Not a usual discussion about photography this time. As this post is out of schedule, I decided to cover something more in line with A day in the life. I’m taking you on a walk around my village.
As I mentioned before, I normally walk on my own after each meal, often in the house because of the weather and to be available for work just in case an emergency arises. But at the weekend, I sometimes go for a walk with my wife instead if the weather is nice. As spring has arrived (the geese and cranes are back and the birds are starting to be noisy in the morning), we went for a Sunday walk after lunch.
For this walk, I decided to travel light so I took my Sony RX100III with us. It’s set to shoot black and white because that’s what I like at the moment. One of things I’m trying to do is learn to look for details. Coming from landscape photography where you want to include as much as possible, concentrating on details is very difficult for me. I need to practice.
It’s traditional for most houses to be surrounded by high walls. The locals aren’t known for being welcoming of people they don’t know. They consider people from the next village, 3km away, as strangers to be weary of. Our house for example, has a large courtyard entirely walled, and the house itself turns its back to the road so that it only exposes a huge 10m tall wall with no opening to the outside world.
We live on the edge of a tiny village. About 97 inhabitants and in the middle of nowhere. As soon as we leave the house, we find ourselves on country lanes.
There has been a lot of rain this winter. It was one of the wettest January and February on record for the country in general. A lot of the tracks have the scars.
I have to say I had never seen that we had thistles around here.
The area is heavily orientated toward vineyards as we live in the Cognac producing area of the country (the city of Cognac is about 20 minutes away). So most of our walk is between fields and fields of Cognac vines. Interesting fact: the production is limited to a set number of ranks. This is to avoid overproduction that killed the industry in the early 20th century. So each plot of land is only allowed to have a certain density of vines and if there are too many, they have to be taken out. The authorities check (in theory, I’ve never seen them do it).
Some of the plants are fairly old and as they require a very specific trimming, they tend to have a special T-like shape. These have already been trimmed this year (it normally happens after Christmas and is all done by hand). First, the previous year’s branches are removed, except 2, then about a month later these 2 branches are brought down and attached to the bottom wires. The wires above will be used to attach the new growth during spring.
All the plants are grafts of French varieties on top phylloxera-resistant American bases. This is due to the late 19th century epidemics of phylloxera (an insect native from the US) that completely decimated the wine industry in France (it was was first spotted in 1863 in France and has now spread to most of the planet). Instead of being neat discrete plants like now, they used to be massive bushes, very dense and several meters tall, that were barely looked after. But these were sensitive to phylloxera and have therefore disappeared from the fields.
I thought the posts and wires art the end of these ranks were creating an interesting triangular shape.
Few fields are fenced. Theft isn’t an issue (also the grapes used for Cognac are absolutely disgusting to eat; they’re extremely bitter and even the animals avoid them). This one is, I suspect to protect it from deers that would eat those trees.
I couldn’t resist taking a photo of our shadows as we were walking down the track.
A fork in the track. At that point we need to decide whether to take the short way home, or take the slightly longer one. As it’s nice and warm in the sun, we opt for the longer one on the left. I liked the sickle shape.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s spring. And some of the trees and hedges have started to have flowers.
As we walk along the tracks, we see deer hoof prints in the mud. These are fresh.
Later on, we see their owners running across a field. My wee camera doesn’t have quite enough of reach to capture them well. Its lens is roughly equivalent to a 24-70mm.
As we come back into the village via the North, we pass the more industrial part of it where the giant vats and the chemicals are stored (I’m guessing they’re chemicals used to spray the vines in the winter to protect them from fungus and insects). Every other house in the village has those giant vats where alcohol or grape juice are temporary stored before they’re moved to barrels.
Here we are. Back at the house. Thanks for taking that tour with us.
#Photography #Opinion #IMayBeWrong #ADayInTheLife #Countryside #Vines #Vineyards