Recipes From The French Wine Harvest. Vintage Feasts From The Vineyards

This feast of sustaining soups, hearty stews, ample roasts and rich desserts takes us behind the scenes at the French Wine harvest and provides a taste of real French family cooking. Recipes from the French Wine Harvest describes the harvest cooking in France's great wine-growing areas - Burgundy, Rhône, Bordeaux, Loire, Champagne and Alsace - and meets the families and individuals behind some of the most famous wine labels. Easy to prepare, nourishing and delicious these dishes are the world's most cheering comfort food - perfect alter a hard day at work, whether in the fields or at the office ! Throughout the wine regions of France, the annual harvest gathers people of all ages and backgrounds to pick the grapes. It's hard and hungry work and, traditionally, the vineyard owner and family feed their temporary army of workers the sort of hearty food (and drink) they need to be out among the vines from dawn to dusk ! The recipes for these harvest feasts have often been in the family for generations and, region by region, represent an unbroken link with the strong traditions of rural French family cooking. Here are salads and red wine stews from Provence, grills from Gascony, tarts from Touraine, Burgundian potato dishes, soup from Champagne : simply prepared and economical food for entertaining in the best tradition of French country cooking. The recipes, originally designed to feed the many, have been carefully reworked to feed a table of six to eight diners. In her researches, the author visited some of France's greatest chateaux and domaines - La Fleur Pétrus and Lynch-Bages, Vieux Télégraphe, Guigal and Domaine Tempier, Michel Lafarge and Domaine Raveneau, Louis Roederer and Zind-Humbrecht - as well as lesser known but equally long-established concerns, to meet the families and individuals behind the wine labels. Beautifully illustrated throughout with images of the vineyards as the grapes were being picked and in the homes where the feasts were being prepared, Recipes from the French Wine Harvest is a gastronomic treat to be appreciated by every enthusiast for the food and wines of France.