The Wrath of Grapes

A few buckets into the day, I felt my back start to seize up.

Let me say here that I consider myself more fit than most 46-year-old men. I play tennis, ski, hike and swim. But nothing I'd ever done before could quite prepare me for the numbing ache that seemed to crawl up from the ball of my right foot and nest deep down in some nexus of muscle, nerve and flesh in my lower back.

I let out a groan -- the first of several involuntary sounds of pain I would make that first day.

"Ca va?" A voice from the other side of the vine asked if I was all right.

"Oui!" I lied, with gusto.

Finding the Cure

After we finished the first vine row, there was just enough time to straighten up and take a glance around at the sun-splashed rows of vines that led up to a golden statue of the Good Lord, hands outstretched, at the crest of a nearby hill. Then it was time to descend the slope and attack more rows of vines.

As the morning wore on, the work picked up, and so did the chatter among the vines. The first thing that came as a shock was that my fellow pickers were weaving in and out of two languages: French and an odd German dialect, which, I learned, was Alsatian.

The second thing that struck me was how downright chipper these people were for a Monday morning.

Florence, a mother in her forties who usually works in a bank, was enthusiastically describing in painstaking detail a recipe for an onion tart. Arnold, a retired geography teacher, was talking about his passion, local historical research. Frantz, a local jack-of-all-trades in his fifties, simply amused himself with the idea of an American picking pinot in their midst.

"You're a real American?" Frantz asked me in French.

"The real Americans are on reservations," interjected Bernard, a vacationing security guard, from two vine rows away.

"Do they pick grapes by hand in California?" Frantz asked me.