Les Vendanges

Each year we watch our grapes grow from hard little green pellets to plump translucent beads of juicy flesh, but…just before we get round to picking them, boof, they’ve gone.  Whether eaten by birds, destroyed by extreme weather or pinched by the neighbours, we’ve never experienced a good ‘vendanges’.  One year we did pick a couple of trays of grapes, juiced them and enjoyed a couple of bottles of ‘jus de la vigne’, but after a couple of barren years, we didn’t have high expectations.

However, a late-September visit to France, combined with warm, fresh temperatures, filled four large boxes with fully-formed ripe-for-the-picking grapes, and they became 14 litres of grape juice, and 13lbs of grape jelly.

Who would believe that grapes like this……………would produce jelly like this?