Friday 23 December 2011

The First Snow

Please visit our website at www.bowater.fr to see more of our work. 
Most of our images are available for sale as prints/fine art prints, mostly as limited editions.
 
Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius.  ~Pietro Aretino

On Tuesday we had our first snow.  It snowed all day and transformed the landscape from the sombre browns and greyish greens of mid-winter to a tapestry of startling, graphic beauty.  It's more comfortable to be here in Châtillon in summer but to us, as photographers and worshippers of landscape, freshly fallen snow is the apotheosis.
 
We live on the Chemin des Vignes and have vineyards as our neighbours.  These vineyards have been the most satisfactory neighbours we have found to date.  There is something primordial about vines.  They flourish in harsh conditions and give of their best in stony soils, sometimes in almost no soil at all.  They relish baking summers and appreciate cold winters from which they bound back into life early in Spring and the whole cycle starts again for them to be cut down almost to the ground after having given their best.  Like many of the best wines, vines can mature with age and, given the chance, can grow very old indeed.
 
We walked into the vineyards and spent a couple of hours enjoying the views and the changing light and here are some of our attempts to record that fleeting day of snow which disappeared as fast as it came.
 
A view down the Chemin des Vignes towards Glandasse, now obscured by cloud.  This view was taken from almost exactly the same spot as the Summer view which opens our previous blog.

 




 

The sun appeared for a few minutes and completely transformed the landscape.
 

 
 
On the way home we passed one of the many local walnut orchards.  
At home, most evenings, we enjoy the produce of the vineyards that give us so much pleasure throughout the year.  Wine production is so much more than just agricultulture.  Man has not had to go back to his roots as, in this department of life, we never left them.
 
We wish everyone a merry Christmas and a glass of something special and, of course, the best possible year in 2012.

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