Sunday 11 January 2009

It's Cold!

Susan and I were congratulating ourselves the other day on the fact that we had left Preuilly before it became really cold. At the time the weather widget (that box on the right-hand side giving Preuilly's weather report) was showing -11°C with a real feel of -15°C. That discussion led to one about the fate of our wine cellar - there are about 20 bottles of not terribly expensive (mainly red) wine sitting in our kitchen. The worry is not so much how the cold will affect the flavour (our reading suggest they may get slightly sweeter), but if the bottles will survive being frozen. Wine apparently freezes at -10° C and we have no wish to return to a puddle of red wine throughout the house and a fridge full of stale beer and broken glass.

Then we received and email from Jill and John and our self-congratulation turned to elements of doubt. Yes, we are pleased not to be trying to survive in that much cold, but look what we missed:

According to their email we have received between 13 and 15 cm of snow in Preuilly. This is not totally unknown, but it is the largest fall for a number of years - certainly since before we started visiting. We are now hoping that it is not too many years before Preuilly looks like a Winter Wonderland again - we hope it will be after we have installed heating, but before we get too infirm to really enjoy it!

These are the photos Jill and John took on Monday and sent to us. In a way we are jealous, but we ARE looking at them from the comfort of a centrally heated house.

Simon

4 comments:

Dj Johnston, of www.djfineart.com said...

Hello Simon,
Can’t blame you for wanting to avoid the thrill of being chilled to the bone in a snow covered stone house that has no central heating, but from where I sit—on the patio on a warm, sunny day in California, it sure looks romantically magical.

Good luck on installing the heat so you can enjoy the magic next time.

Simon said...

DJ, my attitude has always been that it is far better to look at snow than be in it!

Ken Broadhurst said...

That's a lot more snow than we got in Saint-Aignan. I guess it's possible. We had about 15 cm of snow three years ago, at the end of February. This time we got more like 5 cm. But the temperature went down to near –11ºC at least one morning. I doubt that your bottles of wine froze, however. It wouldn't get that cold inside the house... I hope.

Simon said...

Ken - This may be nature finding a balance. I think I remember you talking in May about getting 70-80mm of rain on a day when we got nothing.

Post a Comment