Languedoc Letter/Séamus Martin: The click of the secateurs can be heard throughout the land. In village after village, the local mairies have put up road signs to warn motorists that they should drive carefully.
"Attention Vendanges - soyez prudent" drivers are admonished as little tractors with heavily loaded trailers and huge harvesting machines make their way through narrow streets.
With the exception of the far north and northwest where the climate is unsuitable, France is in the throes of the vendange.
The grapes are being brought in from the great vineyards of Bordeaux and Burgundy, and from the Loire Valley. The harvests are being prepared at the tiny Parisian vineyard at the corner of Rue St Vincent and Rue de Saule in Montmartre as well as in the ocean of vines in Languedoc, the largest wine-producing area on Earth.
All in all, it has been a good year for production, except in Bergerac and Buzet where hailstorms, the great nemesis of the vigneron, have struck.
According to the ministry of agriculture and fisheries, France will this year produce about 55 million hectolitres (more than 1.2 billion gallons) of wine. That sounds like good news, especially down here in Languedoc where one neighbour broke all records last week when his grapes were found to have a potential alcohol content of 16.3 per cent.
Such figures are not unknown from the Primitivo grape in the intense heat and sunshine of Puglia in the heel of the Italian boot, but in these parts they are unprecedented.
The news, however, is not good at all. The stainless steel tanks in many wineries were already full before this year's harvest began. There are bleak rumours that much of the 2005 vintage will, by decree from Paris, be distilled into industrial alcohol at a disastrous price to growers.
France's wine industry has been in crisis for some time and the 2005 harvest serves only to make things worse. Large investments have transformed wine production from a pretty basic rural occupation into a vast modern industry.
Hardly anyone treads grapes anymore, or so I thought. The job is done by huge modern presses. Only a few bands of pickers are to be seen in our commune nowadays. They have been replaced by the great harvesting machines. Many of these investments will now be at risk if large parts of the harvest are destined for industry.
One tiny production of white Grenache, however, has been saved, entirely by accident, from this ignominy. My postage-stamp vineyard was in the process of being harvested when nature struck with awesome ferocity.
A red alert was declared. Schools were closed and children sent home. Anxious eyes scanned the skies for the vertical development of clouds that signals the arrival of storms.
And the storms arrived with apocalyptic ferocity. All trains out of Beziers and Montpellier were cancelled. "Nîmes Drowned" screamed the banner headline in the Midi Libre above a photograph of unfortunate Nîmois making their way home through waist-high water.
In the countryside, the land became sodden. The great harvesting machines and the little tractors could not manage to access the vineyards.
Our small band of Irish harvesters, undeterred by mere boggy ground, set to work in the post-storm sunshine on the white Grenache, until the news came through that the Cave Co-operative had shut its doors and was not accepting grapes for a week at least as a result of the "intempéries".
The récolte of "Monsieur Marteng", as I am known in the heavily accented French of the region, was in jeopardy. The grapes would rot if something was not done soon.
But help was at hand, or more literally, at foot. Grapes were loaded into buckets and basins and, since the cave's great presses were out of bounds, the process of treading grapes by milk-white, untanned Irish feet began.
A friend in Co Clare had e-mailed the advice, which we thankfully ignored, that "real Irishmen keep their socks on when treading grapes".
Local assistance was more practical. Monsieur Comps, of Domaine Comps, whose wonderful AOC Saint Chinian has won the gold medal from the ministry and is now on the menu in the National Assembly in Paris as a "coup de coeur", supplied a fine storage barrel. Monsieur Garin (pronounced locally as Gareng) of Domaine Pech de Saint Paul helped get the fermentation started.
As I write, 250 litres continue to bubble away nicely in the garage of a local house. A carboy of the same vintage is fermenting alongside Monsieur Comps's barrel as a top-up to replenish anything that overflows from the main body as the sugar from the grapes turns inexorably to alcohol.
Bottles and corks will later be sought if our novice winemaking efforts are successful. All that is now needed is a name for the wine. At the moment, Chateau La Feet is a strong favourite.