Angels in the cellar

Twenty years ago, after suffering a breakdown and realising that something was desperately wrong with his life, Hahn moved to a decaying vineyard in the Loire Valley, and slowly began bringing it back to life. Since then he’s lived at Le Clos de la Meslerie, making small batch prize-winning organic wines, following principles of regenerative farming. Here, he invites us to spend a year in his company as he reflects on the land, his life, and the lives of the small group of people he works with. We join Peter through the seasons, pruning the vines and harvesting the grapes by hand, before we follow him to the cellar, where the alchemy begins – and the angels take charge. An evocative, poetic account of a year spent working with nature, the book is also a powerful repudiation of the global economy, its obsession with hyper-consumption and its impacts on the land and its ecosystems.