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 Next year, if wine critics praise the legs on Louis Latour's 2006 vintage Pinot Noir, I'm going to take it as a personal compliment. After all, I spent part of this year's harvest thigh-deep in thousand-liter vats of the stuff.
France's annual grape harvest, or vendange, usually takes place in September and October. Vintners across the country hire an army of temporary workers to harvest and process the grapes during the labor-intensive first stage of wine making.
Picking grapes in Burgundy, the heart of French wine country, sounds like a bucolic way to make a back-to-school buck. But, as I found out during a two-day stint at the prestigious winery and vineyard, snipping, sorting and stomping grapes is not for the faint of heart.
DAY ONE: HARVESTING
 I'd always heard most harvesters were college students from around Europe eager to earn a wad of fast cash. But the team at Louis Latour is a mixed crowd that also includes retirees, wine freaks, housewives and the unemployed.
At sunrise, about 100 of us pack into vans that shuttle us through rows of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vines. The team leaders provide us a bucket and a pair of deceptively sharp garden shears, and we fan out, each picker tackling a row.
The newly risen sun bathes the vineyards in light as delicate as pink champagne, and the birds begin their morning chorus. But it's backbreaking work. We crouch to snip the bunches of grapes that dangle, heavy and sweet, at the base of the vines, then stand and reach over the vine to harvest the grapes on the other side.
The repetitive motions lull me into an almost trancelike state.
But a searing pain jolts me out of my reveries. In addition to a bunch of grapes, I've just snipped my own hand, slicing a perfect v-shape into my thumb.
"Beginner's luck," the pickers cackle, as one of them rubs stinging grape juice into my wound — to disinfect it, I'm told.
Less than half an hour later, I cut myself again, this time nearly lobbing off the tip of my ring finger. The supervisor frowns at my incompetence and scurries off to find me a pair of gloves.
INVENTIVE ACCESSORIES
 Some of the vendange veterans have invented devices to take the pain out of picking.
The most creative invention is Ahmed Kassimon's modified milkmaid's stool. Strapped to his upper thighs, the single-legged stool sticks out from his behind like a tail when he stands. Aesthetic concerns aside, it works. By the afternoon, the 22-year-old law student is the only one whose back isn't shaped like a candy cane.
We pickers fill our buckets and pass them to the carriers, the burly, barrel-chested men who lug the grapes down to the waiting trucks that whisk them back to the winery.
Being a carrier is the hardest job in the harvest, the pickers tell me. One look at Antonio, a strapping Portuguese man, convinces me they're right: sweat streams down his tomato-red face after just one run to the truck. By the day's end, he will have made hundreds of trips.
Just when it looks like Antonio is about to keel over, the supervisors announce the casse-croute, or snack time. We swoop like vultures onto the outdoors buffet of bread, cheese, sausage, coffee and bottles of table wine.
I serve myself a paper cup full of Pinot, my first of the day. It's 9:13 a.m.
"A TABLE"
 Meals are the unquestionable highpoint of the harvesters' day.
The excitement is palpable when, at noon sharp, we abandon our shears and buckets and crowd into the communal dining hall for a four-course lunch. Then it's back to the fields, for another six or so hours before the 2,000-plus calorie dinner, complete with as much wine as we can chug.
After dinner, the exhausted, tipsy harvesters hit the hay.
I had hoped to stay in their quarters but was told by Louis Latour management that the harvesters' dorms "would not be appropriate for a journalist," so I checked into a local hotel.
When a harvester sneaks me into one of the dorms to check it out, I am expecting the worst. But the quarters are respectable, with a row of narrow, iron-frame beds with woolen blankets, dressers and a picture window overlooking the vineyards.
Men stay in one dorm while women share another. Bathrooms are communal and, again, not bad.
By vendange standards, Louis Latour's digs are deluxe. Many French wineries don't offer accommodations and harvesters there camp out in tents for the two-week duration of the vendange.
The harvesters' pay is not high. At Louis Latour, pickers earn ?8.27 (US$10.50) an hour, while carriers make just ?1.00 (US$1.27) more than that. But it's the time that harvesters put in — about 10 to 12 hours per day — that makes the vendange lucrative work.
DAY TWO: STOMPING
 My back aching from picking, I decide to try my feet at stomping, or pigage, as the age-old method is known in French. Despite warnings that I will "not be so much stomping grapes as swimming in them," I have visions of splashing around in knee-high barrels with exploding grapes underfoot.
One look at Louis Latour's 19th-century cuverie, or fermenting room, dispels any such daydreams. For one thing, the vats are enormous: more then 6.5 feet wide and nearly 10 feet deep. Clearly, there will be no playful splashing here.
Also, I won't actually be crushing the grapes: they've already been machine slit and pressed before they hit the vats. My job is to mix up the juice at the bottom of the barrel with the grape seeds and skins that float to the top. It is this densely packed layer of seeds and skins, known as the cap, that will give red wine its color.
Most wineries have mechanized this process, but the tradition-conscious Latour label still prefers the manual method.
Denis Fetzmann, the head of winemaking at Louis Latour, gives me a pair of threadbare shorts, a harness that resembles a medieval torture device and a lecture on stomping safety. Pigage, it turns out, is the most dangerous job in the wine business.
If you don't sink to the bottom of the barrel and drown, you risk suffocation by invisible toxic fumes. Carbonic gas, a byproduct of the fermentation process, accumulates on top of the vats. One sniff will knock you out, and a couple of deep breaths is enough to kill you.
For that reason, stompers always work in pairs. If one partner passes out, the other can fish him or her out using a strap attached to the harness.
Armed with that disturbing knowledge, I cinch my harness. Extra tight.
THESE FEET ARE MADE FOR STOMPIN'
"Take your shoes off and hop on in," Fetzmann tells me.
Where's the antiseptic foot bath? Where's the podiatric inspection to make sure we stompers are athlete's foot and planter's wart-free? Where's the water, to rinse our dusty soles?
"That's not necessary because the alcohol kills everything," he responds, and I toss hygiene worries to the wind and plunge my bare feet into a vat.
Some caps are denser than others. In my first vat, I can walk around on the cap without denting it and have to hop insistently on a single spot to open up a hole.
The cap on my second vat is thin, and I'm in nearly to my waist before I'm able to grab hold of the edge and extract myself from the wine — which, at more than 30 degrees Celsius, feels like bath water. (Fermentation heats up the liquid, turning the vats into enormous, grape-juice Jacuzzis.)
When the caps are too thin to support our weight, my partner and I break them up using tools that looks like a giant's toilet plunger. This is perhaps even more dangerous than getting in the vats because our heads are closer to the gas-covered surface.
As I plunge, I take an inadvertent sniff and nearly fall off my ladder. My partner helps me out of the cuverie and into the fresh air.
Stomping, I decide, is overrated. I'll stick to picking, where just my extremities — and not my life — are at risk.
That night at dinner, my limbs aching and head still woozy from the fumes, I gaze deeply into my Pinot Noir, acutely aware of how much toil — and how many feet — went into this wine.
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TIPS for prospective harvesters:
- Most wineries start placing help wanted ads in local French papers in August, though the dates of the actual harvest vary by region and by year. For aspiring pickers who don't live in Europe, your best bet is to troll the Internet for the contact information of a handful of wineries you'd be interested in. Contact them in late August or early September.
- Ask whether they provide meals and accommodations. Harvesting is already stressful enough without the added worry of pitching a tent and cooking a can of beans for dinner. Aim for a winery that offers both food and shelter.
- Ask whether you need French working papers. Some wineries, like Louis Latour, require them and some don't. Be sure to find out before you book your ticket to France.
- Bring your own gardening gloves and guard them with your life.
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asap contributor Jenny Barchfield is a reporter in the AP's Paris bureau.
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