A Good Year

Writers block is a total bastard for any author. You start with a brilliant idea for a story and somewhere along the line it no longer seems brilliant. The flow stops, the ideas dry up, and all that you are left with are scattered stagnant pools of words.

I guess my biggest problem is that I try to come up with different scenarios for each of my stories. Finding a new and different one is getting increasingly difficult. I have tried on several occasions to use different story devices, some work, some don't, some that I thought worked well enough were crucified by my readers, while others that I thought long and hard about before posting were praised. I have been tempted on a number of occasions to come up with a successful formula and stick to it, but if I wanted to do that I would be writing for a publisher like Mills and Boon who use the same formula for just about every story that they publish, change the name and occupation of the protagonists, put your mind into neutral and produce soppy romances, boring, but making shit loads of money.

This was the dilemma facing me one morning some time ago. I had my usual light bulb moment in the early hours, a story had formed. It was complete, it had a beginning, a middle and an end. My characters were well formed in my mind, who they were, what they did and why, I even had names for them all. Sometimes these light bulbs were turned on by a single thought, or even a comment made to me at some time in my past that had resurfaced in my memory. Sometimes there was a beginning and nothing else, sometimes and ending only, whatever the catalyst, in my mind, at that moment, the finished product was a clear vision.

My motivation to get out of bed that morning and head for my study, to crank up my computer and begin, was tempered by the fact that this was the middle of a particularly cold winter, and my bed was warm and my study cold.

By the time that I'd consumed my breakfast and taken my dogs for their early morning stroll and toilet break on the beach (don't worry, I pick up after them), I'd just about forgotten everything that was so clear a couple of hours earlier. Try as I might it just wasn't happening for me. A rough draft of the storyline might help, but no, I remembered the beginning and the ending, but the stuff in the middle eluded me. Develop the characters and see whether that helps, but apart from the name that I'd assigned to my hero, the other names failed to materialise.

The process of actually writing a story is as varied as the thought process that kicks it off. There are times, such as this morning when it's cold and miserable outside and I'm not able to do the things that I had planned, when I find that I can set aside blocks of time for the sole purpose of writing. If the mind is in gear, and the story is fresh in my mind, it can flow as fast as I can type, sometimes faster, which leads to more than a few typos, and my output is prodigious, other times I can find it difficult to achieve anything of value.

Nothing for it but to save what little I have and file it, along with several other false starts, in the vain hope that inspiration would return.

Okay, what I have for this story so far comes from two different sources, both connected with the wine industry here in Australia, in particular the McLaren Vale district of South Australia. The first concerns aspects of the region. My main character is Jenny Blaylock, a young girl recently graduated from Willunga High School and in her gap year before beginning her wine making studies at Roseworthy College (part of Adelaide University). Willunga High has wine making as part of its curriculum, and the students produce wine each year. She is the daughter of a second generation wine making family, although her family have been growing grapes in the district for over a hundred years. Her father Greg is also a viticulturist, and the product that they produce is entirely their responsibility, from the vineyard to the bottle. This then is the background for this story.

The other source is also connected to the wine industry. On a visit to the Coonawarra region in the south east of South Australia, I was speaking with a young French winemaker. "Why are you here in Australia making wine?" I asked her.

"Because here you have freedom." She said. "You can do things that we are not able to do back in France,"

And this sums up the industry here, we are not bound by tradition, we have had to find ways of overcoming the variable factors that impact on the industry, from climate and weather to government policies such as the wine with-holding tax, that has forced a quantum shift in production techniques, to the ever-changing tastes of the consumers. We are driven by the consumer rather than dictating what the consumer should drink.

So it is, two sources, the first a love of wine, in particular, red wine, to be specific McLaren Vale Shiraz, and the second a comment, that have led to a story based on them both:

*****

A GOOD YEAR

"Why are you picking these grapes now?" I spat the grape onto the ground in front of me.

"What do you mean why are we picking them now? We always begin the harvest at this time." His name was Pierre, this was the vineyard of his family's Chateau, and he was in charge of the harvesting of the grapes.

"But they are not fully ripe, too acidic, and to make really good wine you have to pick them when they are fully ripe and the sugar content is at its peak." I spoke from experience, having grown up with viticulture and winemaking. My name is Jenny Blaylock and I am spending my gap year in France, gaining experience in traditional winemaking before I start my Oenology course at the University of Adelaide's Roseworthy campus, where my father had trained, before he took over the family vineyards and winery.

The wine world has at last acknowledged the status of Roseworthy in producing winemakers who are instrumental in changing the way wine is produced and my father has taken it a step further in applying a new technology to the vineyards.

Up until recently it had been a holiday. With my friends, Susie and Meg, I had arrived in London six months ago and we had done most of the tourist things, drank a little too much too often than was good for us, watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, took in a couple of West End shows for the cultural side of it, and off to Paris on the train for some serious shopping and partying.

After a week in Paris, Susie and Meg had decided that they would never learn French well enough to stay there for very long, and were prepared to head back to London when we met them. We heard the English accents first and then met Timothy, Nigel and Harry, three banking types in Paris for a weekend of debauchery. They invited us to join them, Susie and Meg were all for it, but I wasn't so sure, but I went along for the ride so to speak.

We found ourselves in Nigel's hotel room, Susie and Meg were right off their faces and it wasn't long before their clothes were scattered all over the floor and they were being mauled by all three guys. "Come on Jenny, don't be such a wimp." Meg had spat out a cock long enough to issue the invite. She had another cock jammed into her pussy and was obviously having a good time, as for me this sort of thing, waking up in the morning with a monster hangover and cum all over you, wasn't my idea of fun. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against sex, in fact I enjoy it, but on my terms and one thing that I do not enjoy is to have too much to drink and lose control of the situation. Another thing I hate is having to fight off some drunken slob who's intent on fucking me regardless of what I think.

Harry made a half hearted attempt at getting me to join them, if you can call groping me between the legs an attempt, no finesse at all, but I declined and he went back to Meg's mouth. At some ungodly hour in the morning I woke and felt someone grab my legs and pull them apart while another pair of hands tore my panties aside and fingers pushed roughly into my pussy. "Get the fuck off me!"

"Come on, you know you want it, you Aussie girls are all the same, you might protest at first, but in the end you want it so bad." He was naked and, while his cock wasn't fully hard, he was about to shove it into me. I managed to get my leg free from whoever was holding it and I brought my knee up into his groin as hard as I could. "Fucking hell!" he cried between sobs, "How could you let her do that?" He rolled off me clutching himself.

"You others will be in for the same treatment if you try anything." I gathered my gear and left.

Susie and Meg staggered into our room mid afternoon looking like death stoked up. "What happened to you? We woke up this morning and the boys said something about Harry having to hold an ice pack to his balls because of you."

"They tried to rape me." I didn't want to elaborate further.

"We were having a good time."

"You two were dead to the world and they were still up for action, I think they were on speed or something, so they thought that they would fuck me while I was asleep. Unfortunately for Harry I woke up and kneed him. If I could have done the same to all of them I would have."

"Yeah well, when we and they eventually came to, they shoved us out into the hall and chucked our clothes out after us, we had to get dressed in the hallway. Do you realise how busy those hotels are? There were people everywhere thinking that we were sluts." She realised what she had said. "Which I suppose we were."

A couple of days later they met a couple of Spanish guys and left me in Paris to follow them to Spain, which left me to implement my plan to travel to the wine regions and find work in the vineyards. There was little to do in the actual vineyards until the harvest but I was able to find work in the cellars as the vignerons prepared for the harvest, and this was how I found myself here in Chateau Rombault in the Cote De Rhone region of France. I had helped prepare the presses for the crush, the vats for fermentation and the barrels for aging, and now I was walking through the vines with Pierre.

"What do you know of winemaking?" He seemed offended at my criticism of his tradition, I was being challenged to prove that I wasn't just another backpacker working my way through Europe as a grape picker. I had only just started in this vineyard so I guess he could be forgiven for his scepticism.

"My father is a viticulturist, and a vigneron, and has been producing award winning wines for as long as I can remember, he even has a couple of Intervin gold medals to his name." That should impress him.

"My family has been making wines here for centuries, long before they even had grapes in Australia."

"And I bet you have been making wines the same way all of that time. When everything works for you your wines will be good, not great, just good, and when things are not perfect you produce piss de chat, vinegar."

"If you are so knowledgeable what would you do?"

"By the taste of that grape I would say that it is about 10 Baume and you need it to be closer to 12 before you pick it. I would wait for two or three weeks before I picked these grapes."

"But if we wait it might rain and spoil the grapes."

"How old are these vines?"

"Two, maybe three, hundred years."

"And do you irrigate them?"

"No."

"Then you have nothing to worry about."

"I think maybe you should speak to my father, he is the vigneron, and he gives the orders." Pierre had come to the conclusion that he was never going to win this argument and would be happy to pass me on to someone with a greater knowledge.

And so I found myself sitting in the cool of the cellars of Chateau Rombault talking to Pierre's father. He would have been around fifty years old and had that leathery face of a man who spent most of his life under the hot sun. "Pierre tells me that you disagree with our methods."

"Yes Sir, I do."

"What experience do you have that allows you to comment, have you made wine yourself?"

"Yes, in fact I have. My father allowed me to make wine for the past two years from the vineyard that he planted the year that I was born."

"Pah! The grapes are far too young to produce good wine, the vines must be at least one hundred years old."

"Not so. These vines are deep rooted and do not require irrigation, they have been heavily pruned so that all of their energy is in the fruit and not in the vine. If you wish to try my wine I have a bottle of it in my luggage."

The expression on both of their faces when I came back with the bottle was one of polite condescension. They would try it before telling me it was garbage. I pulled the cork from the bottle. "I see that you still use the cork, I thought that all of the wines from Australia come in screw top bottles."

This is where this story ground to a halt. I could't decide whether to continue with the romance, or to give it context with a background into the wine industry, because wine was central to the story. After looking at the story title for months as I scrolled through my saved files, the story line began to develop, but not as originally conceived. I chose the latter course, mainly because it gave more grounding to the main characters.

"Not all. The problem with the corks is that the inside of the bottle neck is not perfectly cylindrical, and the cork doesn't always seal properly allowing the wine to spoil, we used to lose between ten and twelve percent of our wines from spoilage. There are two solutions to this problem, the first is to use screw caps and the other is to source better bottles. My father found a bottle maker who is able to produce bottles with close to perfect inside necks, so we still use corks." I poured a small amount into each of the three glasses that sat on the bench. The older man raised his glass to his nose and sniffed the wine, a puzzled look came over his face. He took a sip of the wine and swirled it around his mouth, the look remained. He picked up the bottle and read the back label. 'This Shiraz is produced from a small parcel of vines in our McLaren Vale vineyard that was planted in 1983 using a revolutionary new viticulture technique. The grapes were picked when fully ripe and the sugars had reached their peak. The juice was fermented on the skins in open vats that have a system to circulate the juice under the must to control the rate of fermentation. The juice is then extracted using a traditional basket press before being placed in controlled temperature stainless steel vats to complete fermentation for 2 to 3 months. It was then placed in year old French oak casks to age for 18 months, then a further 12 months in new American oak before bottling. The wine was bottle aged for a further 12 months before release.' The label was signed 'Jennifer Blaylock, Winemaker'.

"You made this wine?"

"Yes. My father acted as consultant in that, if I had a problem he gave me advice, but I did all the work myself."

"This wine is from grapes less than twenty-five years old, impossible!"

"Not only is it possible but it is true. Tell me what do you think?"

"It is good, very good." He picked up the bottle and filled all three glasses. We drank in silence.

"Could it be that this young girl from the other side of the world can teach you something of winemaking?" Pierre asked.

His father ignored the comment. "You mentioned that your father used a new technique in the vineyard that produced this wine, what is that?"

"About thirty years ago there was a storm with heavy rain and my grandfather noticed that the grapes on the old vines were not as affected as those on the young drip irrigated vines, which were badly affected, and the berries began to burst before they could be picked. He lost a large percentage of his crop and that got him thinking, so he had some core samples taken from next to the main trunk of both the new and old vines. From those samples he found that the main roots of the old vines were very deep into the water table, and they had very few surface roots so the rain didn't go into the vines, at least not until after harvest. The younger vines, because they had been drip irrigated, had a root system that was close to the surface, and they were affected by the rain almost immediately. He found that they are also more susceptible to the hot surface temperatures of the soil that we experience in the summer, sometimes as high as 45 degrees and the berries would dry up and not produce as much juice."

"My father thought about this problem and worked on the principle that new vines should be deep rooted so that the roots were in the water table and not at the surface like traditionally planted vines. If the roots went directly into a water supply there would be no need for irrigation. It took a while, and much experimentation, but finally a solution was found."

"The vines for the new vineyard were propagated in long bio-degradable tubes and the roots were encouraged to travel at least a metre and a half to find water. When first propogated, he created a false water table some 20 centimetres below the surface. As the roots grew down, he raised the tube to encourage the roots to follow the water table. The vines were two years old before they were ready to plant and the roots were hanging out the bottom of the tubes. You see, the soil in the vineyard is a layer of heavy clay over limestone, it is in and under this limestone that the water sits, so what he did was to bore down into the water table for each vine tube to sit in. Most of the rain in McLaren Vale is winter rain and that is when the vines are dormant, so they have no need for surface roots. The roots went into the water table and the tube eventually degraded into the soil. The other benefit of this technique is that the water that is pumped through the drippers comes from a bore that has a meter on it and we have to pay for water usage, while the water that the roots absorb from the water table cannot be measured, so it cost us nothing."

"We got our first pickable crop four years after the vines were planted, and the juice was blended with other juice because it wasn't ready to stand on its own. Father wouldn't allow me to make wine purely from that vineyard until the vines were fifteen years old. Because the vines were planted the year that I was born, he decided that I should be given the opportunity, if I wanted it, to make the wine from it. I wanted that opportunity, and what you have here is the result of that first vintage. What do you think of it?"

"Your wine is good, it is different from ours, there doesn't seem to be very much tannin in it."

"That is the Australian way with wines, they are fruit driven, the berries de-stemmed so the fermentation is on skin only. I didn't want the oak influence to be intrusive, which is why only year old casks are used for the initial maturation, and then into new oak to soften the palate. The oak influence is softer, more subtle, it is the fruit that is important, why would you grow good grapes just to kill the flavours with tannins?"

"But the tannins are important in the aging process."

"Too much tannin results in wines that are dominated by it, they are thin and there is no fruit flavour to them. Everything about the wines that we, and most Australian winemakers produce, is that it all begins in the vineyard. The vines are monitored to ensure that they have water when it is needed although this is less important with our deep rooted vines, these are dry grown and not irrigated, so water is there at the time when the new growth is happening and after the berry set, they have all the water that they need. The grapes are picked when the sugar is at the level that we want for the wine that we produce, the grapes for this wine are hand picked to ensure that the berries are not damaged before they are crushed. Because of the uncontrolled nature of the wild yeast, the fermentation is controlled by killing all of the wild yeast before crushing, and adding a controlled amount of yeast to achieve the right balance. It is all about balance, the wine is allowed just enough time on oak to balance it before it is bottled. Because this is a premium wine we allow an extra year of bottle age before it is released, although it could be drunk a year earlier. By controlling the process in this way, the Australian wine industry has gained a reputation for producing consistently very good wines year after year, whether the weather is favourable or not."