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Published: October 5th 2009
Le Montagne De Trois Crois
Even I can work that one out!Sunday - Les Joyeux Temps de La Vendange
Mont de Sene
We take a drive out to Mont de Sene, also known as Le Montagne de Trois Crois. Even with my limited French I’m looking out for three crosses on a hill as we are driving along. There are views out in all directions. Nick tells me that sometimes he has been able to see Mont Blanc from here but today it is a little hazy.
We’ve brought a picnic with us - just some bread, cheese and water. Being a Sunday there are a number of families out picnicking too. We feel very underprepared - the typical French family seems to have brought a table cloth and a full silver service with them and are making a big family occasion out of it. Fortunately, though, no-one has considered it necessary to bring any loud music with them.
La Vendange
We stop off next in the village of
Santenay for a coffee and then go for a walk through the vineyards around the village. I can now successfully order coffee using words from just one language (
French!), unfortunately for me I
also seem to have acquired the skill for asking for the bill and paying it.
It’s now the middle of the
vendange, the grape picking season and there are teams of grape pickers in many of the fields. In the area around Beaune all the grapes are picked by hand - this results in higher quality and higher priced wine. The pickers work in teams (Anne is in a team of 26 pickers) working for the minimum wage. In France the minimum wage is €8.80 but everyone will receive that minimum - they don’t have the system we have where a 16 year old is valued less than an 18 year old etc. There is a real mixture of ages in Anne’s team - from 17 through to 64 - although we did see quite a few groups that seemed to be mainly students. I had expected to see more migrant workers but in Anne’s team there were only two workers who were not French. Obviously one team is not a representative sample - but I would have expected to see far more migrant workers.
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Nick James
non-member comment
Belle sene-ry
Impressed that you've managed to make this pop up second on a Google search for 'Mont de Sene'!