Under an upset sky, the rain chased us from the vines. The white Clos de l’Orme does not put water in its wine; the picking of the green and fleshy bunches is postponed. I’ll be back on Monday to warm my rind in the tender October sun and inflict the inevitable back pain on myself. Volunteer pickers, friends, neighbors and passing retirees are quick to taste the white wine served by Rino Dumont as a consolation prize. “We usually don’t drink wine at lunchtime because no one wants to go back to the vines afterwards! remarks Rino, sparing his troops. “The 2021 is an excellent vintage everywhere in Quebec,” adds Lucie Debien, cellar master at Le Clos. “We cannot say the same for 2022, it has rained too much. »
Subject to the cyclothymic vagaries of the climate, Quebec vineyards are doing quite well in terms of quality. Pascale, a French wine agent who came to lend a hand with her neighbours’ harvest, nods when she tastes the seyval blanc. “Before, buyers were skeptical. But over the past ten years, things have improved: Quebec wines are in the spotlight. She herself came to settle in the region, on the wine route, in Armandie.
“We are doing better thanks to the geotextile winter protection”, emphasizes Rino, who has to extend 7 km of cover over his vines in the fall.
Some people enchant everything they touch, be it a place, a project, or an object. Lucie Debien and Rino Dumont have transformed the estate they have occupied since 2009, in Estrie. “We were just looking for a country house to escape to,” explains Lucie, 59, a former civil and environmental engineer who marvels at everything. But this old vineyard abandoned since the year 2000 had not said its last word. The 3,600 fallow Seyval vines charmed the two engineers, to the point that they quit their jobs to take care of them and make their daily wine from them. “We couldn’t leave all of this abandoned,” explains the mistress of the place. As long as we did… we took courses, training, read en masse and grew grapes for 4 years for the other vineyards before launching. For hyper-rational people like the two of us, it was interesting, because there is a whole scientific side to wine, chemistry, biology. They also pick according to the biodynamic calendar, in phase with the moon, flower day or fruit day, it depends. The result ? Some 8000 bottles of white per year, without synthetic chemicals and a confidential but faithful distribution.
grapes and reason
“Everyone should do some engineering before having a vineyard”, Lucie slips in to me, activating the Italian press which slowly pours its juice for two hours into the sparkling clean stainless steel vats. “We are constantly in solution mode. No two vineyards face the same problems. »
The two engineers are not just lab mice, they are also two bookworms. After renovating the house, the vines and the cellar, they found a special purpose for their original barn, whose old planks let field mice and the wind in. “We had too many books in the house and we didn’t know where to put them,” says Lucie. “We thought jokingly that we could perhaps make a library in the barn. We tested the concept one winter by putting books in it to see if they would withstand the cold. And they were intact in the spring. So we built shelves and inaugurated The Book Barn. »
Work makes days prosperous, wine makes Sundays happy.
This unique place, which stores 12,000 classics, forgotten or recent, to the ceiling, is open to local residents and tourists, from spring to the first snowfall. We come across the biography of Tolstoy by his daughter, Horoscope 2022 by Anne-Marie Chalifoux, Harry PotterMichel Tremblay or Robert Lalonde and a section “Books you must have read” in which I slipped (scuse, it was necessary) Zazie in the subwayby Raymond Queneau.
I spotted it zero and infinitythem Tales by Ferron, Jane Eyre, The hussar on the roof and I borrowed The artificial paradises of Baudelaire (1860) where he discusses wine and hashish, “compared as means of multiplying individuality”. I don’t know which wins yet. I found a sentence of 75 words there while in college I learned that an average reader couldn’t digest more than 14. I imagine the wine (or hashish) helping…
“Profound joys of wine, who has not known you? Whoever had a remorse to appease, a memory to evoke, a pain to drown, a castle in Spain to build, all finally invoked you, mysterious god hidden in the fibers of the vine. How great are the spectacles of wine, illuminated by the inner sun. How true and burning is this second youth that man draws from him! »
wine and books
In this barn where I got lost alone like in a haunted museum room, I found yellowed treasures, phantom authors. All I needed was a glass of wine to go through Baudelairian labyrinths. Obviously, the wines of the white Clos de l’Orme bear the literary labels “At the foot of the letter” (Seyval), “Mot dit” (Pinot gris), “Plume” (Savagnin), affixed by hand.
“The book barn corresponded to our business plan, to our values: to share a quiet place, Lucie slips. We don’t want to do weddings or parties, other vineyards do it very well. We offer the place for people to come and enjoy it, have a picnic, rest. »
There is on the terrestrial ball an innumerable, nameless crowd, whose sleep would not lull the sufferings sufficiently. Wine composes songs and poems for them.
I learn from a text unearthed by our ingenious winegrowers that the smell of old almond and vanilla-scented books comes from benzaldehyde and ethylbenzene (also present in petroleum), and that Karl Lagerfeld even made a perfume, Paper Passion, with the silent smell of paper.
When will there be tastings of old books and wines, all vintages combined, a kind of natural paradise in paradise lost?
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