These days many blow their own trumpet about biological wine. But few realize the horrors that it brings with it. And that is probably for the best, because the wildlife that strolls around the vineyards eventually ends up in your mouth. Therefore we recommend winelovers with a weak stomach to stop at this point and skip to the next part of the Slurp. Below follows a summing up of what goes on in our vineyard for the core of our heavy-duty wine tigers. Nightmare on Elmstreet.

The terroir. Millions of years ago there was water here, the Atlantic Ocean. So our vines are standing with their feet in the bottom of the sea covered with fossils and feed themselves on fossilized remains of dead fish, ammonoids and other shellfish that have gone extinct long ago.

Children that eat chips and sit on the couch all day, become fat and lazy. Same thing for grapes. That is why we planted grass in between the vines. That way the roots of the vines get competition from the grass. Because of that the vines become stronger and more resistant to decease. And that is really necessary because there’s not much going on around them!

In the beginning of spring that vineyard grass turns in to a river of daisies,

Everything is sucked out of the ground by the vine and pumped through its old and crooked stem to the top. And all those fossil minerals, flowers, herbs, snail houses, dead mice, newly born sparrows, lizard sweat, rabbit droppings and badger poo, span together in thick, purple bunches of grapes.

We really don’t have a wine cellar. Once upon a time they did carve out a cellar in the rocks under our chateau but that one was for the private wine stock of the lord. The vinification and storage of our chateau wine has been taking place in our ‘Chai’, which in the wine dictionary is an above ground cellar, for ages. Understandable, because from a hygienic, transport or bottling point of view a cellar is quite inconvenient. That is why most chateaus do their vinification in a Chai. Nevertheless, stepping into a real wine cellar does fill me with excitement, the level of which can be compared to a birdwatcher laying eyes on a giant condor. Luckily I have been blessed with a friend who owns a wine cellar, so stunning that you never want to leave. So when he asked if I wanted to have a look at his newest purchase I had already said ‘Oui’ before he finished his sentence.

Because one can hardly show up on a wineboers doorspet with a 6 pack in a festive wrapping, I wanted to get a bottle of wine from the local store. To my almost fatal surprise I suddenly see Alain’s wine in the shelf, for 1500 euros a bottle!

Still recovering from the shock i pulled into Alain's driveway a moment later. He is sitting behind his desk making a phone call. As greeting he hands me a key, which looks like it was used to lock up Judas Iscariot, and whispers: 'Go on ahead to the cellar, I'll catch up in a minute!'

Alain’s cellar was carved out in the rocks a few centuries AD by the Romans. Excitedly I wander around the mysterious tunnels. Totally alone in a cellar full of Saint-Émilion Premier Grand Cru Classé 'A'. It's simply mouthwatering. Suddenly I see, in the glimmer of the flickering lights hanging from copper wires which as almost rusted through, that one of the barrels is slightly leaking.

A glas! A glas! My kingdom for a glas!’
This is a unique opportunity, because asking Alain if I can have a taste should be, put lightly, ‘pas polis’. You can’t ask that for a wine the price of which out paces the selling price of gold.

Then Alain appears. Kindly he suggests that, while we wait for the cellar master to seal the leak in the barrel, we taste a glass of Ausone 2009. I only just manage to suppress the urge to jump for joy.

We slurp several lives at once. We can keep this up because we throw all the things we don’t understand or about which we’re not sure what to do with in the lumber room. But this month we’ll have some construction going on. And inevitably we’ll have to separate the junk from the rubbish.