Virgile's Vineyard Page 13

  ‘Honteux! … Scandaleux! … Execrable! …’

  The strident derision continues unabated while the slender youth faces five hundred and fifty kilos of opponent with what, to my untutored eye, seem entirely admirable bravery and skill. Only belatedly, as the beast slumps lifeless to the sand, do I realize that it was the bull, not the boy, that was the object of this scorn – the two of them regarded by the crowd in general as equally important and equally judgeable competitors, albeit with subtly unequal life expectancies. But now, as suddenly as the hero’s sword pierced the animal’s heart, Manu’s limited lungpower joins the cheers of an ecstatic crowd. A red baseball cap soars skywards, while jubilant white handkerchiefs are waved all round the arena, and for this signal of universal approbation, Castella is awarded one of the little-lamented bull’s ears to decorate some remote Sevillian mantelpiece.

  What Manu needs, of course, is more informed opposition than I can hope to offer, with which to argue the merits of the matadors and the aptitude of the animals long after the event has ended. And so it is that a succession of innocent strangers, who might have other plans for their evening, find themselves embroiled in a series of fierce-fought controversies in the streets and bars surrounding the arena, before Manu will at last contemplate dinner. He then insists on one of the bargain pavement paellas and a giant jug of Sangria, at a table as close as possible to the brass band so that we can be as close as possible to its accompanying trio of tight-T-shirted gogo girls. I can therefore scarcely hear his ‘Never think this used to be a Huguenot city, would you?’

  ‘Too puritanical for wine, I suppose, the Protestants?’ I shout back hoarsely.

  ‘They needed it for communion,’ I can just about lip-read. ‘And not just for the priests, for everyone.’

  ‘But social drinking?’ I yell back at him.

  ‘Mr Killjoy, Calvin,’ is I think what Manu replies. ‘Told his followers it was a sin to buy a round of drinks!’

  A man after your own heart, I reflect, as the bill lands on my side of the table and Manu leads me off to discover the Feria nightlife in earnest.

  *

  I wake with a profound sense that I have discovered enough nightlife in a single night to last me the remainder of the year.

  Having persuaded me that there could be no question of driving home when the festivities finally calmed down around four in the morning, Manu had booked us a hotel, which was firmly at the wrong end of the budget category. (I think it was the derelict awning flapping outside my window that woke me but it might equally have been someone cursing the discomfort of the beds on the other side of the paper-thin walls.) However, at least Manu decided that sharing a room would be one economy too far and I thus remain innocent of all that lies beneath the blue dungarees.

  When I cross the corridor to check on his welfare, I find him unable to face daylight, let alone breakfast, until I have been out to buy him a pair of the biggest and darkest sunglasses known to Nîmes. He groans wretchedly when I remind him that we have only half an hour to get to our rendezvous in the Costières de Nîmes, outside the city. He winces painfully at the crunch of the gravel when we turn into the picturesque courtyard of the Château Mourgues du Grès. He then squints in bemusement at the motto on a sundial, set high on a sun-drenched wall: ‘SINE SOLE NIHIL’.

  ‘Nothing without sun,’ says Anne Collard, the slim, smartly dressed young woman who comes out to greet us, with hardly a hint of disbelief at the outsized sunglasses and the paella-stained Hawaiian shirt which are steadying themselves against a balustrade. ‘It’s been there since the Revolution but we took it as our logo. It so much expresses our philosophy, our aim of capturing all the intensity of the purest, sun-ripened fruit … But is your friend all right?’ she hesitates.

  The buzzing of the cicadas in the late morning heat isn’t helping Manu’s headache.

  ‘Perhaps he’d prefer the salon to the tasting room?’ she offers as, with saintly generosity, she ushers the grubby overalls on to a comfortable white sofa. ‘Mourgues was a Provençal name for Ursuline nuns,’ she resumes, assembling six or seven different Costières de Nîmes on a coffee table. ‘The farm belonged to a convent over near Beaucaire.’

  ‘And Grès? That’s a kind of sandstone, isn’t it?’ I ask, more to drown the muffled moaning from the sofa than to prove how much I remember from my Saint Chinian geology course.

  ‘Exactly. But you must have seen the most distinctive feature of these vineyards, driving in – the galets, the lovely rounded pebbles? Did you notice the colours? From golden yellow, through pink to red? Well, it’s after them that we’ve named our first three wines – the freshest, fruitiest white, rosé and red – “Les Galets Dorés”, “Les Galets Roses” and “Les Galets Rouges”.’

  Her pouring of the first of these is eyed by Manu with unprecedented wariness. For a moment I think he is about to decline but, heroically, he stiffens his resolve and visibly wills himself to lift the glass.

  ‘The galets make wonderful storage heaters,’ she enthuses, as she lines up some rosé beside the white. ‘Absorbing sunshine by day and radiating it on to the grapes at night. They’re unique to the Costières de Nîmes, washed all the way down here from the Alps by the Rhône.’

  ‘You’re only a couple of miles from the Rhône, aren’t you?’ I ask, the burden of small talk falling to me, as Manu conserves his limited powers of speech for a whispered ‘Juste un petit peu’ at the approach of the Galets Rouges.

  ‘Yes, in many ways we feel more a part of Provence and the Côtes du Rhône than the Languedoc. You’d even see the Mont Ventoux from the top of our slopes, if it weren’t for the heat haze.’

  ‘So are your slopes quite high?’ I ask prosaically, finding it difficult to scintillate with Manu muttering prayers for deliverance to the elegant, vaulted ceiling.

  ‘A costière’s a pretty gentle sort of slope,’ she replies. ‘Although our own are steeper than most. Thirty hectares in all, with the different cépages spread around as much as possible for maximum complexity. But the wines from this parcelle are the richest, the most concentrated,’ she says, as she pours a second white labelled ‘Terre d’Argence’. ‘Older vines, for one thing.’

  Virgile told me it was only in 1990 that Madame Collard’s husband François bottled his first vintage, with serious quantities starting only in 1993, which doesn’t suggest great age. However, she explains that the estate was originally bought by her father-in-law back in 1963.

  ‘He never bothered with bottling his wine. He sold it all in bulk to a négociant – the old-fashioned way,’ she adds, as her Terre d’Argence red follows its sibling. ‘Yet in some respects he was very much ahead of his time. He ripped up all his Aramon and replanted with Syrah and Grenache, long before most people. And of course, long before François got involved.’

  ‘Armed with the younger generation’s traditional oenology diploma, I assume?’

  ‘Actually, François studied agricultural engineering. Have a look at his palissage when you leave,’ she laughs. ‘It shows! He’ll be out there now, making some precision adjustment …’

  ‘No, he’s not,’ says a wiry, energetic-looking figure, entering from the courtyard, in neat navy-blue shorts and a matching polo shirt.

  Virgile also mentioned that, for five years after university, François Collard wrote for a wine magazine called La Vigne, but he looks more like a military fitness instructor than either journalist or wine-maker.

  ‘Ah, you’ve reached the “Capitelles”,’ he notes, as his wife prepares to introduce us to their most prestigious red. ‘We first made this in 1998,’ he explains. ‘From our best, lowest-yielding vines and aged in oak for twelve months.’

  He notices that Manu now has his head rather than his glass in his hands.

  ‘You’ve come from the Feria?’ he asks intuitively. ‘Everyone’s first image of Nîmes! It’s why they changed the name from Costières du Gard in 1989, three years after the appellation started. More festive,’ he declar
es, as his wife pours some particularly festive measures.

  ‘I think I want to go home,’ whimpers Manu miserably beside me.

  *

  ‘I don’t care how hot it is, you have to come and see the flowers,’ said Virgile’s mid-morning summons.

  I had been sitting in the only patch of shade by the pool, trying to persuade myself that the gently tinkling goat bells on the hill in front of me were sufficiently romantic to compensate for my view of their distinctly unromantic residence. And surely, I told myself, it couldn’t be long before the scent of the lavender bushes on the terraces leading up to the courtyard behind me was strong enough to drown the farmyard smells drifting down towards me on the southerly wind. Maybe the insomniac goat-dog would even stop barking through the night, when he was a bit more used to living here.

  I had also been struggling to convince myself that the pleasure of plunging into refreshingly cool water would outweigh the murky greenness of the still unpurified pool. Yet it was simply too hot to think my way through the challenge of cleaning it.

  So Virgile’s hectares of glorious blossom promised welcome relief.

  However, as I soon discovered on arrival, there is nothing heart-stoppingly glorious about a Grenache Noir flower. I am more than willing to believe its importance in the calendar – the success of the early summer flowering determining the potential size of the autumn crop. But it is unlikely to attract the coachloads of admirers that flock to the bulbfields of Holland. There is not a petal to be seen – just some tiny clusters of rather dismal-looking yellow stamens around some equally uninspiring little green pods.

  ‘Isn’t the scent amazing?’ exclaims Virgile. ‘And every grape variety different.’

  I thrust my nose deep into the foliage to try to distinguish some sort of perfume.

  ‘This is perfect weather for the flowering,’ he enthuses, as he checks on progress farther along. ‘Windless and warm. Just as long as it doesn’t get any hotter, that is. Or a lot colder or wetter. No, you laugh, but this is really the most critical time of the year. Cold, damp weather could shrivel the infant berries and wind, hail, even heavy rain could destroy them altogether.’

  The catalogue of potential disasters is interrupted by the buzzing of the mobile telephone in Virgile’s trouser pocket.

  ‘He’s accepted my offer,’ he says jubilantly when the call is finished. ‘Oh, but I haven’t told you, have I? I found this amazing load of second-hand equipment. It belonged to a grower, down past Clermont, who’s gone bust. The liquidator wanted the whole lot cleared as fast as possible. He’s just agreed a ridiculously low price, on condition that I take everything. A pump, a cooling machine …’

  ‘Not really your style is it, bric-à-brac?’

  ‘Listen, this is a good deal, even if only a quarter of it works!’

  ‘And if it all works?’ I ask unhelpfully. ‘Where on earth will you put it?’ (It must be the heat that is making me so negative this morning.)

  ‘You’re right, I hadn’t thought of that.’ His features cloud for an instant then brighten again. ‘My friend Olivier will have to act as a storage depot,’ he declares. ‘There’s plenty of space at Mas Jullien!’

  ‘Is that where you trained?’

  ‘Immediately before Chile, yes. We’ve remained good friends, forever swapping ideas and experience.’

  ‘So what does Olivier think about the sales strategy?’ I ask, as we return to our vehicles.

  Virgile has already told me that a certain Philippe Puech, one of the region’s top wholesalers, based in Nîmes, has offered him an attractive price for the whole of his production. The snag, however, is that ‘whole’ means ‘whole’. He insists on one hundred per cent exclusivity, which Virgile is reluctant to give.

  ‘Olivier says it would be a sell-out. He’s been courted by Puech himself. Taken out to two magnificent dinners. Thousands of francs worth of wine opened. But he still said “no”.’

  ‘He should have said “maybe”. There might have been a third dinner!’

  ‘I really can’t make up my mind,’ worries Virgile. ‘It’s very tempting – the idea of a single, painless lorry-load taking all my marketing problems away. But would places like Le Pressoir still be willing to buy from Nîmes?’

  ‘And there’s my own important order. Not to mention Sarah’s,’ I tease him.

  ‘I’ll try to find a way,’ he answers, with a hasty farewell handshake to mask the involuntary twinkle in his eye.

  *

  ‘The weather’s not getting any wetter, is it?’ puffed Mme Vargas when I met her pushing her wheelbarrow up the lane towards her terraces. It was loaded with a pair of watering cans and I thought at first that she must have been ferrying supplies from their house in the village. The cans, however, were empty. ‘We’re lucky,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a little spring up here. But the trouble is, it’s not so fast at this time of year. You have to lean a long way down to reach the water. And you see, that’s how Albert lost his balance.’

  I had been wondering what new calamity could account for M. Vargas’s absence. Now I knew.

  ‘Nothing broken,’ she assured me. ‘Just a little concussed. I’m sure he’ll be up and about by this time next week.’

  I offered to help but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said I must have quite enough watering problems of my own and, of course, she was absolutely right. I am seldom seen these days without either a hose or a watering can in my hand. The heat has turned irrigation into an almost all-consuming pastime. Indeed, I now walk quite absurd distances to empty half-drunk jugs, even glasses of water, on to whichever roots are currently looking the most desperate.

  It has been bad enough over recent weeks, with my round-the-clock life-support system confined to those dangerously late-planted fruit trees. However, the last few days have started to see widespread wilting and even a few fatalities amongst many of the longer-established specimens.

  I started the year with the naïve assumption that Uncle Milo would have chosen only plants that would cheerfully survive whatever dearth of rainfall the Languedoc summer might choose to inflict on them. I now realize a little too late that, although they are clearly some of the longest-suffering species known to Europe, they are not designed for the desert.

  I ought not to be surprised. After all, I knew from the outset that there were water pipes running everywhere on the more cultivated of Uncle Milo’s terraces and they had to be there for a purpose. It’s just that I haven’t had time to fathom which of the countless taps and valves were supposed to make them work, and every time I experimented it seemed to cut off the house supply for long periods afterwards, so I rather gave up. But now I really ought to try again.

  I am having to grapple with other temperature-related changes of routine as well. The mornings are now so hot that, once the sun has risen, even breakfast is unthinkable on the sun-baked balcony outside my bedroom, so I have moved the little table down to the generous shade of one of the cherry trees, which seems at least to catch more breeze than the larger dining table under the main courtyard arcades. In the evenings, even the heartiest red wines need chilling to bring them down to popular conceptions of room temperature. Then at night, it is almost impossible to sleep until the small hours and I wake again as soon as the sun starts rising. Perhaps a siesta is the only solution.

  I am, however, still not waking early enough to get to my apricot trees before Manu. He was there on my doorstep again this morning, with another not especially large basket of slightly underripe fruit.

  ‘It’s a very small crop, all across the département,’ he assured me, as I wondered how long it would be before Mme Gros appeared with another diminutive mustard pot of her ‘home-grown’ jam.

  Then, foolishly, I left my modest share of the harvest to ripen to perfection in a china bowl in the courtyard and returned after an hour or two of watering to find them literally baked by the sunshine.

  *

  ‘I’m not ready,’ said Virgile, looking more
fraught than I have ever seen him when I arrived at the cave in the early afternoon. ‘I’m not at all ready. And I’ve been waiting two hours for this electrician.’

  We were supposed, at last, to be bottling the first of his wines but it seems that nothing can proceed without the electrician and, more importantly, his fuse.

  ‘I was worried this morning that the pump on my second-hand bottling machine might be a bit rough – might shake the wine up too much,’ he explained, pulling anxiously at his normally neat black curls. ‘So the electrician helped me adapt it to use my normal pump instead. Then five minutes after he left, the fuse blew. And it’s a very specialist kind of fuse. So I’m stuck here waiting for the electrician to come back.’

  ‘Is it urgent now, the bottling?’ I asked.

  ‘Only in the sense that I seem to have wasted the whole week, putting it off with one problem after another. And the minor detail that I need to get some money into my bank account. But every day’s getting hotter and this is a job we’ll simply have to do with the doors open, for sheer lack of space.’

  ‘But apart from that, how are things?’

  ‘Apart from that, I’m completely overwhelmed. So much grass to be dealt with in the fields. So much spraying needed everywhere … I haven’t been near my vines at Nébian for a fortnight.’

  ‘Out of sight, out of mind?’

  ‘Exactly. I really ought to be down there now. Instead, I’ve got Matthieu rolling up any minute to help and no machine.’

  The arrival of the other conscript has, however, had slightly more success in diverting Virgile’s attention from his troubles. We are still waiting for the electrician but at least we are waiting behind a glass of cold beer at one of Le Pressoir’s pavement tables on the other side of the square.

  ‘Mais, qu’est-ce que c’est?’ asks Pius when he notices that Virgile has set up a brightly painted antique pump and decorative barrel or two outside his cave, as if to attract the attention of potential passing trade. ‘Anyone would think you had something to sell!’