Construction · 14 February 2003
Some time ago I wrote about our friend Noël the vigneron (like my mother, Holly, he was born on Christmas day), and of his decision to leave the local wine co-op to start a private winery.
We had seen him and his wife Patricia only a couple times since: they were insanely busy, though the news updates were always good. At the potluck dinner after the elementary school’s holiday pageant in December – to which we had brought fried chicken and macaroni salad, and at which I failed to convey the concept, or even the appeal, of white trash cooking (‘well, no, not really peasant…’) – Noël talked of investment from a Belgian wine dealer who was looking to buy land here, and of the haystack of paperwork he was navigating every day in addition to tending the vines. We also learned he had officially parted ways with the co-op, though apparently not before staring blankly at the seriocomic implementation of some of the modernization practices that he had been booted out as president just for proposing.
They spent the Christmas holidays in South Africa, where they visited 28 different wineries. It was good.
Last night Noël came by to say he was giving us a tonne of compost for the garden (!), and to show one of the most fascinating sets of documents I’ve ever seen: the architect’s plans for the new cave, over 1,000 square metres in all, with tanks and vats and a pressing thingy and a glass-walled retail shop at one end.
Noël looks energized, transformed: a 50 year old man on the verge of something huge. You try explaining to such a person how your content management system is coming along.
The compost, incidentally, is made from marc, the stuff (skins and seeds and whatnot) left over after the rasins have been pressed. Go figure.
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