A slow day in the cellar. I went to the Cafe de la Place for a couple of pressions at lunch and consequently sleepy. Sat on an upturned bucket in the sunshine, my shirtsleeves and my trousers rolled up above my boots, the sun beating down on the green vines, the empty road, the tractors and stacked palettes, the air still, the earth breezing quietly on a late summer's afternoon...

These words are my own - I have picked them from the vine with bleeding fingers; scraped, torn and prised them from their containers, macerated the fruit of language and dumped the stalks. I have hidden them, thick and muddy, in dark places, tended and remounted them, given them time and nourishment to feed upon themselves until they become clear, mature and fortified. I hold them in glass and steel, in great receptacles on wood and concrete, reinforced with will, clarified and analysed them, to the point where they are ready; prepare for distribution. Then, and only then, will I release them, encapsulated, bottled and boxed, fined for delectation. Taste these endeavours, swirl them across the tongue, savour the smells of long hours of work, hope and trepidation - consume, and enjoy.

This morning (is there any other?), as I came over the hill from Aigues-Vives and descended onto the plain, the land was swathed in mist, that receded as I approached. The tower of Beaufort protruded as from a cloud, the turbines on the hill refused to turn, and smoke hung motionless above the chimneys of Olonzac. The windows of the boulangerie were misted too - the workers, stripped to the waist, dripped sweat on the hot, new bread fresh from the ovens, breathing still more still clouds into the frosted morning air.

No fruit today - only the relentless ring of remontages, pumping the last day's juice over today's rememberings. I take a pitchfork and swing the stalks of flyblown, rotten greens over my shoulder.

My hands are hardening as my soul dissolves. A gauche: two thick cuts on the soft knuckle of my thumb, swelling with pus; a thin, deep, wine-drenched chink in the pad. More scrapes across the fingers and a round, red bruise on the palm where the pump attempted to suckle my hand. A droit: blisters. Black, dried blood at the base of my little finger, speckled divots on the third, black scratches across the base of the first and second. The whole stained, encrusted; another cut on the side of the first finger of my right hand is lined with black, fading to red and yellow in the depths of my flesh, the thumb unscathed. I have dried berries in my hair and sulphur burns on my forearms. Several of my toes are torn and bleeding. Each day I rub wood splinters and acid into my wounds, excavating the dead and reinvigorating the new with pain. I roll tobacco in ICV adhesive labels, swig wine straight from the steel tanks, pressing my lips to the tap. The juice runs down my chin and I rub it away with wine-stained hands. The fermenting grapes bubble with Carbon Dioxide, burning the lungs and throat, smarting the eyes, falling unconscious into vats of boiling fruit... the fermentation pushes the exhausted pulp to the top of the tanks, where it dries, cracks and produces ethyl acetate, nail-polish remover - the scent of beauty products produced by decay. My hand covers the hose, spraying juice over the stinking cap, the liquid jetting through my fingers, errant berries like little turds squeezing through the sphincter of my clenched fist... Outside, the drains blocked, foul-smelling green liquid bubbles up between the rows of bush-vines, fertilising the grapes with our own waste, ensuring next year's harvest on the effluent of this. My cigarette flares and I cough, wrack and return my own expectorant, my blood fermenting in my veins; cold, wet and hungry, shivering in the moonlit dawn and noonday sun, seeing, once again, the plain afire, against the Black Mountains, expectant, clouds heavy with rain, the winds, the Cesse and the Mistral, holding back, waiting to dive down upon the land; writing out the land as it disappears, framed in the filthy windscreen, beneath my wheel. Fingernails, undermined with dirt, ringed with filth, all parts of me, lungs stained black and stomach caked with must, the very bones smoked and soaked in wine... boiled in acid, and dissolved... Ethyl acetate draws out les moucherons, the vinegar flies, specks of life held together by swiftly beating, microscopic wings, gathered in clouds over the cuves.