Joel's Blog: Harvest Wine

Joel looks back at a trip to Anjou - a trip that led a special Chenin that now sits on our shelves...

In the harvest of 2022 myself and two friends were fortunate to go out to Anjou and spend two weeks harvesting with Mai & Kenji Hodgson, wine producers who have been working in Anjou for over ten years. They work on just over four hectares of land, mostly Chenin Blanc, but with a little Grolleau Noir & Cabernet Franc too. Their wines have become sought after for their power, purity and ability to age. They are two of the most fascinating people to talk wine with - a classical pallet, but a deep love for unsulfured wines.

Harvest involves picking grapes of course, we picked a lot of Chenin Blanc, but it also involves a lot of cleaning, especially when working without additives. Cleaning the press, cellar, barrels, crates, bins for fruit… you have to be meticulous. Generally we’d start around 7.30 or 8, meet the team at the cellar (a mix of mostly french people, a lot who had worked locally before) and head up together to whichever vineyard was ready for that day. After a few hours picking, we would always stop for casse-croûte at around 10.30am. Coffee, baguette, cheese, pate… A welcome and beautiful break before another couple of hours harvesting. 

Lunch was generally at a community kitchen set up for harvest by a team of mostly retired villagers. A bunch of winemakers signed up for it and would pay an incredibly affordable price for a good lunch cooked by these generous folk. Simple, but delicious french food, a lamb stew, sausage with lentils, moules frites and then beer and wine from the winemakers shared around.

After this recharge, the afternoon was back picking grapes until the job was done. Usually 4 or 5pm, by which time some of the team would have gone back to the cellar to start processing fruit, through their beautiful mechanical press. As we were staying just two doors down from the Hodgson’s house, just a couple of minutes walk from the cellar, we would invariably stay on a bit longer, to help finish the process and set up the pumps to the tanks where fermentation would start. In this busy time, the days were often long. 

We would retire for dinner at their house, sometimes cooking it for whoever was left, a time to reflect on the day and for Kenji to delve into his cellar where we got to taste some special bottles, the best invariably being old vintages of the Hodgson wines, as old as 2014. 

And repeat… for two weeks, which never felt like a chore, or even work. 

As our time in Anjou was coming to an end Kenji pulled me aside and said he wanted to give us a little something more for our time. Would we like to make our own barrel of Chenin? Not something you say no too. 

Kenji let us use a barrel gifted to them by their good friend and fellow winemaker Richard Leroy. We filled a barrel with juice from grapes we'd picked from two of the vineyards that make up some of what goes into their Faia cuvee. That was in the morning we had to depart, so we left with a view to coming back to bottle next spring, should the wine finish fermentation and become dry.

After getting the OK from Kenji that the wine was ready to bottle, we headed back the next May to bottle it by hand, with no additions of course, with a label created from a picture taken on the trip of a chair behind their cellar that offered rest after a long day picking fruit.  

After giving the wine a long rest post bottling, we have decided that now is the time to release this wine, one of less than 300 produced. We think it's tasting great already, but will be cellaring a good few bottles for a number of years, partly to remember those sunny harvest days and partly because we tasted some incredible old vintages of Hodgson Chenin on that trip. If this wine gets even halfway too, will be very much worth the wait.

All the best!

Pick up a bottle of Harvest 22 from Wright’s.