Virgile's Vineyard Read online

  When Manu first bluffed our way in here, M. Lignères was quick to explain his difficulty in more than half rising to greet us. ‘A bad crash in one of those.’ He gestured ruefully towards a giant photograph of a racing car behind him. He used to be a driver – when not otherwise engaged as master wine-maker and psychologist – and the accident left him partially paralysed and wheelchair-bound for many years. However, a combination of physiotherapy and the iron will that he clearly brings to all things has recently enabled him to walk again – not without difficulty but with only occasional support from a stick. He can also drive but M. Puyal is more the man for what’s in store.

  I am not entirely sorry that Manu insists on sitting in the front of the Land Rover. M. Lignères’s ‘enormous altitude variations’ are linked by such steep ascents and precipitous descents that I am soon regretting the richer elements of my lunch. Indeed, M. Puyal explains that many of these inhospitably stony tracks are used for testing racing cars.

  ‘All the top names come here with their new designs,’ he says, as we skid downhill through the rain-soaked golden gorse. ‘You see those guys on the ridge over there? That’s the Mitsubishi team. They’ll stay with us for as long as it takes to break the car. Then, when they’ve seen where it’s broken, they’ll take it away to decide how to make it stronger. But we also hire out four-wheel drives for ordinary drivers to use the circuit. It helps attract people from other regions, who then discover our wines. It’s also why we developed the hotel side of our operation,’ he continues, as I begin to wonder whether this multi-faceted enterprise has any limits.

  ‘You can’t just stand still,’ he says, as if reading my thoughts. ‘We live in what Jean-Marie calls a “Kleenex Society”. Everything is disposable. New ideas are needed all the time to keep the public’s interest. But all the fringe activities, like the concerts and the art exhibitions – did Jean-Marie mention those? – they also help to “socialize” our disabled employees.’

  There is little sign of the disabled this afternoon, except for some shadowy silhouettes huddled in a distant, steamed-up minibus. There has also been little sign of Manu’s hoped-for tasting but, just as we are taking a more promising turn towards the cave, we stop to greet an approaching tractor.

  M. Puyal introduces us to Georges, the serious, slightly anxious-looking driver. His report on his afternoon’s activities proves him a man who knows his Grenache from his Syrah and his ‘goblet’ pruning from his cordon royat but he is rather surprisingly one of the handicapped.

  ‘Needed a lot of shelter and support at first,’ says M. Puyal, as Georges drives on. ‘But then he teamed up with one of the handicapped girls and we gave them a little flat on the estate. Now they’re well enough to live together in the village. Someone pops in to help them sort out their bills but they’re well on their way to integration.’

  As we speed back to the cave, he declares Georges to be ‘one of their best successes’ – and he is right: when you have met Georges, the notion that the wine which you may be about to sample has rivalled the legendary Château Pétrus somehow seems less important.

  *

  ‘Tu veux aller ébourgeonner?’ asked Virgile, when I picked up the telephone.

  I had no idea what ‘ébourgeonning’ might involve but I said I could be with him in half an hour. He told me I’d be working for the first time dans le vert. I had no idea what working ‘in the green’ meant either but it sounded more fun than pruning dead wood from olive trees in a howling gale.

  I had in fact been pruning quite worrying quantities of dead wood. I needed to ask the Vargases’ advice – or rather that of Madame Vargas, since Monsieur was still not back on his feet – but that would have to wait.

  Just as I found a parking space in front of Le Pressoir, some rain hit the windscreen. Nothing so remarkable about that, except that this afternoon the sky was brilliantly, cloudlessly blue – so blue that it made you wonder how the rainclouds could ever return – and yet there it was: rain on the windscreen.

  ‘It’s the wind,’ said Marie-Anne, coming out from the restaurant with her two little daughters to greet me. The children laughed at a couple of elderly villagers who were struggling to remain vertical for a windswept game of boules at the bottom end of the square. Then a sudden gust threw rain in all our faces and the children’s laughter turned to tears. But still the sun shone on. ‘It must be raining up on the Larzac and blowing all the way down on the wind,’ Marie-Anne explained, as she took her protesting offspring back inside. ‘No wonder we get these rainbows!’

  It was every bit as blustery when Virgile and I reached our target patch of vines near Montpeyroux.

  ‘Grenache Blanc,’ he announced, ‘Don’t ask me what I’m going to do with it. It was part of a job lot that I’m renting but I haven’t any other white grapes.’

  ‘For a blend, you mean?’

  ‘You have to mix at least two cépages for a white Coteaux du Languedoc – the same as for a red. I suppose I could make a single-variety vin de pays but I can’t say I’m very convinced by the idea of pure Grenache Blanc. So it was rather a crazy acquisition.’

  But of course, it would take much more than a few doubts about the usefulness of a vine to make Virgile relax his usual exacting standards, as rapidly becomes clear when he starts explaining the business of the day. The bourgeons prove to be the buds, which have burst in a windswept profusion of delicate, fluffy new leaves and fresh, pale green shoots (hence our working dans le vert). However, they are mostly too profuse for Virgile’s liking. I had fondly imagined the winter pruning to be more than rigorous enough to achieve his intended low yields, but no. If we are to have any hope of reaching that target half-litre per vine, we must examine every one of the five or six points of growth and strip off all but two of the shoots sprouting from each.

  ‘Not just any old two,’ he emphasizes, as if I could have been naïve enough to imagine anything so simple. ‘Always keep the strongest. But favour the shoots that are most in line with the row. And of course, lower rather than higher, where possible. We’re thinking ahead to the next round of pruning here, deciding where we want next year’s shoots.’

  Virgile leaves me grappling with the conflicting priorities – every bit as indecisive as I was at the pruning stage and thinking that surely three-dimensional chess would have been less stressful.

  *

  A couple of weeks ago Babette put up a new sign. ‘Between 19.30 and 21.30 meals only,’ it said.

  ‘You mean, we can’t call in for just a drink any more?’ I asked, surprised that her dinner trade at this time of year could be brisk enough to exclude the casual imbiber.

  ‘Oh, you can,’ she said. ‘All the regulars can.’

  ‘Is this your new summer régime or something?’

  ‘Hardly,’ she laughed, as the wind howled outside. ‘It’s just that I’ve been getting a lot of rough types coming up from Lodève, looking for trouble. But now I can point to the sign.’

  This seemed to make sense until I made my first ever Saturday evening visit last weekend. When I arrived at about eight o’clock I could hardly open the door, there were so many villagers drinking at the bar.

  ‘So how will you explain this lot to your undesirables?’ I asked.

  ‘Easy – I’ll say they’re waiting for tables.’

  Babette was cheerfully oblivious to the fact that there was only one table laid, let alone occupied. The recently widowed octogenarian Monsieur Privat was, as usual, tucking into one of his twice-a-day, every day meals at his regular table near the kitchen. (No one knew how he survived on her jour de fermeture.) Otherwise, there didn’t seem to be the slightest interest in food; but before I could put this to Babette, another wave of ‘regulars’ forced its way inside and she was overwhelmed with drinks orders.

  Babette’s new dining rules may have nothing to do with summer but there are many indications that warmer times are finally on their way. She herself has taken down the café terrace’s wall of plastic
weatherproofing and poked some artificial roses in amongst the neglected-looking greenery in her concrete planters. Down in Saint Saturnin, Pius is busy constructing a big wooden platform in front of Le Pressoir to quadruple his outdoor capacity. And back here in the village shop, Nathalie has put up a notice that, as from next month, she will be offering fresh milk as well as the disgusting ‘long-life’ that we have endured all winter. (‘The visitors prefer it,’ she told me.)

  Even closer to home, a trio of the noisiest frogs imaginable has arrived to keep me awake throughout the summer, croaking loudly beside the pool in three-part counterpoint every night. They are also the greenest frogs imaginable – a thoroughly implausible, children’s story-book green. Tree frogs, according to my uncle’s dog-eared but vividly illustrated Mediterranean nature book. I spotted one of them jumping into the water and could hardly believe that such a tiny, three-centimetre body could generate such reverberating, sleep-banishing volume.

  Meanwhile, all around the garden, there are dozens of once anonymous, indistinguishable shrubs bursting into vibrantly varied life. Geraniums for the breakfast balcony have found their way into my shopping basket and the first – but certainly not the last – of the new season’s insects have delivered their bites.

  But surely the most striking indication that the seasons are changing is the number of friends who are starting to telephone – ostensibly to check on my welfare but rapidly progressing to explore my receptiveness to visitors.

  There are two bedrooms in the main house but the separate studio has always seemed the ideal lodging for all but the closest of guests. However, some vital work is needed to make it safe, especially a few repairs to the wrought-iron staircase leading up to the galleried sleeping area. So yesterday Monsieur Parrouty, a convincingly burly-looking blacksmith, came up from Lodève to take a long, thoughtful look.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked, as I shook his blackened, vice-like hand and introduced him to Uncle Milo’s rickety spiral.

  ‘Bawf,’ said M. Parrouty.

  In fact that proved to be mainly what he said. He was a man of few words. He was more preoccupied with stroking his opulent moustaches. Indeed, metalwork, I decided, could represent only a minor sideline for a man whose principal activity was clearly the winning of the local whisker-growing competition. A pair of luxuriant S-shaped curls looped nearly down to his chin, before twisting magnificently back again to reach almost as high as his ears. They obscured so much of his face that it was quite impossible to interpret the stream of ruminative noises, as he sized up the assignment.

  ‘Baaaawfff,’ he said in tones that could as easily be read as an expression of admiration for Uncle Milo’s staircase design as one of dismay at its state of repair. But before I could elicit any more articulate estimate of the problem, my powers of speech were cut short by a blood-curdling scream from the roof.

  In retrospect, I suppose, it was not so much a scream as a screech. Certainly not a squeal. The sheer volume, let alone the violence of the noise put it far beyond the frontiers of squealing. A shriek perhaps, something halfway between fear and anger – but whatever the mot juste, there was evidently something up there that was not best pleased to be disturbed. And something substantial too.

  The shriek was rapidly followed by a tumultuous frenzy of movement. As far as I could tell, and improbable as it seemed, the furious scrabbling seemed to be coming from an almost negligible gap between the steeply sloping ceiling boards and the roof tiles immediately above them. I tried to console myself with the thought that the sound of a pigeon on a slate roof in England could reverberate below as if an eagle had chosen to perch there but, deep down, I knew that something formidable had taken up residence beneath the terracotta.

  ‘Bawaawaawaawff,’ said M. Parrouty, still cogitating regardless.

  His moustaches twitched ever more animatedly with every new aspect of the staircase project that he considered but with never a flicker of interest in the violent agitation above us. Either he enjoyed the society of similar visitors in his own rafters or some highly developed sense of politesse precluded him from passing comment. It was inconceivable that he could have failed to hear it.

  However, as soon as M. Parrouty had uttered his last farewell ‘bawf’, I rushed to the main house for the nature book. Heaven knows why I thought this was going to help when I had nothing visual to go on, but I turned to the page that covered a local selection of comfortingly harmless-seeming mice, only to encounter, at the bottom of the page, a painstakingly detailed drawing of a dark, glistening turd. It looked worryingly familiar.

  I hurried back out to the courtyard and, sure enough, there in the corner near the studio were three perfect forty-millimetre specimens. I hadn’t taken much notice when I had seen them in the morning but now I felt absolutely certain that the beast with which they had not long since parted company was a ‘fouine’. And yet I had no idea what a fouine might be.

  Every other living thing in the entire book had been favoured with a graphically lifelike, full-frontal pose. So why not the fouine? Was the creature’s physical reality so terrible that the sight of anything more than its excrement would have potential purchasers fainting throughout the bookshops of Southern France?

  May

  Several days and several freshly delivered, telltale traces later (at least there are none inside the studio) I am still hearing the same alarming scuffle in the roof whenever I enter the studio. And worse than that, this morning I heard the high-pitched squeaking of what I can only imagine are babies. But I am little the wiser about my adversary, except that my dictionary offers an Anglo-Saxon alias: ‘stone martin’. Otherwise, all that the nature book adds is that my fouine is (a) a notorious leaver of turds (which is hardly news) and (b) carnivorous (which is hardly reassuring).

  Meanwhile, the need to prepare the studio for my friends’ arrival grows ever more pressing, so I decide to assert a few proprietorial rights – nothing over-sophisticated, just a few judicious whacks of a heavy broom-handle on the wooden ceiling, at the epicentre of the commotion. This quickly teaches me something that the nature book could have mentioned: the female fouine has no qualms about abandoning her young within seconds of the going getting rough. Her exit from the roof is, however, so rapid that I have no time to catch sight of her.

  I do, nonetheless, get several more chances, as the second thing I learn about the fouine is that it is exceptionally persistent about returning as soon as things quieten down again. At first, I get a glimpse of something brown and furry disappearing into the bushes. Then, in the afternoon, a sighting of a bushy-tailed rear view – much larger than a squirrel, I’d say, but a little smaller, I think (and hope), than a cat. And finally, towards evening, a flash of white on a fast-moving chest.

  As usual I need advice, but Manu is away for the weekend, dragooned into visiting a sister-in-law whose fulminations against the demon drink apparently make his life with Mme Gros feel like a Bacchanalian orgy. And the Vargases, I know, are now both out of action. Madame sprained her wrists in a fall from a ladder while engaged in some over-ambitious work on their olive trees, and Monsieur has taken her for a rest-cure at a cousin’s on the coast. So I am forced to resort to the collective wisdom of the village café.

  I join the crush at the bar and initiate a ‘supposing a friend of mine had this animal in his roof’ kind of conversation, expecting the usual hotly-debated range of views. But tonight the zoological consensus is both immediate and unanimous.

  ‘Vous avez une fouine!’ they chorus.

  Unfortunately, however, opinions as to how the animal’s unhappy host should best proceed in these circumstances are less united.

  ‘Elles sont protégées,’ calls M. Privat from the corner table where he is enjoying another of his twice-daily meals chez Babette. (The man’s appetite for coq aux olives must be inexhaustible.) The fouine’s protection, he insists, precludes even the civilest of invitations to consider alternative accommodation. ‘Mais pourquoi les chasser, alo
rs? … Je les aime, moi,’ he adds affectionately.

  ‘Elles sont vicieuses,’ counters Monsieur Puylairol, the bee-keeper.

  For a man of his profession he is surprisingly timid-looking but he speaks on this occasion with unaccustomed vehemence. Presumably, the life of an apiculteur exposes him to quite enough aggression without confronting a fouine.

  ‘Only my opinion, of course,’ he continues, more characteristically diffident. ‘But I wouldn’t go nearer than twenty metres, if I were you.’

  ‘Not without a full suit of body armour,’ Babette supports him more emphatically, and I set off home wondering whether the studio will ever again be fit for human habitation.

  I am too depressed to return to the battlefield until the morning; but when I do, the crack of the broom against the ceiling boards is greeted with unaccustomed silence. The fouine is clearly learning not to panic at the first hint of hostilities. Another more savage prod produces the same mute response. Perhaps it has gone in search of breakfast. But a few more batterings at intervals throughout the morning and still there is no hint of protest.

  Cautiously, I face the improbable truth: I seem to have won. The fouine appears to have decided that there must be easier places to raise a family.

  *

  The vines are surely now at their most beautiful – vibrantly limey green, profusely, flutteringly leafy yet still distinctly independent shapes, set off by newly ploughed soil, in neat rows, all across the region. Even Virgile has ploughed the weeds into his soils, though perversely, he is now wondering whether he might even sow some replacement grasses in the spaces between his rows for better organic balance.

  Everywhere the tiny round buds are starting to form, looking so much like miniature grapes that I thought I must have somehow missed the flowering. But the surprising thing is the sheer quantity of these buds. After all that winter pruning and April shoot-removal, Virgile’s vines are still remarkably heavily laden.