Working with local field assistants on the island—“the best botanists ever”—Sheldrake carried out a painstaking census of the soil in a series of plots, sequencing the DNA of hundreds of root samples taken both from green plants and the Voyria. This allowed him to determine which species of fungi were connecting which plants, and thereby to make an unprecedentedly detailed map of the jungle’s social network. Sheldrake got out his phone and pulled up an image of the map on his screen. The intricacy of relation it represented reminded me of attempts I had seen to map the global Internet: a firework display of meshing lines and colors.
We stopped to eat in a dry part of the forest, on rising ground amid old pines. Sheldrake had brought two mangoes and a spinach tart. He drank beer, I drank water, and the pine roots snaked and interlaced around us. He told me about the home laboratory he runs on his kitchen table, and the microbrewery he runs in his garden shed. He has brewed mead from honey, as well as cider from the apples of Newton’s apple tree, at Trinity College, Cambridge (batch name: Gravity), and from the apples of Darwin’s orchard at Down House (batch name: Evolution).
Later in the day we came to a lake, where a hard-packed mud bank sloped down into shallow water. Carp burped in the shadows. Moorhen bickered. The lake bed belched gas bubbles. Sheldrake and I sat facing the setting sun, and he explained how, for each formal scientific paper he published about mycorrhizae, he planned also to publish the paper’s “dark twin,” in which he would describe the “messy network of crazy things that underlies every piece of cool, clean science, but that you aren’t usually allowed to see—the fortunate accidents of fieldwork, the tangential serendipitous observation that sets off a thought train, the boredom, the chance encounters.” Two dog-walkers interrupted our conversation, looking hopeful. “Do you know where the visitors’ center is?” one asked. “We’re lost.” “No, we’re lost too,” I said, happily. We traded best guesses, exchanging what little information we had, and they wandered off.
ANN MAH
Volunteering for the Harvest
FROM The New York Times
As a wine lover with an active imagination, I’d always pictured the French wine harvest as a cross between Sideways and I Love Lucy, a sun-drenched bacchanal featuring boozy lunches en plein air, rosy-cheeked peasants crushing fruit with their bare feet, and a bit of insouciant grape picking.
But on my first morning of a week spent working in a Champagne vineyard, the clouds hung low and leaden, an ominous dark mass biding its time. I wore rubber boots, bought not thirty minutes earlier, the smallest pair at the garden supply center, and still three sizes too big.
I wielded a pair of secateurs (one-handed pruning clippers), their orange handles flashing through dew-drenched vine leaves as I hunted for the correct stem to cut. The foliage rustled, crisp as newspaper, and my sweater cuffs, peeping from beneath the sleeves of a borrowed rain slicker, became itchy shackles of sodden wool.
Finally, my shears snipped the right stem, and a bunch of grapes tumbled into my outstretched hand. As I reached for the next cluster, a gentle patter began to echo through the vineyard; it turned into an urgent beat before I realized what it was: rain. Ahead of me were rows of vines stretched as far as I could see, lushly verdant, laden with fruit.
I had come to the rolling slopes of Champagne to participate in the age-old tradition of les vendanges, the annual wine harvest that takes place at summer’s end. From grape picking, to pressing, to juice fermentation, the harvest—which lasts from two to three weeks—generates myriad extra tasks, and most wineries rely heavily on temporary labor, both paid and unpaid.
In exchange for long days of toil, they often offer meals, wine, and lodging, making this an ideal vacation for the budget traveler. And, as I found when I volunteered last September with AR Lenoble—a family-owned Champagne house in Damery, about five miles northwest of Epernay—the camaraderie, breathtaking vineyard views, and rare glimpse of French culture can almost make the backaches disappear. The free-flowing Champagne doesn’t hurt either.
Before the quaffs of Champagne, though, I had to do some legwork. In recent years, more French wineries have begun harvesting by machine, which is cheaper and faster, though it offers inconsistent quality. Winemakers that still harvest by hand—predominantly in the premier regions like Champagne, Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Châteauneuf-du-Pape—are regulated by rigid French labor laws, particularly during the harvest season, with fines levied to discourage black market employment. Volunteers fall into a gray area, but some wineries are reluctant to take the risk.
On the other hand, there exists a timeless tradition of volunteer grape harvesting—as ancient, perhaps, as wine itself—necessitated by the sheer volume of urgent activity required to collect ripe cultivated grapes and initiate supervised fermentation. Many properties, especially the small and family-owned, still welcome volunteers in exchange for food and lodging, but they follow a key principle: discretion.
“Volunteer help is clearly the way it’s always been done in France,” said Caroline Jones, the winemaker at Domaine Rouge-Bleu, a small Côtes du Rhône winery that she owns with her husband, Thomas Bertrand. “For us, it’s a question of quality. We always want to hand-harvest our grapes, but the cost of a team of pickers is prohibitive for us. By using volunteers, we get a group of people who are excited to be here, and they become personally involved.”
Several months ago, I had emailed three small French wineries, offering my (free) services. To my surprise, all of them responded with an invitation—one winery for a day, the other two for the entire harvest.
In the end, I chose the type of wine I like the best. And that is how I found myself picking pinot meunier grapes amid a minor tempest in Champagne.
Earlier that morning, around eight o’clock, I had hitched a ride from the winery to this patch of vines above Damery. As I clambered down from the farm van, Hervé Blondel, one of the vineyard managers, handed me a bucket and a pair of garden shears and set me to work picking fruit without much further advice. The art to harvesting grapes, I soon realized, is to know exactly where to clip so that the bunch falls free.
I spent a lot of time hunting for those elusive key stems, which hide camouflaged in thick clusters of grape leaves, kneeling, stooping, and bending my body into regrettable contortions, snipping aimlessly until a cluster dropped into my free hand (or, just as often, onto the ground). The grapes went into a bucket that grew heavy as I crept down the row.
Around me, the other vendangeurs (a family of eight from Nord-Pas-de-Calais) worked in pairs, facing each other from opposite sides of the vine, a vantage point that allowed them to seize every cluster with efficiency. They descended upon the fruit like locusts, the sound of their secateurs as sharp as snapping jaws.
There are, I discovered, many small kindnesses in the vineyard. Like the plastic cup of coffee offered to me by the team, a rejuvenating sugary boost against the damp. Or the way a heavy bucket of grapes gets passed over the vines, moving from hand to hand, to save you from lugging it to the wheelbarrow at the end of the row.
Or the thoughtfulness of Mr. Blondel, who, when he saw me struggling to tackle an unwieldy thicket of vines, picked up a pair of secateurs and faced me on the other side. “It’s sad to pick grapes alone,” he said. For a few moments we clipped companionably while chatting about viticulture and the general indolence of French youth (the latter, I suspected, a topic as eternal as the vendange).
Lenoble’s vineyards are scattered throughout the region in small parcels—a patch of chardonnay here, a swath of pinot noir there, each terroir adding a distinct note to the wine’s character.
The heart of the operation remains the winery, which is tucked into the village of Damery, beside the church and the school. The sprawling eighteenth-century building—once the family home of Lenoble’s current owners, siblings Anne and Antoine Malassagne—includes offices, a sleek and modern cuverie, which holds the fermentation vats, and a web of clammy cellars where the temperature never
rises above fifty-five degrees.
Upstairs, the rambling, empty rooms became, during the harvest, a dormitory. One section housed four burly young Polish men who had driven from Gdansk to operate the antediluvian grape presses (both they and the family from Nord-Pas-de-Calais were paid for their labor); another, separate area was for me, the only woman.
I had been warned that the lodgings would be spartan. At the end of that first day in the vines, however, even my room’s simple furnishings seemed enticing, the narrow bed and coat rack draped in pools of late-afternoon sunshine. At the opposite end of the empty apartment, a bathroom sported pink tiles dating to about 1963, but I noticed only the hot water in the shower.
Late that night, however, entombed in a deep rural silence, my imagination began to cartwheel. Could my bed, which bore the hallmarks of midcentury hospital furniture, have come from an insane asylum? Had I brushed the key in my door, or did its chain start swinging by itself? Did I have enough courage to walk through the endless dark rooms, with their creaking floorboards and peeling wallpaper, to reach the bathroom?
Outside, the clanging church bells announced every quarter-hour until midnight. I decided to sleep with the lights on.
Mornings came early, heralded first by the neighboring church’s bells at six and then by the insistent thwack of the pressoirs, or grape presses. Their deafening rhythm formed the background noise of my stay, with the old-fashioned machinery operating from dawn to dusk, and a current of precious grape juice coursing like a springtime creek.
The Polish team muscled loads of grapes into the three wooden presses and used pitchforks to fluff the crushed fruit between each cycle, a task called the retrousse, which requires brute strength and helps extract as much juice as possible.
One afternoon, José Hernandez, the pressoir manager, showed me how to operate the machines. I ran between them increasing or decreasing the pressure at the appropriate moment, all while hosing, mopping, and sweeping the floors. I discovered that working inside the winery had certain advantages: less kneeling and stooping, less annoyance from rain—and unlimited glasses of fresh grape juice, crisp and bright.
Harvest days were long, but they included an extended break for that venerable French institution: lunch. Every afternoon, we gathered around the long kitchen table, a motley crew of Polish men who spoke no French, Frenchmen who spoke no Polish, and me.
I had dreamed of the slow-simmered dishes I read about in cookbooks like Recipes from the French Wine Harvest, but as its author, Rosi Hanson, later told me, “More families, especially wives and daughters, work outside the home now, and they’re not available to do the cooking.” Still, our meals, provided by a local caterer, offered four hearty courses with dishes like grated carrot salad and veal stew, followed by cheese and dessert.
Given the table’s language barrier, conversation was often hesitant. But some things need no translation—like the day I heated a tray of couscous in the oven and everything burst into flames. Smoke billowed and everyone ran to the kitchen, panicked. I quickly doused the fire with a glass of water, and Antoine, the winery owner, couldn’t have been kinder about my mistake.
One evening, the Polish guys and I sat after dinner and drank the house Champagne, glass after glass poured from the wine refrigerator in the corner of the kitchen. In halting English, they told me about their children and, as they warmed to the language, waxed enthusiastic about the foods they missed from home.
“Winemaking seems a lot like cooking,” I said to Franck Michaud, the head vigneron, or winemaker, the day I assisted him in the cuverie. We had just finished preparing a fermentation solution, adding warm water, yeast, plus a good shot of juice, and allowing the mixture to proof, or foam—just like breadmaking.
Under Mr. Michaud’s tutelage, I stirred up a batch of malolactic bacteria, tenderly allowing the frozen sachets to defrost, before mixing them with tepid water and packets of powdered nutrients. I learned how to measure the juice’s density using a thermometer and bobbing hydrometer to determine the amount of sugar needed for chaptalization (a process that increases the wine’s final alcohol content).
I cleaned towering steel cuves (vats), inserting my upper body inside the reception vat, aiming a high-powered hose, and spraying the interior (and myself) with fierce jets of water. I climbed a ladder to the top of a fermentation tank and agitated the young red wine within, pushing the floating grape skins back beneath the surface; it smelled warm and festive, faintly reminiscent of mulling spices, and left me splashed in crimson droplets.
Mr. Michaud’s work as a winemaker, I realized, relied on hoses and industrial pumps. There was always some kind of liquid on the flow, from the press to a cuve, or the removal of residue to the waste tank. He bustled about the cuverie, moving hoses from one receptacle to another, chatting with me over one shoulder (we talked a lot about the pigs that he butchers annually) while always fretting about where he would store the vast quantities of fresh juice that continued to arrive from the pressoir.
In the midst of his flurried activity, I often feared I was underfoot: a hindrance who needed instruction, rather than a helping hand. But awkward moments are part of the volunteer experience. Patience, good humor, and resourcefulness are helpful traits to have on hand.
Before I arrived in Champagne, I had wondered: could long days of physical labor feel at all relaxing?
The answer, I think, came on my last afternoon of grape harvesting, when the clouds lightened and the sun finally appeared, creating a sudden hothouse warmth. The other vendangeurs and I peeled off our outer layers, draping raincoats and sweaters on trellis posts, lifting our faces to the streaky rays of light that had nourished the very plants surrounding us, and encouraged them to bud, flower, and fruit. My cheeks turned pink, and my hands—which were constantly touching the red grapes—grew black, stained with sticky tannins that would prove impossible to scrub from my fingernails.
As I worked, I fell into an almost meditative state, admiring the bright flash of a ladybug moving across a green leaf, the soft violet of clustered pinot meunier grapes, the faint striated pattern of vineyard rows running toward the village below, the crumble underfoot of the region’s cherished chalky soil. Picking grapes requires no particular skills or training, only a measure of agility. This work was the inverse of my daily deskbound grind: it taxed my body and left my mind free.
“Do you mind if I join you?” It was an older woman, the one the team addressed as “Ma mère.” As we harvested together, we talked about her grandchildren, and, this being France, her favorite things to cook. “Layer a baking dish with sliced potatoes, onions, crème fraîche, some mussels and scallops,” she said. “Put in the oven and bake for thirty minutes. I make it at Christmas. It goes well with Champagne.” We clipped together in silence for a few minutes. “Maybe you will cook it and think of me,” she said.
I never learned her name. But she gave me the best kind of souvenir.
ALEXIS OKEOWO
The Away Team
FROM The New Yorker
Around eleven o’clock on the night of October 10, 2015, Samson Arefaine learned that he had been selected to play on the national soccer team of Eritrea, a sliver of a nation in the Horn of Africa. For two months, he had been in a training camp in the capital, Asmara, with thirty-three other men, vying for ten open spots on the Red Sea Camels. Now the team was due to fly to Botswana in less than two hours, to play in a World Cup qualifying match. Arefaine needed to pack quickly, so he ran to his room, in a house that team officials had arranged for players to use during the camp. The house had no electricity, and he struggled to see in the dark, but he managed to throw some shirts, shorts, and sandals into a bag. On the way to the airport, he called his parents and told them the exciting news.
At twenty-six, Arefaine is lean and wiry, with bright-copper skin, tight-cropped curls, and a narrow face with a faint beard. On the team, he was known for being outspoken and funny, a reliable source of jokes and stories, and also as sensitive a
nd watchful. “He knows how to read faces,” one teammate said. Though he played on the defensive line, at right back, he was the fastest member of the team, and he often rushed forward to score unexpected goals. His teammates described him as one of Eritrea’s best players.
When Arefaine boarded the plane, he had never been outside the country. For Eritreans, this is not unusual: Eritrea is one of the few nations that require an exit visa. An isolated, secretive state of some 4 million people, it has been under emergency rule since 1998. The United Nations has accused its military and its government—including the president, a former rebel leader named Isaias Afewerki—of crimes against humanity toward their own people, including indefinite conscription, arbitrary arrests and torture, and mass surveillance. “There are no civil liberties, there is no freedom of speech, there is no freedom to organize,” Adane Ghebremeskel Tekie, an activist with the Eritrean Movement for Democracy and Human Rights, said. “The regime can do anything it wants.” According to the UN, as many as 5,000 people flee the country every month, making it one of the world’s largest sources of refugees. Last year, 3,800 people drowned while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea; many of them were Eritreans.
Despite its self-imposed isolation, Eritrea wants to be seen as a normal country, and international sporting competitions are a way to present a good face to the world. Eritrean athletes—runners, cyclists, and soccer players—are sometimes permitted to compete in other countries. The Red Sea Camels are a particular source of pride; Eritrea is no less soccer-mad than Italy or Brazil. But, embarrassingly for the government, members of the national soccer team have repeatedly defected after games abroad: Angola in 2007, Kenya in 2009, Uganda in 2012.
After the last defection, the government disbanded the team. Then, in the fall of 2015, it came up with a solution. It would form a team mostly of Eritrean athletes who lived abroad and held dual nationality, and therefore had no incentive to defect. The remaining positions could be filled with loyal athletes living in Eritrea. “They have to trust you,” Yohannes Sium, one of the chosen local players, said. “Trust was the main thing, not skill.”
The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 22
