most of the cards, so to speak, are dealt. But a single rainy week can turn the most promising year into disaster, and occasionally, as in 1924 and again in 1946, a month of miraculously warm and sunny days just before the vintage will transform what looks like a bad year into a grande année.
During the whole month of September, everywhere in the Bordeaux country, a fall housecleaning is under way—a prodigious brushing and scrubbing, sweeping and scouring—as the fermenting rooms and presses are made ready for the grape harvest. The owners, many of whom have been away for the summer, move back to their châteaux to keep an eye on things, and if the prospects are good, a kind of gay excitement seems to pervade the whole countryside.
There is a good deal of friendly rivalry between the producers as vintage time comes on; in general, “he who picks last, picks best,” but there is the constant and increasing hazard of autumn rains, and it takes a good deal of nerve to risk one's entire crop for the thin margin of added quality which a few days of September sunshine can give. It was with a definite note of triumph that the owner of a small Médoc château announced to me last fall that “Lafite is already picking, but I have not picked a grape and the weather is still fine.”
The Médoc at vintage time, in a good year, is a sight worth seeing. The villages are deserted, and everyone from seven to seventy is in the vines—the women picking into flat wicker baskets and generally singing as they work, the young men emptying the baskets into the bottes on their backs and carrying them to the nearby roads, where the old men are waiting with two-wheeled carts and the slow, shuffling oxen that draw them. Around every château there is a sort of invisible aromatic halo, made up of the scent of fresh-crushed grapes and the sweet unmistakable odor of fermenting wine.
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