“If a man dies young, the people will say he drank himself to death. But an old man who lives a long life, the people will say he is preserved by the alcohol.” -Ewald
I left New York City in the spring.
My girlfriend was employed in restaurants and, like thousands of others, she was quickly laid off when the pandemic hit, shutting down the restaurant world as we knew it. Unlike thousands of others, she was on a work visa and so this change in employment status also meant she had to leave the country, and quickly. We had been living together for over five years; yet from one day to the next, everything changed.
I left soon after. The prospect of weathering the pandemic alone in a small apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, without my partner of a half-decade, was too much. Because of our years living together, the Canadian government considered us married by common law. I was allowed into the country, though even with signed papers I was turned away twice at the airports in New York. The third time was the charm.
While the summer was spent in Canada, working remotely (like thousands of others), we decided if we could, we’d try and do harvest in Germany. The trip from Ontario to Germany was not quite as complicated as the exodus from New York City to Ontario – we were only turned away from the airport once!
We landed in Germany early on the 9th of September; we began picking the next day. The first grapes were plucked from the vines to kickoff harvest 2020 at Stein/Lardot on Thursday, September 10th – Pinot Gris and Müller-Thurgau.
It has to be said, though the repetition of these sorts of lines with the mirroring inaction is dispiriting to say the least: 2020 is the earliest harvest ever on record. Climate change is becoming more and more omnipresent.
We started at sunrise in the Piesporter Falkenberg, an incredibly steep and great vineyard with young-vine Pinot Gris on grey/quartz slate for Phillip Lardot. It’s funny, this site is only a few meters from Keller’s hallowed Schubertslay. The grapes will macerate on the skins and go into Lardot’s skin-fermented Pinot Gris.
In the afternoon, we picked a very special Müller-Thurgau parcel in Sankt Aldegunder Himmelreich. This parcel has been farmed for nearly half a century by a man named Ewald. He is 83 years old, spry and fit, still working the vineyards and tending to his plots in Sankt Aldegund. I can only hope we will all have as good of health as he does at that age. There are so many stories and anecdotes that Ewald has to share. He’s an amazing person.
This is the beginning; I’ll try and report each week on what harvest feels like, what life feels like, in the Mosel, in September in this most strange year, for harvest.