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Not sure if you can see. It’s looking crumbs probably about two maybe 3 ft deep at the moment. And a week ago this was empty. It looked like a basically a hard packed road. Um but we’ve had so much rain. It’s all coming off the fields down here. It’s Well, if you were playing poo sticks, it would be a great bridge for it. stop and take a quick pick to add to my straa for the day and then we will rock on with our ride. It’s a map of all that artistry. Let’s crack on with taking a look around and seeing what’s happening in the world. So, we’re back in the vines. And as I was saying earlier to myself because I forgot to turn the camera on. This time of year, we’ve finished the harvest. My van as they call it here in France. The vines are starting to die back. You can see all the leaves are going brown. They’ll all fall off very very soon. And then in I don’t know 8 to 10 weeks the the vine workers will arrive and they’ll start to trim all of the branches back and just leave the two strongest branches. And that means that when the vines start to grow again next year, they put all of their effort into those two strongest shoots. And so they work hard. They’re not wasting effort into shoots and branches that aren’t going to be productive. And the grapes are basically plumper, juicier, and have more sugar in them, which is what we need. The main crop around here is a grape called inlong, which was originally from Italy. Um, I don’t know if it was bought here legitimately or stolen back in the day. My money’s on stolen. But, um, it grows really, really well on chalky soil, which is what we have an awful lot here. All the land here is on limestone, so it grows exceptionally well. It makes awful wine. Um, it’s utterly disgusting. Um, it’s also awful for jams and jellies, too. We’ve tried that. It’s also utterly disgusting. But if you ferment it and then distill it and then distill it again, you get a beautiful clear liquid called odiv, water of life in its literal translation. And that odiv is clear and around 70 to 75% proof. Um, you kind of wouldn’t want to drink it. You’d probably go blind. But that is then what the cognac blenders take and they blend it with odiv from all of the farms around here and they make the blend that they’re known for. So um Martell, Hennessy, Hine, um all of those that you’ve heard of. All their cognacs are blends. Every year is different. So the master cognac blender does it all by taste and takes 25 years apprenticeship to get there. So they start training the new guy up 25 years before current person retires. And as I say, it’s all done by taste. And somehow they managed to make it taste the same year after year after year despite the fact that the harvest changes, the ode changes, dogs bark at you. Um, everything changes yet everything stays the same. It’s genuinely quite impressive. Not sure how they do that. But there you go. But anyway, so once it’s done, that’s that’s the way they turn very sour grapes here into cognac. They’re distilled basically in the same way that you would distill any spirit or hooch. If you boil it up, it condenses. It gets rid of the water. And as it as it condenses, the alcohol remains. And um there you go. That’s today’s lesson in cognac. And then the way it changes from this clear odivi to the dark brown liquid that you know as cognac is down to the tannins in the oak barrels. So there is various blends vs um and then exo and they all had minimum years. So VS is 3 years, VSOP 5 years, XO 10 years minimum maturing in the barrels and they take on all the barrels are oak and they take on the oak tannins from the barrels and that’s where not just the color but the taste and the maturity of cognac comes from. So it turns from that clear liquid into this brown liquid that it starts quite a light brown and then the exos depending what type you get as I say the minimum is 10 years but some are 25 30 years and they got really dark trickly brown um chocolatey notes to them as well. Um, if you buy uh Hennessy’s Napoleon, I think it is, that’s matured minimum of 100 years in the barrel. So, anything that’s harvested now at best our grandchildren will be able to drink it if it’s going to be Napoleon. Um, that’s about 2 and a half grand a bottle. So, considerably out of my price range, that’s for sure. And unless I win the lottery, I’m never going to be able to try it. Up in front of us here, you can see these are the vats that they put grapes in when they’ve just been picked. They mature them two weeks in there, the grape juice. So, this farm has loads of new stainless steel ones on my left, and there’s about another 8 to 10 on the right here. Absolutely huge, vast amounts of liquid they produce here. And um yeah, all goes to make cognac.