Water into wine

Aunty B came to our 4th of July party on Friday, and as usual we put her up overnight and S drove her back home on Saturday. She mentioned that it was Narbonne's annual Fête de la Véraison today, which she always goes to, the highlight being when the drinking fountain outside the town hall starts running with red wine. Véraison is the moment when the grapes start changing colour, and its an excuse for a wine-oriented festival. We've heard about it often, but never been, and it seemed a good opportunity to rectify our error.

If it was windy at home, it was blowing a gale in Narbonne. We parked a long way out of town and walked through a neighbourhood we'd never explored before. An interesting mixture of little single-storey labourers' cottages built in the 1920s or 1930s, rather grander art deco houses, and a few small modern blocks of flats. I nabbed a couple of great doors: from old, needs TLC to well kept relatively new.

That wasn't the goal of the day though. We arrived in the place de l'Hôtel de Ville to the sight of no unusual activity for what was supposed to be a popular fête. B and a couple of friends were braving the wind at a cafe table though, so we joined them for a drink. A PA system was broadcasting announcements, hard to hear over the piped music, from which we eventually gathered that for reasons of wind, the wine confréries were instead assembling outside the covered market and processing from there. "Here in fifteen minutes," it claimed. "That'll be half an hour then," one of B's friends accurately said.

When we'd finished our drinks we left them with their second coffees and walked down to the Halles to see what was happening. We just caught the procession setting off with the inevitable banda after the inevitable pause apéro, so we followed them. To our surprise they marched straight past the place de l'Hôtel de Ville and continued up to the archbishop's garden next to the cathedral. Here, after ten minutes' milling around grasping at flapping papers and flying hats and introducing the many visiting confréries, they performed the annual miracle of transforming water into wine. This is stage 1; stage 2 in the extra. Personally I would not drink the brilliant red liquid issuing from the amphora. There are a few more photos right from here.

The wine fountain in the square was sadly cancelled; not clear why, but it was possibly due to water restrictions. We returned to the square to find B still sitting at the same table, with a different group of friends, still waiting for the procession to arrive. They were not that miffed when they discovered they'd missed it. "Look”, said B proudly, lifting her glass, "I've turned my coffee into wine!"

We didn't stay, but headed back to the packed covered market to buy some lunch from the very good North African food stall -- a delicious tagine -- and then home. We had bought lunch because unlike last year, when S spent the morning hawking leftover food round the village, we had almost no leftovers from Friday. Virtually everything got eaten except for some desserts and a few bits of cheese. We'll be nibbling on more of that this evening.