A trip to the Distillery.

That's what I did yesterday. You see, the French government requires anyone producing wine to "give" them a certain percentage of their harvest, be it in marc (the skins, pips, and various fermented yellow jackets and other things), in lees (the solid grape matter that settles at the bottom of the tank after fermentation) or in wine if you don't have enough of the first two to fill the requirement. All of these things are picked up by your local distillery to be distilled into industrial alcohol. Think of it as an extra tax on wineries. Well, given our chaotic state just before harvest, we didn't have time to figure out who to contact and how to go about giving our grapes skins etc. to the distillery so we took our marc back to the vineyards and composted it. That is a shame, because now we will almost certainly end up having to give them some of our wine. Some, meaning about 200 liters, which is more than I care to think about! So, back to the distillery... In late November we racked our wines -- transferred them from one tank to another in order to "take it off the lees" or remove the solid grape matter that had settled to the bottom of the tank. This turns out to be a very thick purple sludge. We stored it in a big blue plastic barrel, put some SO2 on the top and then promptly forgot about it. I called the nearest distillery located about a half an hour away from here to find out how it all works. They said that first I had to become of member and buy shares - which cost a whopping 3 euros per share, fill out a bunch of paper work and then promise to deliver to them 4 hecto-liters (400 liters) of wine, which is about 4% of our production. The lees that we recovered from racking all of the wine turned out to be about 2 hectoliters, so we were half-way there! Not so bad since we had missed out on the skins etc. So, I drive up there in my little blue putt-putt 1978 Renault, the poor little thing barely made it with 200 kilos of wine in the back! I couldn't believe it when I arrived, the place reminded my of something out of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." The distillery is a huge operation with great big smoke stacks spewing out white steam. There were tons and tons of wine by-product, skins, seeds, stems etc in great big heaps like at the dump. Big bull-dozer type machines would come to scoop up large quantities to be heated boiled and re-boiled resulting in the precious alcohol that the French government seems so interested in. There I was, in my little tiny car being passed by huge trucks with cisterns full of purple gunk, vying for a place to empty my little barrel full of goo. What a crazy experience!