Virgile's Vineyard Page 11
‘Will we have to thin them yet again?’ I ask faint-heartedly, remembering Virgile’s masochistically modest three glasses per vine.
‘Nature will probably find a way of doing that bit for us,’ he assures me. ‘Disease or hail or something usually helps us out.’
The vines that seem to be growing fastest are his Syrah, and the assignment for the day is to reorganize their palissage – the system of wires on which this variety in particular needs to be trained, before its exceptionally high-reaching shoots get snapped off by the wind. The wires are already there, a relic of the previous owner, stretching all along the length of each row. However, they are still where the last vintage left them and now need repositioning to support the delicate young growth. At roughly eight-metre intervals down the rows, there are metal posts with supporting hooks at different heights, and the object of the exercise is to lower the wires from one of these pegs to another without damaging the new shoots.
‘Hey, careful,’ says Virgile, as I tug with excessive enthusiasm at a wire already tangled by tendrils. ‘I know I don’t want a lot of grapes but I do want some!’
As we work down the vineyard together, on opposite sides of the row, I ask about progress on his much-deferred bottling. I know that he opted in the end for ‘serigraphic’ labelling, printed directly on to the bottles, but the last time I enquired the initial designs had failed to please.
‘Next month,’ he says. ‘Definitely. I must get some wine on the market to appease the bank. But goodness knows how. I mean, I know Pius will take some for Le Pressoir but as for the rest … There just aren’t enough hours in the day.’
‘You’ll have to get yourself a wife,’ I suggest. ‘Someone with nothing better to do than hang around the cave all day, giving tastings …’
‘You’re right,’ he laughs. ‘When she isn’t answering the telephone and paying the bills and doing the paperwork for the Customs … I knew there was something missing in my business plan!’
*
‘You must be mad,’ said Babette, when I told her yesterday that her hearty confit de canard was going to have to fortify me for an afternoon of tree planting.
I didn’t need her to tell me that it was far too late in the year but, back in March, when I ordered the trees from another of Manu’s shooting cronies, I was naïve enough to assume that it might need fewer than twenty reminders to secure the promised ‘same day delivery’.
‘Madder still,’ she said when I telephoned a couple of hours later to ask whether she knew of anyone with some dynamite.
Uncle Milo had left the level, paddock-like area immediately behind the house unplanted – simply fencing it off in his unavailing effort to separate sheep from vines. Having cleared away the canopy of brambles, I was now determined to plant this area but, as Babette was quick to point out, land is often left unplanted for a reason. In this case, the soil’s unyielding resistance to my pick-axe suggested no one had disturbed it since whatever seismic convulsion shaped these hillsides in the first place.
‘I thought you had more trees than you could cope with already,’ she observed with ample justification.
‘Not peach trees,’ I explained defensively. ‘And Manu says I ought to replace a couple of dead Mirabelles. And the paddock looks so empty,’ I continued, knowing privately that, more than anything, I was simply impatient to make a creative mark on my landscape after so many months of cutting and clearing and burning.
Our famously resourceful café proprietress was disappointingly unhelpful in the dynamite department but she did know someone with a giant, tractor-mounted drill, which she thought should solve the problem. As long as the job didn’t need too much discussion.
The importance of Babette’s proviso became clear as soon as Monsieur Mas applied himself to this morning’s doorstep preliminaries. A big broad smile beamed down at me from a big round head on big broad shoulders. But the smile was entirely toothless. If I had not already seen a mechanical drilling device, with accompanying tractor, lurching up the lane, M. Mas’s sibilant speech of self-introduction would have given me no hint as to his identity. He, on the other hand, was too busy fiddling with a whistling hearing aid to guess that my own first words might merely be ones of greeting.
‘BON… JOUR,’ I tried again more slowly.
‘M’sssshhhuhhMassshhh,’ he announced once more.
I was already hoarse with fruitlessly repeated salutations before I could even begin to address the subtler message that the stakes so mysteriously dotted round the paddock coincided with the spots where his drill was to dig the required holes.
But now that the holes are dug and the fruit trees duly planted, another thought has struck me. The field where I have chosen to plant my trees is effectively the only part of Uncle Milo’s estate where there is no convenient water supply. Almost everywhere else, there appears to be some sort of outpost of his still untested watering system. But not in the paddock, I realize belatedly.
‘You’ll need to do that every day, when it gets warmer,’ calls Mme Gros contentedly from the other side of the stream, as she watches me hobble out of the bathroom with a watering can for the tenth time.
*
‘I wish I didn’t have to do this,’ says Virgile gloomily, as Laurent, his friend with the filtering machine, presses the start button.
Laurent looks silently on, as the pump starts noisily sucking the wine from the peace and quiet of its fibreglass tank and forcing it down the pipe to the point where it pushes its way through the multi-layered, card-like filter before returning again to the calm of another newly sterilized cuve on the other side. Laurent’s wordless solemnity suggests that he considers it a great shame too but maybe he is just taciturn by nature. It is Virgile who voices the concern.
‘You never know how much intensity you’re losing,’ he frets. ‘I didn’t intend to filter it at all but I had a problem with the wine in one of my barrels. I thought it was developing too much volatility – too much acetic acid. So I was afraid to bottle without filtering first.’
‘But I thought it was the wine you’re keeping to bottle next year which was now in the barrels,’ I respond, confused.
‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? I decided to mix them after all. I thought the weightier wine for next year needed balancing with some of the freshness of this year’s. And vice versa. But the net result is, everything now needs filtering.’
He takes a sample of the newly clarified wine in a glass. He sniffs it, tastes it and passes it to Laurent. ‘What do you think?’ he asks tensely.
‘It certainly looks more brilliant,’ says Laurent, avoiding the issue.
*
‘Great pus-filled swellings in the armpits and groin,’ said Krystina, as Babette thrust two generous salades niçoises on to our sun-dappled table.
It was the first day that extra tables and chairs had spilled out beyond her café terrace to fill as much of the Place de la Fontaine as the chaotic parking of cars and vineyard machinery permitted. Scores of lunchers were celebrating this first confirmation of summer. Monsieur Privat seemed only too pleased to be sharing his shady table under an ancient plane tree with a trio of Scandinavian girls, while the Vargases, back from the coast, continued Madame’s convalescence on the sunnier side of the square. Babette had still not found time for tablecloth-making but nobody cared. They were much more interested in their carafes of well-chilled rosé and the colourful salads that were giving the coq aux olives a well-earned rest.
So who but Krystina could have chosen such a moment to regale me with a grisly account of the Black Death?
‘Disastrous for wine production,’ she persisted between mouthfuls.
‘Lack of workers?’ I asked, having lost most of my own appetite.
‘Lack of customers as well,’ she explained. ‘Wiped out a third of the population by 1400. You’d never think Montpellier was Europe’s most important medicine school. But the professors seemed to be much more interested in doctoring wine. You see, the medieva
l stuff was still very short-lived. Anything left by summertime was likely to be sour and the spicing of wine to disguise the deterioration became one of the Medicine Faculty’s specialities. You’ll get a better idea when we’re down there.’
Krystina’s threat, however, reckoned without my secret knowledge that Wednesday was ‘Aromatherapy Day’. So this morning, in a gesture of rare defiance, I have taken advantage of this prior claim on her liberty to find my own independent way to the university city.
Arnaldus de Villanova is the man I am looking for. Not the man himself – he died in 1311 – but his bestseller, the Liber de Vinis, the first book ever to be printed on the subject of wine and endlessly reprinted, it appears, until at least the sixteenth century. But no one seems to have thought fit to give him a statue in the Faculty’s imposing classical entrance hall of fame. Only the librarian upstairs seems to show proper respect, as she ushers me to a research desk with surprising lack of interest in either my motives or my credentials.
‘You can choose from about twenty editions,’ she explains, without even consulting the catalogue. ‘In Latin, that is. Unfortunately, there’s no French translation worth reading. There’s one coming out in Catalan next year but maybe you don’t want to wait.’
Stupidly, I came all this way without a moment’s thought for the subtle linguistic warning in Villanova’s title. But I know it would take me months to understand the Latin, and the Catalan I wouldn’t even recognize. So I brave her scorn and ask for the vilified version française.
I am not sure what I expected. Some kind of technical vinicultural treatise, I suppose. Or a first compendious encyclopaedia of local wines. But what I get is a bizarre, fifty-two-page mixture of astrology and alchemy, much of it devoted to some very dubious-sounding ‘recipes’ for a series of wine-based Wonder Drugs. My favourite infuses straightforward wine with a mixture of garlic, cinnamon, liquorice, resin and ‘mastic’ to produce an elixir allegedly capable of warming the kidneys, purifying the blood, banishing melancholy, relieving haemorrhoids and stopping your hair going grey, all in the same miraculous dose.
But at last Mme Gros’s love of Noilly Prat is explained: she must see a similar promise of eternal life in its own only slightly less extraordinary list of ingredients.
A sobering thought indeed.
*
The first of my visitors has come and gone. And waving her off, I hardly knew which had done me more good – the unaccustomed separation from my strimmer and chainsaw or Sarah’s unfeigned enthusiasm for the house and the land, the village and the countryside, the food and the wine. Her amazement made me listen with new ears to the morning birdsong, evening frogsong and night-time stillness and her bright-eyed curiosity took us into corners of Uncle Milo’s land that I had never found time to explore.
One day for instance, at the far extremity of the wood, we found a curious, circular, stone-built, stone-roofed shelter, half-hidden by creepers.
‘Another shepherd’s hut?’ speculated Sarah, as we ventured inside to admire the unexpected intricacy of its dome-like ceiling.
‘A capitelle,’ corrected Mme Gros, appearing from nowhere in the doorway. Her primary objective was to check that Sarah represented only a temporary addition to the community but, having come this far, she was willing to share another of her nuggets of folklore. ‘You’ll find lots of capitelles round here,’ she explained. ‘They were used by women field-workers for giving birth.’
She looked meaningfully at Sarah, as if to say ‘let that be a warning’.
‘I won’t be a tick, I feel a baby coming on,’ Sarah giggled, unaware of my neighbour’s underdeveloped sense of humour.
‘Pas de respect, ces jeunes gens,’ snorted Mme Gros, as she tutted her way back through the wood.
On another day, Virgile joined us for lunch and we sat together in the shade of the courtyard arches, sampling something new to me, as well as to Sarah – a local speciality, which he had forgotten to tell me he made. ‘Carthagène,’ he called it, as he poured us each a glassful from the plastic bottle in which the continuing delays in his mise en bouteille had forced it to travel. ‘I can’t think why we didn’t taste it back in January. It’s one of my passions.’
The curiosity in our hands looked exactly like an ordinary pale pink rosé but the taste was quite different: intensely grapey, yet somehow noticeably higher in alcohol than wine.
‘It’s a blend of pure, only lightly fermented grape juice, with pure unflavoured alcohol,’ he explained. ‘The addition of the alcohol – the mutage as it’s called – stops the juice fermenting and preserves its natural freshness and sweetness: an invention, as it happens, of your mate Arnaldus, down at Montpellier.’
‘But how do you make it pink?’ asked Sarah. ‘Mixing red juice and white juice?’
‘Not at the best addresses,’ replied Virgile, more tolerantly I suspect than if I had asked the same question. ‘You use red grapes – in this case a blend of Syrah and Grenache Noir. But you allow the juice only a brief contact with the skins, especially if you want a delicate colour like this.’
‘Well, it’s one of my passions too,’ declared Sarah. ‘I’d like a dozen when it’s bottled.’
Virgile had also brought us a couple of the wines that he made in 1997 on his grandfather’s land in the Côtes du Ventoux and we dutifully set about comparing them over our charcuterie and salad. Both bottles were simply and stylishly signed ‘Virgile’ in gold marker pen – a prototype, he told me, for the rather more sophisticated serigraphic design now commissioned for his Languedoc wines. But intriguingly, each of the bottles also bore a different barrel number: 32 and 46.
‘How many barrels did you make?’ asked Sarah, imagining a long and tunnel-like cave, lined with casks.
‘Two,’ answered Virgile with a grin that showed he understood as much about marketing as he did about wine-making.
‘Well, I think they’re the best two reds that I’ve tasted in years,’ announced Sarah, as she placed another substantial order for his Coteaux du Languedoc.
Both the Ventoux and the Carthagène were undeniably delicious but I couldn’t help wondering whether Sarah’s purchases might have owed less to the charms of the wines than the charms of the wine-maker. She has, after all, always claimed to be allergic to anything red and indifferent to anything sweet. And she did tell me it was particularly tactless to return to the courtyard with the cheeses, just as Virgile was enquiring about her marital status.
So, while I can hardly see Sarah abandoning her high-powered city career for dutiful days behind his tasting counter, I think she may well be back before the summer is much advanced to see more of his ‘black gypsy eyes’.
*
‘Marvellous man, your uncle,’ said Manu, surveying my ripening cherries at the beginning of the month. ‘Always very generous with his produce.’
‘Marvellous quality,’ he said, when he appeared on my doorstep before breakfast this morning with a basketful of the glossy, black-red fruits. ‘But you mustn’t be disappointed with the quantity. It’s the same across the region. Too much temperature variation from day to night in the early spring,’ he insisted as he mopped the juice stains trickling down his chin.
However, my later discovery that Mme Gros had bought up the village shop’s entire supply of preserving sugar left little doubt that I had unwittingly emulated Uncle Milo’s generosity.
Not that Manu has stripped my trees entirely bare. He has left me plenty that could still be reached if I had a taller ladder and others that could perhaps be used for jam, if I had the patience to cut away the little blemishes where the insects have sampled them first. (If only they would gorge themselves on one cherry at a time, instead of these roving comparative tastings, there would be plenty for everyone.) But after an hour or so of unrewarding exertions, punctuated by vicious attacks from an insect population jealously defending its prerogatives, I decide to make do with Manu’s little hamper.
*
Virgile’s mighty em
pire now extends to a rented garage in one of the winding and exceptionally narrow streets behind the church. This is where he keeps his new (but not, of course, brand new) tractor. It is also where a small but formidable-looking herd of many-armed mechanical spraying monsters is kept in captivity – each, he explains, designed to tackle a different phase of the vine’s development or a different kind of treatment.
There are two main enemies, apparently: a downy mildew and a completely different powdery mildew, otherwise known as oïdium. Each is matched by two main weapons: the first, a pale blue mixture of lime, copper sulphate and water, popularly known as Bordeaux Mixture because Bordeaux is where it was invented, and the other, a white powdered form of sulphur. It seems that the current hot, dry weather will reduce the risk of the downy mildew but, unfortunately, somehow favour the spread of the powdery kind. The only consolation is that the same climatic conditions will also be good for the distribution of the remedial sulphur dust.
‘It’s all I seem to do at the moment,’ Virgile yawned, as we inspected the new garage annexe one stifling hot afternoon. ‘Very early every morning too, before the sun’s too high, and then late in the evening when it’s cool again. It’ll go on like that for weeks. The worst is the land down at Nébian. It’s too far away to tow the big machines behind the tractor, so I have to go in the van with a spray that I can carry on my back. And carrying thirty-five kilos of liquid and motor in these temperatures is no joke!’
‘Is it normally as hot as this in May?’ I asked, as we returned to the airless heat of the alley. Some village women who had been gossiping in the shade of an adjoining doorstep when we arrived, were now clinging to the changing shadows on the other side.
‘This is pretty exceptional,’ he assured me, as we settled under Le Pressoir’s awning for two of the coldest beers that Marie-Anne could muster. ‘More like the end of June or July.’