Sat in my favourite café in Jersey, I’m about as far removed from grape picking as I can get. And yet, every now and then I catch myself grinning at one of the memories or events of the last couple of weeks. What a great experience!
The grape picking itself was arduous, backbreaking stuff (at least for the first few days) interspersed by song and jovial vulgarities. ‘9’s’ out in the field (a veritable feast of wine, meat, cheese and bread) were a great morning pick up. This was followed by wine stops every hour or so and a three course lunch (with wine!) so we were usually grape picking half cut making it an altogether more pleasant experience J
Everyone had their own techniques when it came to actually picking the grapes. Paul took on the ‘1,2 miss-a-few’ technique, Charlie was all about speed, everyone looked out for the shortest rows with the fewest grapes, whilst Ben always landed the longest rows with the most grapes (that was his excuse for lagging behind anyway!)
At the farm we were housed in dorms: a small 4-bed ‘girl’ dorm and a larger dorm for the lads. At first, we ‘the girls’ thought we had the better of the two dorms. That was until 11pm on our first night when we had our first ‘enlightening’ introduction to the French team.
We’d just settled to go to sleep (in preparation for the 6am wake-up call) when our peace and tranquility was rather rudely disturbed by the arrival of the ‘boys next door’ – a bunch of middle-aged men who’d been out for a couple of drinks at the local bistro and were residing in the room next to us.
Half an hour of belching and farting ensued, made worse when we laughed and they realized they had an audience on the other side of the paper-thin walls. And so it continued. This was our affectionate wake-up call every morning.
Key highlights of grape picking:
- Will-isms – “did your past boyfriends ever hit you?” (random question when asking Laura about her upbringing), “how do you say ’obviously’ in French with a really sarcastic undertone?” (his second question to me after ‘What’s the word for bucket?”)
- The blackbird song (sung at full pelt in the middle of the vineyard)
Where be it blackbird to?
I know where he be,
He be up yon wurzel tree, and I be after he!
Now I sees he, and he sees I,
Bugger'd if I don't get 'en
Wit a girt big stick I'll knock 'im down,
Blackbird I'll 'ave he!
La la la la la la
La la la la la la
'Ow's 'e, Fadder?
[Audience Answer] Alright!
- Robojob (as performed by Charlie…don’t ask!)
- Pocket Sausage (sausage stored in pockets after 9’s for a mid-morning snack)
- Cupboard Clothes (old clothes found in a cupboard in the boys’ dorm which were worn out in the field to great comic effect J )
In four days we all (bar ‘weird’ Will) became very close. Unfortunately, our grape picking experience came to an abrupt end just when we’d finally got over the back ache from bending over all da. At the end of the third day we were told by Jean-Pierre that there was only one more day left of grape picking. The rains had arrived so he’d hired more people than usual to get the grapes picked before they rotted. We were left in a bit of a pickle as we’d all booked tickets for the following week. The agency we’d used were useless and offered us no help at all. Charlie, Vicky and Paul managed to get a lift from a friend, Josef and Harmen headed back to Holland, Will….who knows, and Ben, Triso, Tone, Laura and I decided to head to Paris to try and change our tickets. And so our next adventure began…
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