There is a scene in autumn, in the villages along the Indus, that has not really changed for two hundred years. The apricots have been picked. The barley has been threshed. The days are short, the nights are already below freezing. And along the riverbeds, groups of women in bright wool shawls are moving slowly among the low, thorny bushes — cutting small branches, twisting them gently, letting the frozen orange berries drop into buckets held between their knees.
This is the sea buckthorn harvest. It runs from mid-October to late November, sometimes into the first snowfall. It cannot be done by machine — the bush is thorny and low, the fruit is fragile, the terrain along the river is uneven and stony. It has always been done by hand, mostly by the women of the village. It is slow, cold, and — because of the thorns — often literally bloody work. A single hectare of wild groves takes a group of six women two full weeks to harvest.
For most of history, the harvest was done for the family kitchen. A jar of juice for the winter. A small bottle of oil for a burn or a cough. The rest was left for the birds. In the last twenty years — as India rediscovered sea buckthorn, and as the science began to speak for it — the harvest has quietly become a source of household income for many of these families. Not large. Not life-changing. But real, and steady, and paid in the same season the fruit is picked.
The women who pick our berries have names, and homes, and children, and are not romantic figures — they are simply people doing skilled seasonal work well. They know which bush is worth returning to after the first frost (colder fruit is sweeter, and denser). They know which patch by the river was ripped out by last year's flood, and which one is coming back. They know how to freeze a bucket overnight so that the next morning's threshing is easier. Two hundred years of small knowledge, held quietly, transferred sister to sister.
When we started Amberbio, one of the first decisions was that we would not disturb this. We would not build our own farms. We would not shift the harvest to cultivated European stock. We would keep buying from the same wild groves, from the same collectives, at fair prices, at the same season the fruit ripens. The bottle on your shelf is not the beginning of the story. Their October is.
There is a phrase in Ladakhi — jhulley — that is a greeting, a thank-you, a farewell, and a small quiet acknowledgement of another person, all at once. Every bottle of Amberbio, if we are honest about it, is a small jhulley to a woman we may never meet, in a valley most of us will never see, doing work that is older than any of our brands. We think that is worth saying out loud, at least once.