The Night Pump-Over

Harvest doesn't stop at six.

Fermentation runs on its own clock, and its clock has no interest in yours. So somebody sets an alarm, gets up at two or three, walks down to a cold building, and moves wine from the bottom of a tank to the top of it for twenty minutes.

Then goes back to bed. Then does it again at six.

I've never worked a full harvest. I've been there for pieces of one, which is enough to know the particular quality of a cellar at three in the morning. It's warmer inside than out. It smells of bread with something sharper underneath. The tanks make small noises. Gas escaping. A tick as metal moves.

Nobody talks much. There isn't the energy for it, and there's nothing to say that couldn't wait until light.

What stays with me is that this is happening every night for weeks, in every cellar in the commune, at roughly the same hours, and none of them can see each other doing it. A whole valley awake in the dark, separately.

By the time the wine reaches you it will have spent thirty-eight months ageing because the law says so, and a few more years in somebody's rack because you were sensible. Nothing in the glass will tell you about the alarm at two.

That's the arrangement. Most of what we end up admiring has a two a.m. in it that we never get shown.