Grape Harvesting and Codfish

After all this madness it would be unfair if everything else wouldn't turn out great. So it did. The week we were in Bordeaux with Anaïs, who was going to grape harvest with us and who got us the job, and his brothers Pierre and Sibylle, was spectacular. The city is really beautiful - no wonder it's a UNESCO heritage site - and the cyclists crazy. They ride in all directions, on the sidewalk, on the road, on the metro lines, wherever needed. Cold or not two minutes afterwards I was already sweating from concentration. The good thing is that despite this almost bicycle anarchy cars respect them above all. And very rarely we heard honking.

Compared with Portugal the work at these vineyards couldn't have been smoother. The most important thing to make a good Sauternes wine is within the quality of the grapes picked up at the right time. Nothing to do with other types of wines which the important thing is to pick up everything as quickly as possible. Here concentration, observing well each bunch and see their maturation point (in this case a proper "rottenness") was sovereign. Therefore the pace was necessarily slower. Especially in the first days until we go it right. Our chef Pierre had all the patience in the world to teach us and to put everyone in a good mood. We were in the right place with the right team!

On the next weekend me and Fernando decided to go for ride till the nearest coast. Early enough we prepared everything to leave with our baby girls. 5km later - fffff! - a hole. Now that's odd we thought. Concerning we were rolling on the smoothest asphalt road. When we took a proper look the reality was quite different: ripped tire! Which ripped the inner tube, which in turn or we get a good enough solution or Fernando had to walk back to our Château. I don't know where he got that but he came from behind a machinery house in a neighboring vineyard with a piece of black hard sponge. We filled the tire with it, mended the inner tube and returned "home", which after all was about 1km away from another road. Fortunately it rained the whole weekend so we were glad to not have been able to go.

I have to tell you about the most unbelievable episode that happened to us during this stay. The codfish episode. Since the grape harvest beginning, when we met Ignasi again, we talked about making a cream codfish - his favorite Portuguese dish that Fernando could do so well. We promised we would make it when we received the payment.

It was a night like any other. I don't remember where our friends were, probably had gone out. I was cleaning the kitchen and the toilet. We went to the tent at night as dark as pitch. This time I hadn't forgotten the flashlight so it was the only way to see where we were stepping. Right outside the gate I'm faced with the strangest vision. I point the flashlight down to the ground and ask: "Can you understand what that is?" We approached. "A codfish?" We laughed. "A codfish? It can't be!" We kept on laughing. Already squatting towards what would be a very good slice of codfish, already soaked, we couldn't stop laughing. We looked around, we turned the slice around, we looked at the sky... no clue where it would have come from, as how or what was a nice slice of codfish doing at the entrance of the Château. Any cat that stole it from a house? That haven't eat it afterwards? And actually not even cracked? Absolutely no idea...

We grabbed it, washed it well and it was sure that the next day it would be transformed into the most flavorful - and unbelievable - cream codfish of our lives. Even today we laugh at this surreal event and we've given up trying to understand it. We also lost count of the number of times we raised our voices up to the skies and asked the Almighty Codfish Lord to send us other things or even more slices like that one... but apparently that was a one way ticket. (Unfortunately we didn't take photos.)