CHARENTE AND DORDOGNE INFORMATION

• Both Charente and Dordogne vineyard owners pleased with the total of their harvest which is now in vats and barrels in the transformation into Cognac and wine. One of our local neighbours who is bent double with osteoporosis at the age of eighty something, has his "juice" in a huge barrel in his private barn - c`est .normale.! Whilst his wife was out doing the local school lunch he decided to climb a ladder and look into the top of the barrel to see how it was fermenting and he leant so far over the top he fell straight in! Hours later a local delivery man came to the house, there was no reply and as he was getting back into his van he heard a faint cry for help. Going over the lane to the adjacent barn he found Monsieur, hauled him out, and saved his life. A week later his dear wife gave us a five litre plastic barrel of the wine. We decided he might have had a stressful time in the barrel and dumped it!!
  
  
• Farmers complaining that the ground is too dry but equally they have not yet got in all their corn....so, some happier than others. Nevertheless the hunting season has started and the "shooters" are out watching for anything that moves.
  
  
• October is normally a mushroom collecting month, especially "cèpes" but this year minimal, some saying that Spring was too dry, others that a north wind was too cold. Who knows! The normal saying is that if it snows early in the year it will be a great season for funghi. Not this year so far....…..
  
  
• The walnuts have been picked off the ground and laid out ceremoniously on drying racks in barns where they will rest until February. The nightmare of cracking them to take to an old-fashioned huilierie lives on. To make walnut oil which is worth its weight in gold, take the weight of the walnuts, divide by two once shelled and that should be the weight of the kernals, then divide by two again and that is the amount of oil that should be produced, this time in litres. So, in essence, 12 kilos of nuts = 6 kilos of kernals = 3 litres of oil and a kitchen covered in walnut shells!
  
  
• Talk of the "Truffle season" starting early November and as "Cèpes" above, no-one quite sure whether there will be any....or not. We wait and see and are out ourselves with local truffle-hunting pig on the 1st December. Watch this space
  
  
• Oddities in street fashion. On sunny days the tourists are out and about in late summer clothing and eating outdoors whereas the older, rural French believe that October is for winter clothing, so beside the former people are overcoat-clad/scarf-attired others. We went water-skiing up the River Charente the first week in November and telling our French neighbours they shuddered in horror.