Finally getting warmer! A walk under cloudy skies with occasional drizzle. At a walker’s pace, changes to the landscape are slow. Low rolling hills continue, and still lots of water. Here is a lock on a canal built alongside the Aisne river - a smaller canal than the new Seine-Europe-Nord one will be!
Still lots of colza. An individual plant doesn’t seem to have perfume, but a whole field gives off a scent somewhere in between floral and soft ripe cheese.
And then all of a sudden today, on about the last quarter of the walk, signs for champagne producers appeared.
And then the vines! Acres of them.
Huge fields like this, covering entire hill sides, will contain vines owned by many different “maisons de champagne”. What a lot of work they represent. Each vine gets trimmed and carefully attached to wires. The vines are not all identical, nor are the ways of training them. Some had buds, others none yet. Some were from very old roots, others newer.
I read in a magazine that more than 100,000 seasonal workers come to this region in the fall to pick the grapes. That is something I did as a student in France, but in the Bordeaux region. One day one of the pickers in my group got shot by a bird hunter - luckily not a bad injury, but extraordinarily careless!
Hermonville where I have a room for the night is a village largely built from stone. Like everywhere in this region, largely rebuilt after the war. And again riddled with tunnels where the stone was carved out of the ground.
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