Drop in jobless leaving Beaujolais vineyards short of labourers

Michel Deflache's family has been making wine since the 16th century, and he started picking grapes when he was three.

Listening to the 41-year-old director of the Union Interprofessionnelle des Vins de Beaujolais in Villefranche-sur-Saone makes you want to jump on a train and head for Beaujolais to alleviate the looming grape-picker shortage.

Elsewhere in France, grape-pickers are deployed in groups of up to 100, and work alongside harvesting machines. Not in Beaujolais, where vineyards are planted on hillsides in smaller parcels.

"Beaujolais grapes are picked by teams of 20," Mr Deflache says. "The weather is fine in September, and there's a real mix of people and cultures, from the very young to the retired, a lot of foreign students. There's a good atmosphere - joy, even. A huge number of marriages result from the grape harvest. One of my best friends married an Alsace girl who came to pick in his vineyard.

"I only have 4 1/2 hectares," Mr Deflache continues. "I harvest them myself in one weekend, with a half-dozen mates. It's like a big party. On the second day your back is killing you, but then you forget about it. C'est hyper-sympa. "

Beaujolais and Champagne (where grapes are harvested in October) are the only French wine-growing regions which use no harvesting machines, because the decrees establishing their appellation controlee stipulate that grapes be put whole, not crushed, into vats. "Other regions practice de-stemming," Mr Deflache explains.

"We put the whole grape bunch in, stem and all. That's what gives Beaujolais wines their light, fruity flavour."

Regulations require all grape-pickers to be lodged and fed three meals for each eight-hour day, though some prefer to camp out to earn more money. Most winegrowers serve a machon - from the French verb for chewing - in mid-morning, consisting of bread, cheese and sausage.

The Beaujolais harvest begins next week and continues through the third week of September. Bernard Defaux of the ANPE (the French government employment agency) in Belleville-sur-Saone had eight frantic wine-growers in his office when I called him. It takes 35,000 people to pick all the grapes in Beaujolais, and the ANPE is still 3,000 short.

Unemployment has dropped dramatically in France over the past two years, to 9.6 per cent. Bureaucracy and a deduction from dole payments are a disincentive for French jobless to take seasonal work like grape harvesting.

Students form the biggest single contingent of pickers, but classes in technical colleges have been moved forward to early September.

"French young people can easily get temporary work through Manpower or Adecco," Mr Defaux said. "They have no travel costs, and they can earn up to 400 francs a day. The wine harvest is more romantic, but they only net about 230 francs a day."

Mr Defaux says he gets about 100 Irish grape-pickers every year. It's too late to send a written application, but if you show up at the Belleville-sur-Saone or Villefranche train stations just north of Lyons with a valid passport, he promises you'll have work within a day, with food and lodging, for eight to 10 days.

Both train stations have mobile homes marked "ANPE Service Vendanges" in the parking lots, open from 7.45 a.m. until 7.15 in the evening.

Although the labour shortage is particularly severe this year, the drinkers of 160 million bottles of Beaujolais produced annually need not fear. "Wine-growers like to have their pickers lined up in advance," Mr Deflache says. "The harvest is the culmination of the year's work. Somehow we always manage."

There are four categories of Beaujolais: Nouveau, regular Beaujolais, Beaujolais-Villages and the 10 crus that include Morgon, Brouilly and Moulina-Vent.

All come from the Gamay grape, which matures more quickly than others. "Here in Beaujolais we always drank our wine earlier. It just wasn't called Nouveau," Mr Deflache says. "Originally we drank it in Villefranche. In the 19th century we began sending it to Paris. Then in the late 1960s there was a marketing campaign all over France. In the 1970s it reached the US, Britain and the rest of Europe."

A third of the grapes picked over the next month will ferment for four days in giant vats, be pressed, bottled and delivered in a marathon race on the third Thursday of November. Ireland, Mr Deflache says, is one European country where Beaujolais Nouveau hasn't caught on.

"The Irish buy a lot of Beaujolais crus, but very little Beaujolais Nouveau. It's our most atypical market." In most of Europe Beaujolais is its own competitor: German consumers buy the cheap Nouveau rather than finer Morgon or Brouilly.

Mr Deflache says a cru is to be savoured. But, he admits, Beaujolais Nouveau is best quickly drunk - and quickly forgotten.