Fewer Come to the Harvest Table but Meals Are Still Memorable

MAREUIL-SUR-CHER, France

IT was a harvest day like any other at Clos Roche Blanche vineyards in the Loire Valley. The weather was mild, the sky by turns bright and cloud-dimmed, the grapes dusky and ripe. Flanking the leafy vines, experienced pickers squatted, knees splayed, on moist soil, clipping bunches of gamay into large plastic buckets. Some sang, some complained, some joked, but all moved agilely, clearing row after sticky, grueling row.

I lagged behind, harvesting grapes with the awkward persistence of someone not wanting to look like a wimpy, desk-bound city girl. After four hours, my thigh muscles were molten lead and my hands were inky purple and bleeding where I’d snipped my skin instead of a stem. But I was determined to keep going until lunchtime.

Finally at 12:07, the winery owner, Catherine Roussel, gave the signal to stop. There was a collective sigh of relief. Empty buckets were upturned into improvised stools and cigarettes were lit; bottles of red wine were opened, passed around and quickly drained.

Then something discordant with my pastoral fantasy of a hearty harvest feast occurred. Instead of filing into a picturesque tent for a wine-soaked meal, the pickers filed to their cars and went home for a two-hour break.

It’s a scene that’s becoming more familiar all across the Loire Valley. Over the last decade, the centuries-old tradition of a grape pickers’ midday feast has begun to wither, for a variety of reasons.

One is the prevalence of mechanical pickers, which are replacing people in regions where hand-harvesting is not mandated by law. This means that there are more local workers available to pick for wineries that don’t harvest by machine. And local workers can go home for lunch.

Another reason is cultural. As women become more active in wineries and less tied to the kitchen, and as their mothers grow too old to do all the work themselves, lunch duty has been shunted to caterers, if there is lunch duty at all.

For Ms. Roussel, this shift has been a blessing.

“For years my mother and I had to make lunch for all the grape pickers,” she said as she watched the pickers drive away. “Every day we cooked for more than 20 people. It was too much work.”

The intense workload made her contemplate extreme measures. “I even thought I’d try a mechanical harvester so I wouldn’t have to cook anymore,” she said.

She gave up the machine after a few years, but by that time, expectations had changed. She was free.

Now, each afternoon Ms. Roussel and her winemaker and business partner, Didier Barrouillet, sit down to a smaller yet nonetheless festive meal cooked by Ms. Roussel’s mother, Solange Bonin.

Over the three days that I was there trying to help with (or at least not impede) the harvest, Ms. Bonin served a variety of local harvest specialties. They included a savory pumpkin tart with onions, and tiny green lentils cooked with plump pork sausages. One day, we were presented with an omelet stuffed with tiny mousseron mushrooms that Ms. Roussel gathered in the vineyard, then cooked in browned butter until they were nutty and golden.

At the end of each meal, there was local goat cheese, and, once, baked apples glazed with Ms. Roussel’s homemade blackberry jam. All was accompanied with Clos Roche Blanche’s minerally, fragrant wines, which tasted like the sauvignon blanc and gamay grapes we were picking.

Down the road 20 miles in Les Montils, another winemaker, Thierry Puzelat of Clos du Tue Boeuf winery, cleaves closer to tradition, and every day feeds his flock of pickers — vendangeurs — lunch, prepared by a friend. As has always been the regional custom, this year he secured a quarter of a cow, two freshly killed lambs and dozens of chickens and rabbits to supply the feasts — including the lively party and end-of-harvest feast that almost every winery, including Clos Roche Blanche, looks forward to holding.

But Mr. Puzelat’s reasons for providing the lunches are less culinary than social. “They do it because it gives the team of vendangeurs a sense of solidarity,” said Joe Dressner of Clos du Tue Boeuf’s importer, Louis/Dressner Selections of New York. “That solidarity is important if they are going to work well and do a good job in the vineyards,” he said by e-mail.

Butchering a pig before the harvest and using every bit of it to feed the workers is another longstanding custom that is waning these days, because, as Ms. Roussel remembers, “it was a lot of work during the busiest time of the year.”

This said, she is nostalgic for the rich, flavorful meat of her neighbor’s pigs, which she and her mother used to slowly simmer in their own fat over an open fire into melting rillettes. Although she doesn’t make the rillettes herself anymore, Ms. Bonin still buys them to spread on baguettes for sandwiches. Every day at around 10:15, she packs them into a wicker basket and brings them to the pickers for a midmorning snack, along with some bottles of red wine and strong espresso in a thermos.

And by that time, after picking grapes in the hot sun for over two hours, everyone (and especially me) desperately needed a break.