Summer Fêtes

Watching the vines fill out and noticing that the grapes are burgeoning week by week has reminded me that summer is advancing. August is right around the corner, and as with all good passages of time, I don't know where the last few months have gone. Around Narbonne, the red blooms of poppy fields that danced with the faintest breeze in early summer have been replaced by fields of sunflowers that stand tall and and intent, heads following the sun's orb from morning to night with a delightful earnestness.

And the summer fêtes are well underway. The idea seems to be that each weekend, a different village around here throws their fête, and everybody from the other villages descends on that village to turn it upside down. The following weekend, it's somebody else's turn. I'm not too sure what we are celebrating other than it's summer, there's a lot of wine around, and this is France. Last weekend, I traveled out to Tousan in the heart of the Corbières, a moody appellation that stretches from just west of Narbonne to the foot of the Pyrenees and produces some of the darker and bolder reds of the region. Normally a sleepy little village containing one café, a couple of auberges and a post office, Tousan pulled out the stops and welcomed five hundred people into it's streets and cellars for an all-night, all-singing, all-dancing wine fest. I'm no longer surprised to see that five-year-old children outlast me at French parties; I laid down my arms at 3am on the village-square-come-dancefloor and quietly faded into the auberge with some excuses about training for an Ironman.

Then there was the recovery lunch the following day. I was lucky enough to be invited to attend a luncheon at a domain on the outskirts of Tousan that has been handed down from father to son for generations (note to self: when in France, it's a good idea to make friends with domain owners where possible). Back in Canada, we sometimes barbecue with cedar planks because, well, we have a lot of cedar on hand. Here in the heart of France's largest wine producing region (recently acquired fact: one in ten bottles of wine produced in France comes from Languedoc), they barbecue with - what else - old vines. You have to see it to believe it, and I'm kicking myself for not having the wherewithal to take a picture of the old knotted vines that fueled the old tin barbecue and gave the Merguez sausages a delicious slightly smoked, earthy flavour (so I'm told - I munched on pasta salad while 'forcing' more rosé down).

I also somehow managed to force myself out for a long trail run during the course of the weekend. How often to you get to ask a domain owner, 'do you mind if I run through your vines?'

And thankfully somebody else had the wherewithal to photograph me:

It's good to have some moments of summer captured as they pass.