How an American businessman lost his job and found himself in an old French vineyard | Wine
One night on Friday 24 years ago, Peter Han was sitting at the back of a taxi to Heathrow, without sleeping 48 hours after work.
The American organic wine flowers born from France remember: “My computer is on my lap”, where the spring sunlight lights the deep pink walls in his studies at the old Manor’s house in the Valley of Luer, and its beloved chrome abroad, “and I am making a wide schedule.
“My manager gives me shit because I did not work at work – I promised my French girlfriend after I do not know the number of promises that we disappear in the end of this week – then she calls and start screaming at my face because she knows that I will miss the trip to Paris.”
Moments later, “there was something inside me and went like this” – he holds his right -hand deputy – “Crunch Crunch Crunch”. Challed, unable to breathe, was a 36 -year -old company’s strategy consultant to panic. It was the moment of breaking, a body that says to the mind, enough.
Han continued to work as a financial advisor, and his feeling of Antichrist syndrome “wandering in my face” and there is no idea. After all, he was a Business Officer in Parma. “I had this idea I was a commercial young man, and that this was my way.”
His family left their home in New Jersey when he was four years old. “We have emerged all over the world-Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sydney,” where he was sent to “one of those Saudi schools in all boys-was not cane.” At the age of twenty years, he got a job as a trader on the Sydney Stock Exchange, when there is still a commercial hole, a lot of screaming and a lot of money.
By mid -twenties, he was completely formed in himself that he did not feel at home. “I was one of these international commercial errors,” he says. Ten years later, “a little nihilism, I swept in this world of larger cars, large boats, and private aircraft. I didn’t feel any meaning. I was afraid because, at some point, it is very difficult to fill something else.”
He also felt dismay from the feeling of longing, writing in his new magic book, The angels in the cellar: notes from a French generosity. One of the fans of Prost, with an advertiser of the nineteenth century, realized that he was nostalgia, but this did not feel poetic. It seemed dangerous, felt “anxious”, uprooted, and he did not even know what he was eager.
“What do you really like?” He asked himself in an attempt to find out. “It is a great question, right?” He tells me, he is smiling now after he knew the answer. “I thought, how did life look like where you were where you were living, where your work was your life, where you enjoyed it to the extent that the work did not seem, although it might be difficult, and the place of his case almost every day of your life abroad?”
All this stems from his passion for wine, and he began to take wine lessons in Paris, and now his main workplace, and explore the cellars of wine, work and walk in the generosity of the vineyard. He realized that above all he liked to be on the ground, a feeling of land and soil, and the vineyard returned. Thus, for two years, he returned to the college part -time to study vineyard, grape science and wine making). Here, two smaller organic farmers, Damian and Vennat, who taught him about chrome physiology. Thanks to the guidance and friendship, he decided to search for a small farm organically. It is finally time for a new way of living.
In 2002, he found a four-hectare farm with a small vouvray generosity that no one-only because the 400-year-old house came with him and needs “a lot of work”.
Since then, Peter, 60, was making small organic wine in Le Dow de la MayslriHe lives with his second wife, Juliet, and their 14 -year -old daughter. His elderly child through his first marriage are frequent visitors. Avoid planting machines whenever possible. They are crushed on a 100 -year -old manual printing press and fermented naturally, and his friend Philip brings horses at work instead of tractors even between 60 to 80 vineyards of 80 to 80 years.
One day, Peter and Philip were taking a break under the Judah tree in full pink flowers. Peter ignored his zero phone, before checking his messages. A friend of his “former life” sent some pictures from a commercial lunch in Ritz: Peter Wine in the Wine List (at more than 100 pounds of the bottle), which are chandeliers of the liver, and decorated.
Peter admits a sense of pride for a moment, and perhaps even self-satisfaction-all transit. “What surprised me is that, at some point, I was very excited about all of this, but now, it didn’t make me particularly excited.
“I did not live my life as I did in financing, and in many worlds of companies in which you reach the next level and try to get prizes from your superiors and customers. I have retreated. It was a nice moment but I realized, God, I really don’t care. This was a kind of revelation.”
It is concerned with the social and economic aspect of the wine industry. “Farmers get the short end of the stick,” he says. “The price that the bottle was selling in Ritz or in any three -star Michelin restaurant anywhere in the world is probably 10 times the price it sold for. There is also a certain bitterness to see it,” laughs.
When Peter Philip passed his phone, his head simply shook and smiled and said: “Let’s do the work.”
The physical life of this work has seen Peter’s concern and his compatibility with the land it renews. “I no longer feel that nature is separate from me, and it is the development of humanity in the nineteenth and twentieth century.” Through agriculture and non -mechanical chrome cultivation, he deliberately returned.
“Certainly I don’t want to look like a new teacher in the new era, however Hoomo, the sane Was she wandering around this world for 300,000 years, right? So for about 298,000 of those years we used to live on the ground and from the ground. We were university fishermen and farmers. When you are on your own plane, make deals, or work in Burger King, “he continues, saying:” We lose sight of all of this. “
For him, identifying the place of his land, its harm, and the ecological system inside it, enabled it to be in time – from learning from the past, living useful at the present time and forming the future for others.
“The deer that I saw as it sponsors this morning. Prayer that I found on this position. Insects around me when I kneel in the vineyard, trim, birds – all this seems like a Disney movie. But I am not outside this; I am not outside it.”
The weather can be brutal but Peter tends to every season. “I do not mind if the sky is raining, praising or freezing. You know that when you throw a thunderbolt nature on you – the cold damage, for example, or frost damage – it is not the same when you are not your customer or boss at work, she is not a person,” she is not a person. “
But his relationship with every wine he produces is personal, deeply. He loves them a lot – nothing more, nothing less – what he loves his children. “Many people do not believe me when I say that, but that’s right! I don’t have favorites – children or wine – and I will do anything for all of them.”
It is not customary to be accompanied by a completely comfortable person, a happy person, a person who can die happy – almost a few years ago.
It was outside the jars, chromium spray against fungal diseases using the minimum copper and sulfur levels (less than a third of the amount allowed to grow organic chrome). It was a very slope plot, as it turned 400 kg of the center of gravity.
“I turned very quickly, and I felt that the wheels were losing traction,” Peter recalls. “I felt the jars was walking. I was going. How long did these things continue? A second, half a second?
He records his multiple ideas in the book: “I will die. I want to be with my wife and children.
“I was remarkably calm,” reflects now. “This really surprised me. The only explanation I can think about, that was because I felt my life was somehow. I felt, I do what I want to do, I don’t want to change anything, this is my life.
The angels in the cellar: notes from a French generosity Written by Peter Han is published by Little Toller Books at a price of 20 pounds. Buy a copy of Guardianbookshop.com In 18 pounds
