Not long into my stint as a wine grape picker in Alsace -- about 20 minutes, to be exact -- I began to wonder whether I would come out of it whole.
I had come to the tiny wine-making village of Wolxheim, France (pop. 870), to join the grape harvest -- la vendange -- of a local winery in early October.
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Anyone, I figured, could tour this gorgeous wine country west of the Rhine, with its storybook villages and rolling vineyards, the usual way: motoring among local winemakers and stopping to sample the single-grape Alsatian wines -- dry white Riesling and pinot blanc, perfumed pinot Tokay, sweet muscat and Gewuerztraminer, and light, red pinot noir.
On this trip, I'd planned to do as many French people do in fall: take a vacation from computers, telephones and modern life to experience the real wine life in the provincial world of rural France. There would be no three-star dining, no thermal baths, no wine-tasting seminars. With no experience and no real idea of what to expect, I'd committed to a week of eight-hour days of backbreaking work, leavened only by harvest camaraderie.
Alsace's wine country -- nestled between the Vosges mountains and France's German border, more than 275 miles due east of Paris -- is simply one of the most beautiful stretches of vineyards anywhere. Its vibrantly green hills are dotted with Hansel and Gretel villages that on many mornings in fall are draped in misty, low-lying fog. I stayed in a pedestrian but functional hotel in the town of Molsheim, which has a large square with shops and restaurants that serve Alsatian cuisine -- seemingly the richest combinations that France and Germany can offer -- with carafes of local wine.
I found winemaker Jean-Bernard Siebert, who has about 16 acres of vineyards in and around Wolxheim, through my friend Daniel, who was born in Alsace and has worked many a harvest for his friend Siebert. Experience wasn't necessary; anyone who can safely operate a pair of gardening shears, bend to lift buckets all day long and communicate basic ideas in French or German is technically qualified.
Work began at 8 a.m., when some 10 to 15 of us -- young and old, men and women, professionals and provincials, students and retirees, but most all Alsatian -- crammed into a panel van with benches made from wood planks and milk crates. On my first day, we were driven just outside town to a neatly ordered slope with rows of pinot noir, and each of us was issued a pair of clippers and a bucket.
The harvest foreman, Dominique, was a 48-year-old industrial engineer who uses accumulated time off and some of his five weeks of French vacation time to harvest grapes for a full month every year. He assigned us our cutting formations: Two people generally worked each side of a vine row, with another pair working the opposite side of the same vines. The main idea is to clip the fist-size bunches of grapes from the vine without cutting off your fingers or those of the picker across from you. We then dropped the grapes in our buckets and, when the buckets were full, passed them underneath the vines to a central row, where a small tractor waited to take the grapes to a trailer parked in the road.
I followed the others in setting to work -- moving up and down at odd angles to collect grape bunches, most of which seemed to be either at waist level or hanging just a few inches off the ground.
"Watch the leaves," Dominique warned in French as he observed my bucket filling up with enough fall color to make an autumn window display. Grape leaves, I learned, need to be pulled out, particularly in wet years like last year, when the vines were treated for early signs of damp-related diseases.
"Watch the fingers, too," a male voice said on the other side of the vine, "we've already had two injured this week."
After a few minutes, my bucket was full and I placed it -- loaded with about 20 pounds of grapes -- underneath the vine. A hand from the next row pulled it away, and a few seconds later an empty bucket -- kicked like a soccer ball -- came flying back my way.
