Of all the elements that go into producing great wine, one of the most crucial is also one of the most overlooked, except by those who provide it: sweat.

To anybody who has ever wielded a trowel in a backyard vegetable patch, it comes as no surprise that farming is hard work. Forget for a moment the cellar work, with its endless hauling of barrels, repositioning of equipment and mastery of hoses. These are labor-intensive tasks to be sure, but for those who grow their own grapes, it’s the farming itself that requires holy dedication and earns the inventor of aspirin nightly blessings.

This is especially true on the hillside vineyards of the world, crazily angled places like, to name a few, the Mosel and Rhine valleys in Germany, Ribeira Sacra in Spain, the Douro in Portugal and the northern Rhône Valley in France, where grapevines are planted on slopes so steep as to defy all common sense.

One such place is the mountain that rises above the village of Cornas on the west bank of the Rhône, forming an amphitheater facing southeast toward Valence. For more than a thousand years, humans have grown grapevines in its granite soils, trudging up the precipitous hillside to perform their arduous chores. Hillsides like Cornas do not lend themselves to modernity. The slopes are too steep for tractors and other labor-saving devices, and the small landowners who mostly farm the syrah vineyards rarely can afford to hire teams of outsiders to do the work. The sweat is largely their own.