Featured | Still Life with Domain Milan Vines Part IV, p. 258 of An American in Provence.
“Today was harvest for the Pinot Noir, the first one of all the vineyard. I knew this day would come but only when the grapes felt ready. I wish we could all live by that principle in life, to have the freedom and the respect to say when it is our time.
As I drove to the vineyards before first light this morning I did not know what I would create today. I wanted to be pure and present in the experience and the extreme privilege to be in the vineyard with the winemaker who still touches every part of his process. I took a moment to walk the vineyard and observe. Listen. Feel. I overhear someone say it is a very leafy year. I marvel at how the Queen Anne’s Lace is dotting up everywhere, a true mark of peak summer in France to me. I come back and ask the winemaker, Theo, why the roses at the end of the rows? He explains that they act as a first sign of alarm to disease. I visit the cave with their painted butterfly watching over like the eyes in The Great Gatsby. I hold the basket which belonged to the vineyard’s grandmother that she used to harvest fruits from in her own era in this very plot.
Today’s photographic work is a culmination of experience and influence as I bought back small artifacts to study from. Perhaps, however, the most poetic of them all was asking Theo, @domainemilan’s 2nd generation winemaker, to choose for me a cluster of grapes he thought most represented a perfect Pinot Noir harvest. He disappeared into wild tangles of vines only to emerge with one cluster he extended out to me in his left hand. I looked down and yes, it was perfect… and if he meant it or not, it was in the shape of a heart.”
Photographer Bio
Jamie Beck is an award-winning American photographer and NYT Bestselling author of An American in Provence. Beck is best known for co-creating the Cinemagraph, with her husband Kevin Burg, and for her work and life in Provence; including her Isolation Creation series.
Read more about Jamie Beck at our blog here!
Details
Museum-quality posters made on thick and durable matte paper.
- Paper Size: 18 x 24 inches
- Photographic portion: 16.1 x 20.9 inches
- Paper thickness: 10.3 mil
- Paper weight: 5.6 oz/y² (192 g/m²)
- Giclée printing quality
- Opacity: 94%













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