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  Virgile’s Vineyard

  A Year in the Languedoc Wine Country

  PATRICK MOON

  Copyright © 2014 Patrick Moon

  Front Cover image © Adrienne Fryer 2003

  First published in 2003

  by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd,

  50 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BD

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,

  or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

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  For Andrew

  Contents

  Cover

  New Year’s Eve

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  Afterword

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Patrick Moon

  New Year’s Eve

  Maybe I just need more than twenty-four hours of southern sunlight to melt my northern restraint, but ten o’clock in the morning did seem marginally early for aperitifs.

  What do you do though, when the man whose new neighbour you have just become is there on your doorstep, agitatedly shifting his portly frame from one short leg to another, as if all his future wellbeing depended on your acceptance? How can I not say yes? I am, after all, in the land of the langue d’oc – the ancient Occitan language, in which everyone said oc instead of oui. So I meekly cross the wobbly wooden footbridge and follow his eager but elderly steps to the small stone cottage on the opposite side of the stream, bracing myself for a glass of his homemade rouge.

  For Monsieur Gros there appears to be no time to lose. Before he has even puffed his way to the top of his garden path, he has produced a corkscrew from his dirty blue overalls. And before I have fought my way through the curtain of plastic ribbons defending his kitchen doorway, he is already tugging breathlessly at a cork.

  ‘Your uncle Milo always enjoyed his wines,’ he chuckles, tapping a conspiratorial finger on a bloodshot nose that bears eloquent witness to more than half a century of equally high enjoyment. ‘Until his illness, that is …’

  He ushers me quickly to a bare wooden table and is urgently scanning the austere, low-ceilinged room for some drinking vessels, when a tall, forbidding figure of similar vintage emerges from the gloom of an alcove.

  ‘Ah, voici, ma femme,’ he says with a start.

  I mumble a hesitant ‘Enchanté, madame’ and am rewarded with an almost imperceptible, silent nod.

  ‘Oh yes,’ resumes M. Gros, with unnaturally hearty laughter. ‘We always knew Milo would leave the house to a wine-lover. N’est-ce pas, ma chère?’

  The object of this endearment tightens her lips. Madame Gros could hardly look less pleased to see her husband so swiftly replacing my benefactor with a new drinking companion. She produces two glasses of notable smallness and stands with arms firmly folded across her ample bosom, defying us to overfill them.

  I begin to suspect a method in my neighbour’s madly early invitation. If social drinking is so reluctantly tolerated, solitary consumption must be even more deeply disapproved of. So accomplices have to be rounded up whenever he is thirsty.

  Given these onerous social obligations, it amazes me that Uncle Milo ever found time to build the house that is now, unexpectedly, mine. He once told me it took him fifteen years to summon up the energy to drop out. So, even for a lapsed architect, his achievement here in the next twenty-five was pretty remarkable. It did, however, leave him no time for the acquisition of wives, children or any heirs more worthy than his nephew – a nephew who hasn’t even visited since his student days and therefore feels exceptionally undeserving this morning.

  My uncle had only got as far as building two simple rooms when I was last here and younger visitors like me used to sleep in a tiny shepherd’s maset in the garden. Now the house looks a bit like a miniature Romanesque monastery, with its vast, stone-vaulted dining room and the generously rounded arches of the shady cloister lining all but the south-facing side of its spectacular front courtyard. I can hardly imagine how it kept itself out of the design magazines.

  Not that there would be much chance of a photo-call today. The paint on the window shutters has started to peel and a number of the terracotta roof tiles lie broken on the ground. The ancient agricultural terraces stretching up the hill behind the house are crumbling and the once immaculately cultivated vines and olive and fruit trees all look almost impenetrably overgrown with the neglect of my uncle’s declining health: uncomfortable reminders of my own less excusable neglect.

  ‘You’ll be coming down for the summer holidays, I imagine,’ says Mme Gros, anxious to ascertain the limits of the domestic damage that I might do.

  As compassionately as possible, I break the news that I’ve let my English house for the whole of next year. I stumble over the French for sabbatical but I can see from her look of dismay that she has grasped the essential gist.

  And this is all before I have braved even my first sip of M. Gros’s worryingly thin-looking wine.

  ‘You make a lot of this?’ I ask, playing for time.

  ‘Oh very little. Very, very little. Just three thousand litres a year. Just for me and the family,’ he says.

  Time may, of course, yet reveal the precise extent of this happy group of enthusiasts but I am already trying to calculate how many relatives M. Gros would need before he could divide his annual production into an average daily intake that would be less than life-threatening – especially as the only family member in evidence seems to be so resolutely abstemious. I raise my glass nervously in Mme Gros’s direction.

  The wine is, as I feared, thin, sharp and characterless. More surprisingly, given the maker’s inclination towards intoxication, it also tastes unexpectedly low in alcohol. Which is probably why it is barely eleven o’clock when he proposes that we adjourn to the sitting room for some of his ‘secret’ home-distilled brandy.

  ‘Don’t tell a soul,’ he whispers, as he pours me a brimming measure.

  Even drinking only one glass to his three, I am beginning to feel the room rotate – a sensation that isn’t helped by the walls being covered with the swirliest of brown and orange, carpet-like wallpapers. On closer inspection, so is the ceiling. In fact, the only side of the cube not so decorated is the floor. Perversely, this appears to be hewn directly out of the underlying rock. My glass has been replenished once too often for me to be certain.

  As the morning wears on, I become ever more pessimistic that
I shall finish my unpacking before the spring. My host meanwhile becomes ever more determined in his health-toasting, back-slapping matiness. By 11.30, Monsieur E. Gros will tolerate no other epithet but Emmanuel; by noon, only the diminutive ‘Manu’ is ever to cross my lips. Above all, I must, without failure or excuse, accompany him and his lady wife to this evening’s Saint Sylvester Night feast.

  But Mme Gros is having none of this. With evident satisfaction, she reminds him that the deadline for reservations expired two days ago. (However bad my influence on her spouse in the privacy of her home, I shall not be leading him astray in the Salle des Fêtes.) And speaking of which, isn’t it time he was down there setting up the trestle tables?

  *

  I am secretly relieved. A preview of the dinner menu, with its opening highlight of ‘stuffed neck’ (the unfortunate bird or animal undisclosed) inspired little confidence. But with my own simpler New Year’s dinner now finished, I feel unable to resist going down to snoop discreetly on the revels.

  Uncle Milo’s house is well outside the village so I drive as far as the medieval-looking gateway at the bottom of the narrow main street. I have had no opportunity to explore until now and there are very few street lights, but the couples zigzagging unsteadily down the gradient towards me must surely be coming from the direction of the Salle des Fêtes.

  My instincts are soon confirmed by the sound of some long-forgotten hits of the seventies drifting tinnily from the far side of the fountain in the little square at the top of the hill. I am not sure whether it is kitchen or disco exertions that have steamed up the windows but I can more or less make out Mme Gros and another equally intimidating matron waging a terrifying war on the washing up. Manu is nowhere to be seen. (Perhaps sent home in disgrace? Perhaps collapsed under one of his trestle tables?) Fractious children are playing football with an empty drink can. A weary young mother dances listlessly round her pushchair on the post-prandial dance-floor. My instinct was right: tonight was not the night for my social début.

  My time was better spent making discoveries and resolutions.

  I decided this morning that I ought to drink my solitary toast to the coming year with something fitting. So I asked a local wineshop to recommend one of the best of the local wines. I knew that things had changed since the plastic-stoppered, three-starred litres of my adolescent summers but I had not guessed how radically. I had certainly not been prepared for so much diversity, sparking such contagious enthusiasm from my wine-merchant. Nor imagined that he would persuade me to pay ten times as much for an obscure and rustic-sounding vin de pays as I might have given for something with a famous name. Yet, even allowing for a touch of house-moving hysteria, there is no avoiding the conclusion that tonight’s so-called ‘country wine’ was really one of the great experiences of my life.

  So, with twelve whole months at my disposal, it seems as good a New Year Resolution as any to try to get to grips with the remarkable wine-making revolution that appears to be going on here. (I can’t spend the entire year battling with the brambles.) I shall see if I can understand that subtle something which separates the Domaine de la Grange des Pères from the ‘Domaine d’Emmanuel Gros’. And while I am about it, I shall have a go at filling my uncle’s cellar with some of the region’s finest. It feels like the least that I can do to thank him for letting me come here.

  January

  I have made a big mistake. I have told Manu about my resolutions and, deaf to all protest, he has decided I cannot possibly fulfil them on my own. Imagining a year of joyously uninhibited tastings, far from the censorious supervision of his wife, he has appointed himself my indispensable tutor, protector and guide. Indeed, no sooner was the public holiday over than his battered red van was revving impatiently at the bottom of my drive.

  ‘You’re forgetting the size of the Languedoc,’ he fretted, as if our only hope of covering the ground in the time available would be 364 unremittingly early starts. ‘It spans three départements, you know.’

  I had not even thought about where I wanted to start but I knew that, if I surrendered the initiative, I might never again recover it. So, with Manu already releasing the handbrake, I frantically tried to remember one of the bottles that impressed me when I was down here to see the notaire in the autumn.

  ‘Are we anywhere near Montpeyroux?’ I asked, as a possible name came hazily to mind.

  ‘Near enough to take the scenic route,’ answered Manu, swinging cheerfully off on to a narrow road winding up into the hills on the other side of the village.

  I had thought that few views could match the one from the arcaded courtyard at the front of Uncle Milo’s house. Indeed, every front window looks down the hillside, through olives, oaks and cypresses, past vineyards and occasional shepherds’ huts, to the river valley far below and then way beyond to the distant, interlocking diagonals of a succession of hills, stretching down towards an invisible coastal plain. But this morning we were climbing higher still – not quite as high as the bleak Larzac moorlands behind us, which I knew from my arrival a couple of days before, but high enough to see as far as the coast, some forty kilometres away, where the January sunshine was gleaming golden on the sea.

  Having spotted a sufficiently chilly-looking, windswept crest, Manu swerved to a sudden halt for a cigarette and a geography lesson. ‘Montpeyroux,’ he began, with an ostentatious clearing of his throat, ‘is of course a village in the Coteaux du Languedoc …’

  ‘The what du Languedoc?’

  ‘Coteaux,’ he repeated, impatient that I had interrupted his oratory. ‘Meaning much the same as Côtes. As in du Rhône. Hillside slopes. Only with the longer word, you get shorter slopes. Anyway, it’s a very large wine-making region. Huge, in fact. Stretching all the way from Nîmes to Narbonne, like a . . .’ Manu’s arms drew frantic circles in the air until at last an appropriate simile hove into view ‘… giant amphitheatre. Voilà. And Montpeyroux is, of course …’

  ‘Around the middle of the back row?’ I suggested.

  ‘One of its best villages,’ Manu continued, ignoring my attempt to hi-jack his metaphor. ‘And as such, entitled to put its own name on the label as well.’

  I was not in fact quite as ignorant about the French wine-naming system as Manu imagined. I knew that the powers that be had comprehensively divided and sub-divided the French vineyards in a codification of positively Napoleonic thoroughness. It was all supposed to give the customer a sense of what he was entitled to expect from his bottle, by imposing controls on the way in which a wine had to be made if it wanted to be labelled with the name of a designated area. Hence, the expression Appellation Contrôlée.

  ‘All nonsense, of course,’ said Manu. ‘You get good and bad wines, whatever the name.’ But it soon became clear that the real reason why he had so little time for the appellation is that it had inconsiderately outlawed his principal grape variety, once the Midi’s dominant vine, the Aramon.

  ‘Wonderfully productive,’ he enthused, as we drove on. ‘Up to four hundred hectolitres per hectare! When the most you get in a Coteaux du Languedoc is a miserable fifty.’ I had little understanding of hectolitres and hectares but I got Manu’s general drift. ‘It’s ridiculous, discriminating against Aramon!’ he continued. ‘I mean, it even does well where it’s too flat and fertile for the swanky new varieties …’ He simply couldn’t understand why everyone else had been ripping it up and replanting.

  But I could. I’d tasted his wine.

  Our third drive up and down Montpeyroux’s frustratingly long main street is, however, slightly discrediting Manu’s assertion that he knew exactly how to find the Domaine d’Aupilhac. The tall and timeless-looking buildings, squeezed tightly together on either side, all look equally anonymous. I tentatively suggest that an elaborately painted ‘A’ on the wall beside one of the ancient panelled doors might be a clue. (I have the advantage: I saw the logo on their label in October.) A confident young-looking man, in confidently expensive casual clothes, responds to Manu’s rap on
his iron knocker with a welcoming, wine-stained hand.

  My companion really ought to approve of Sylvain Fadat because he has founded much of his considerable renown on another unfashionable grape: the Carignan – not as deeply disdained as Manu’s Aramon but another, it seems, that a lot of people have been accepting European Community subsidies to rip out.

  ‘For a long time, it replaced the Aramon as the dominant local variety,’ Sylvain explains, as we follow him through a series of small, low-ceilinged rooms to an office dominated by an enormous modern desk. ‘It was a major contributor to the region’s bad name, because of its dreadfully high yield.’

  ‘I don’t see why that’s so dreadful,’ grunts Manu, as his plump denimed weight slumps into one of Sylvain’s plump leather armchairs.

  ‘It depends whether or not you like bland bulk,’ Sylvain answers civilly.

  ‘You decided the Carignan could be rehabilitated?’ I ask, remembering my autumn wine, which was anything but bland.

  ‘I didn’t have any crusading mission.’ He smiles as he pours us a dark, purple-tinged sample of the latest vintage. ‘I simply didn’t have the money to replant. It was 1989. I’d just finished my oenology studies at Montpellier …’ (I was right: he is indeed still young, despite his receding hairline.) ‘The vines that my father used to cultivate for the co-operative were about fifty years old, and I pruned them hard and harvested late. All of which helped to give me low, concentrated yields.’

  Manu drains his glass with an expression of exaggerated concentration, apparently weighing up the wisdom of giving this young upstart the benefit of the doubt.