The call comes on a Tuesday afternoon.
Thursday, he says. Not next week. Thursday. And if the wind turns tonight it might be Wednesday.
That is all the notice anyone gets, including him. The most expensive wine in France comes off the vine on about seventy two hours' warning, and the decision is made by one man standing in a row at seven in the evening, eating the grapes and cracking the pips between his back teeth.
Which is why hardly anyone sees it. Any cellar in Burgundy will open for you in June, when the gravel is raked and the vines are quiet and the whole afternoon was arranged that morning because you were coming. The second week of the picking cannot be arranged. You can only be free when it happens.
This year it is early. Champagne opens on 15 August and Burgundy may go before it, and both of those were September dates a generation ago. The first French fruit of 2026 came off on 15 July in the Aude, the earliest harvest anyone has on record. A brutal July has since stalled the vines and pulled back some of that lead, but the calendar has moved and it is not moving back.
Four regions below. Four completely different weeks.
Champagne, in the village press house
It opens on 15 August, and the bulk of the picking falls between the twentieth and the twenty fifth.
You stay in a village. Not a town. One street, a church, a bakery that opens at half past six, and a dozen growers whose names are on gates within four hundred metres of each other.
You get up at five, in the dark, because that is when the trailers start coming in. The crates are shallow and perforated and capped at fifty kilos so the weight of the fruit cannot crush the fruit underneath, and they get stacked in a yard behind a house on the main street while a man walks the row of them looking at what has arrived. Somebody hands you a coffee without asking.
That building is a press house. There are hundreds of them through these villages, because the bunches have to reach a press whole and fast. Most champagne is made from black grapes, and the juice has to come out before the skins colour it. It is also why every grape in the region is picked by hand, and not out of sentiment. The rules require it.
What comes out is measured to the litre. Four thousand kilos of fruit gives at most 2,550, and the first 2,050 are the cuvée, the clean juice that goes into the wine with a name on it. The rest goes elsewhere. That division is made in a shed on a village street at seven in the morning and it decides more than most of what happens afterwards.
By nine you have eaten standing up in somebody's kitchen with the radio on and people coming in and out in wet boots.
The middle of the day is yours, and the answer to what to do with it is underground. The cellars here are cut into chalk, some of them twenty or thirty metres down, some of them dug by the Romans for building stone and only later filled with bottles. It is around ten degrees down there in every season. After a morning in a yard, the cold hits you on the stairs and then becomes the best part of the day.
You eat in a house that evening rather than a restaurant, because during the harvest nobody here goes out. There is far too much food, the bottles on the table have no labels, and at some point somebody who has been up since four falls asleep sitting upright.
This year they are pressing a small crop. Three frost episodes in March and early April took close to forty per cent of the buds, the worst the region has had since 2003, and drought did the rest. A hundred and twenty thousand pickers arrive anyway, and villages of six hundred people double overnight.
Burgundy, at the casse croûte
Somewhere between the tenth and the twentieth of August this year, which could match its earliest start on record.
You are in a stone house in a village between Nuits and Beaune, with shutters that do not quite close and a courtyard where the cars are parked badly. The vines start at the end of the street. You can walk to them in four minutes, and on the way you pass three gates with names on them that you have paid a great deal of money for at one time or another.
At ten in the morning the pickers stop mid row and walk to the end of it, where somebody has laid a board across a plastic crate.
Saucisson, a knife nobody wipes, half a wheel of something, bread torn rather than cut, a jar of mustard with a spoon standing up in it, and two litres of last year's village wine being drunk out of tumblers at ten in the morning. This is the casse croûte. It lasts twenty five minutes. Somebody is telling a story that started yesterday, and then a sentence gets left unfinished and everybody walks back into the rows.
The scale here is domestic, and that is the whole charm of it. The largest grand cru on the Côte de Nuits covers about fifty hectares and has roughly eighty five owners across a hundred and thirty odd parcels, the result of a forced sale in the phylloxera years and a century of inheritance since. So a vineyard whose name you know gets picked by thirty people in a single morning, by families who have come back to the same house for decades and who will be at the same table tonight.
Lunch is at the domaine, outside, twenty five people on trestles, and it takes ninety minutes because it always does.
In the afternoon you stand at the cellar door for the one decision worth watching: whole bunches into the vat, or stems taken off first. Stems give structure, grip and a green note that one producer wants and his neighbour treats as a fault. Same village, same day, same weather, opposite answers. Then somebody opens something old for no particular reason, which happens more in this fortnight than in the rest of the year combined.
Beaune is fifteen minutes away if you want a proper dinner. Most nights you will not want one.
And when the last parcel is in, there is the paulée, the meal the owner puts on for the pickers. It goes until people sing.
The northern Rhône, straight up
The end of August into September.
You come up from Lyon after breakfast, forty minutes, and the valley closes in. Then the right bank of the river simply stands up in front of you: terraces barely wider than the vines they carry, gradients reaching sixty per cent, dry stone walls holding the whole hill together without a gram of cement.
Almost nothing here can be mechanised. Some of the ploughing is done with a cable winch anchored at the top of the slope, dragging the plough uphill while a man walks behind it. The rest is a crawler tractor, a horse, or a pickaxe. The fruit is cut into buckets and carried down on steps built into the walls.
You will walk it, and that is the day. From the road it looks pretty. From the fourth terrace up, with a picker going past you carrying a full load, it looks like something else. Wear the shoes you would wear on a hill, not the ones you would wear to a tasting.
In Côte-Rôtie there is a little Viognier, a white grape, growing among the Syrah and picked on the same day by the same hands. The rules permit up to a fifth and in practice it is rarely more than a twentieth, and the two must ferment together rather than be blended afterwards. Growers will tell you it holds the colour. The published trials are not convinced. Nobody argues about the floral lift, and they have been doing it for a very long time.
At one o'clock a trestle table appears on whichever terrace is wide enough to hold one. Everybody sits.
Afterwards you go down into a cellar at the foot of the slope, which smells of fermenting Syrah, a smell somewhere between blackcurrant and hot iron that stays in your clothes. Dinner is on the river at Condrieu or up in Vienne, and you sleep extremely well, because you climbed a hill.
Bordeaux, the one with nerves in it
Bordeaux picks in stages over five or six weeks, September into October. Dry whites first, around the turn of the month. Merlot from the middle of September. Then Cabernet Sauvignon, which ripens last and needs the extra fortnight, which is why everybody at a Médoc estate spends the second half of September looking at forecasts. One badly timed week of rain on unpicked Cabernet is the difference between a vintage people talk about and one they do not.
You stay on the property, and the tone is unlike anywhere else in this article. Everyone is courteous and nobody is fully present. Phones go face up on tables. A conversation about the garden stops mid sentence because a tractor has come into the yard.
Inside there is a long vibrating belt with people standing on both sides of it. The fruit comes past in a continuous stream and their hands move without stopping, pulling out leaves, stems, anything underripe, at a speed that is difficult to watch for long. Some estates run optical sorters that photograph every berry and blow out the failures. Most do both, machine and then human, because nobody quite trusts the machine on its own.
Lunch at this kind of address is a proper one, at a long table, with the sorting line still audible through a door and somebody leaving between courses to check a tank. Then the weather comes up, as it will at every meal you eat here, and the table divides between the people who want to pick on Thursday and the people who want to wait until Monday.
In the evening you taste out of the vats with a glass thief. It is purple, violent and unfinished, and nobody has any idea yet whether it is any good.
And then it does not stop
In Sauternes they will still be out in October, working the same rows for the third or fourth time, taking individual berries once the rot has done the right thing to them. Three passes is the practical minimum. The best estates go through six or more.
It is the least like the rest of it. No crowd, no trailers, no press house. A few people moving slowly through a vineyard that has already been picked twice, taking one berry at a time, while everybody else has moved on to lunch.
Getting the week right
Growers know a fortnight out whether it will be early or late, and they know for certain about three days beforehand. This year even that has proved optimistic, because the heat keeps changing its mind.
So it is a window rather than a date. You hold a stretch of days, you stay within reach, and somebody calls you.
