September/October 1977
By Roger Mann
Through Southern France
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You may sleep in an outbuilding with other vendangeurs or, if you're lucky, you might be given a room in the f armer's house. Either way, if you're not allergic to hard work and you enjoy meeting warm and generous people, le vendange could be your ticket to a Europe you didn't even know existed!
For more than 2,000 years, le vendange (the gathering in of grapes) has been one of France's most widely noted late summer and early autumn traditions. We all know that.
But did you know that you can actually get paid ($15 to $25 a day, plus-in most cases-a daily bottle of wine) for taking part in this almostmythical harvest? Or that you can do so without going through the hassles of obtaining a work permit . . . or learning to speak French . . . or even writing ahead to arrange for a job before you get there?
Well, you can. I know because I spent several happy weeks last fall on Corsica (a sunny French island in the Mediterranean) and in Provence (a charming mountainous region of southern France) picking grapes. And, although I worked, I enjoyed every minute of it. By the time the harvest was over, I had earned enough money to pay my way to Nairobi, Kenya (yes, in Africa) where I am now just as happily writing this article. I see no reason-now that the grape season is once again upon uswhy you (male or female) shouldn't be able to work your way through southern France during this fall of 1977 . . . just as I did in the autumn of 1976.
THE OPPORTUNITIES ABOUND
This pleasant (for anyone who yearns to travel but who has more ambition than money) state of affairs is one of the few silver linings in the dark cloud of agribiz "progress" now sweeping the world. Just as millions of smaller farmers have been squeezed off the land in the United States and many other nations, most of France's peasants are being pushed from their independent country lives to factory jobs and row houses in the cities.
The increasingly few farmers left behind have, for the most part, successfully replaced their vanishing field workers with machines. For the most part, that is. Because, while machinery can indeed do many agricultural jobs faster and easier and less expensively than people and animals can handle the same tasks (at least as long as the petroleum holds out!), there is still no really satisfactory replacement for the human eye and hand when it comes to picking grapes.
To be sure, it's no longer unusual to spot the odd mechanical picker lumbering through some of the vineyards of southern France. To produce the very best wines, however -the wines for which France is so justly famous-grapes must still be sorted by eye and plucked by hand.
Which, of course, creates a tremendous seasonal demand for field laborers. A demand that hardpressed farmers are anxious to fill in any way they can: with French dropouts and students . . . Arab and Iberian migrant workers . . . and almost anyone else (including you, if you want to get in on the action!) who turns up. My guess is that any reasonably sober warm body which wanders into southern France by the middle of September and makes an honest attempt at doing useful vineyard work should have absolutely no trouble staying continuously employed until late October. The demand for field hands is definitely there
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