The vines sleep and wait

Some of my conversational French is a bit rusty, but I found that I can totally talk to people about wine. Wine! Not something you talk about too often … except, as it turns out, in the Alsace and the Cote d’Or you kind of totally do.

At least with the local vigneronnes and vignerons, and I met more of them than I expected. Right now they (and their families and hired hands and workers etc) are busy cutting the vines. Sometimes the cut vines are burned right behind the cutters, in a so-called “brouette” (basically a wheeled, movable giant open metal can which can withstand fire), and so trails of smoke can be observed in vineyard after vineyard, and the air along them smells faintly of smoke (which was the phenomenon that led me to investiagate it). Sometimes, the brouettes have holes in the bottom, and so that the burnt ash can fall out and comes to rest between the vine rows. And the burning/smoke is also a protection against vine diseases. So I learned – and now you know, too. :-)