Page 1 of Grape Juice
I
I don’t know the part about the knees yet. No one has told me that the grapes here will grow so close to the ground. That we’ll all be clipping riesling in these primal postures—doubled over like we’ve been sucker punched, like we’re praying. Then again, no one has told me much of anything, really—save for when to board my flight, how to get where I’m going.
I travel to Alsace by way of Paris. Upon landing, waking to announcements in a foreign language, I pause to marvel at the flight attendants—how brilliantly, impossibly untarnished they seem, even postvoyage. Pristine and postured, hair slicked back, all of their figures shaped like bobby pins.
In my comparative state of disarray, I press on: collect my bags, depart from the airport, board a four-hour commuter train from Gare deLyon to a station called Saint Joseph. A tiny blue Fiat awaits me in the parking lot, just as my email instructions had promised. The car looks like it’s been through the wash one too many times—darlingin a way that suggests it might just short out in the middle of the highway.
A small woman with a cropped gray bob sits in the front seat, typing arrhythmically with her pointer fingers on her iPad. Beatrice. She’s the winemaker’s sister, who I’ve been told manages operations for the domaine.
I tap at the window to get her attention, and she looks at me blankly before sitting up with so much enthusiasm, her body jerks against her still-buckled seat belt. Once she frees herself, she hobbles out of the driver’s seat and nearly skips around the front of the car to kiss me on both cheeks. “Alice, she’s here! In the flesh!” she cries as if announcing my presence to some invisible third party. “Oh,bienvenue! Welcome! Our only American!”
She holds my face, sizing me up in an entirely unapologetic once-over, and I feel my cheeks heat. “Don’t worry, we’ll build you some muscle this month,chérie.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Beatrice!” I say with a grin before berating myself silently for reverting to English. How easy it is to fancy oneself worldly—non-American, at least—until on foreign soil.
“Please, please, you call me Bea. Everyone does. Are we ready?”
I nod, and she rolls my suitcase to the back of the car and hoists it into the trunk, with far more umph than one might expect from a woman of her size, before parading back to the front seat. “Off we go! So, shall we speak in English or in French?”
“Français, s’il vous plaît,” I mutter, flinching at the clumsiness of my accent. “A bit slowly, if you don’t mind...”
She smirks knowingly. Then, steadily, with care toenunciate, she begins to deliver her opening sermon: There are a handful of us here right now for the grape harvest,les vendanges. An Italian, a German, an Australian, and, well, the French. There is just one other woman, so we’ll share a room, while the men are split between the two larger ones on either side of the same hallway. Everyone is close to me in age—late twenties, she suspects—so she imagines we’ll get on just fine. Antoine, the winemaker, lives with Bea in a smaller cottage just about a kilometer away.
For the duration of harvest, she will prepare our meals; we’ll eat every night at the house, and lunch will be served in the vines. Breakfast, however, is our responsibility—coffee is available in the kitchen, she’ll show me where, and we’ll need to be dressed, fed, and ready to go by 6:00a.m. each morning.
In the midst of my furious attempts at translation, I marvel that her words have no borders, no stops and starts. It’s like she’s speaking in cursive.
I’m already plenty familiar with the basic contours of wine harvest: Annually, volunteers flock to a region during the three-odd weeks when the area’s grapes grow maximally ripe. Pick too early, and they’re sour. Pick too late, and they’re overly sweet, too high in sugar. But much like flowers, grapes cut from their stems begin to wilt. So the race isn’t merely about separating bunches from vines; it’s about pressing, de-stemming, sorting, and barreling—all before the fruit has the chance to go leathery.
The other volunteers, I assume, will have their own reasons for attending: things to run from, things to runtoward, French to practice, dirt to touch. And I, well, I’m here because I was asked. My boss, a prominent enough wine importer, had offered—nearly mandated, without solicitation—a round-trip flight to France in the hopes that I might spend time with one of his producers and learn something about the terroir to bolster my sales pitches back home.
It all came about with little ceremony: He’d sent me an email just two weeks ago with the subject line “RE:WINEHARVEST” followed by characteristically spare body copy: “Three and a half weeks in Alsace. Lots of manual labor. Will probably change your life. You in?”
I’d hesitated, but what kind of good protagonist declines an opportunity like that? Evidently, even my employer could sense that I was no longer a particularly likable main character (I did not disagree). And this seemed like the sort of thing that might improve my sense of scale or perhaps my whole personality.
By the time Bea and I putter onto the property, the sky has shifted to the gauzy prologue to darkness. In places like this—various vineyards I’ve visited for work—the sun always seems to take its time absconding, the opposite of an Irish exit. Departures are drawn out and loud, full of handshakes and promises of future plans.
Here, in the diluted glow, a long wooden table stands in front of a big farm-style residence. Around it, a buzzing flurry of people at work, most freshly showered, with wet hair and crisp shirts. They lay out silverware, water pitchers, and dishes, oscillating back and forth from the kitchen.
“Perfect timing.” Bea deposits my suitcase at my feet. “I’ll show you to your room, then you can come down for dinner and meet the group.”
I trail behind her as we enter the foyer, which is lined with what look like hundreds of pairs of work boots—Blundstones and tall rubber wellies—all of them slathered in a dusty casing of dried mud. The stairs are dark and wooden, and my room is no different. Inside, four twin beds are arranged in opposite corners, and a square window frames a vineyard view so picturesque, it almost seems trite. A little worn desk sits beneath the sill. On it, a mug nesting a toothbrush is surrounded by the general debris of Girl: face lotion, nail clippers, hairbrush, small tube of sun lotion.
Bea points out the bathroom, small and mirrorless, right across the hall. I’ll share it with all of the other volunteers, she explains, so we’re to keep our showers to under six minutes each.
“Anything else you need at the moment?” she asks.
“Non, merci!” Even as I catalog the visual details of the space, I’m struggling to latch on to the fact that it’s not someoneelse’sanecdote.
“Why don’t you gather yourself, then come meet us downstairs?” She shuts the bedroom door gently behind her.
I can feel the weight of the day’s travel tugging at my eyelids—the fatigue that accompanies so much newness, the reshuffling of time. But the thrum downstairs beckons, vibrating almost like some benign beehive.
Naturally, I’m well aware that arriving anywhere fresh,inserting oneself into its machinations, is a difficult affair. Right now, I’m loitering at the edge of some new and not-yet-infiltrated group, feeling othered for it. The sentiment is somewhere between loneliness and intimidation. A meager dose of optimism in there too, maybe. I close my eyes—just for a moment—but as soon as I do, the door flings open to reveal a beaming redhead, her hair braided into a crown.
“I’m Ruby!” Her Australian accent is thick, and her hands are on her hips. “Welcome to the animal house!”
“Alice. Hi.” I hold out my hand with a laugh.
