Loire 2025
The sun hung directly overhead, slowly ambling across a great arc of unbroken azure.
Lazing back in her deckchair, gently sweltering, Mademoiselle Agricultrice sipped on her chilled kombucha as she scanned the vibrant blue expanse. She was trying to think when she had last seen a cloud. Was it this month? Or last month? Or the month before that?
“It’s hotter than a ticket to a DRC tasting,” she said out loud, to nobody but herself and her vines.
Lowering her gaze from the sky overhead, her ninth Gauloises of the day dangled precariously from her bottom lip as her vines came into view. From azure blue to emerald green; two different shades, but the same intense vibrancy. Healthy vines, healthy leaves, and after a perfect flowering what appeared to be a healthy grapes.
“This is the life,” she sighed, as she stretched out her legs. “I know winemakers who left the Loire for the Languedoc, to escape the frost and the rain and the mildew, but if they had waited just a few more years they would have realised the Languedoc was coming to them!”
Turning her head to the right her gaze now settled now on a pile of canary yellow. Next to her new accommodation – an old vardo, a traditional Romani horse-drawn wagon – there sat a pile of brightly hued plastic. It was the sheeting – repurposed domestic recycling sacks – she had used to shield her vines from the rain during the dreary 2024 vintage.
She slid lower in the deckchair, grateful that 2024 was behind her, as she sought to reclaim her midday doze.
