Virgile's Vineyard Read online

  I wait until he has gathered almost a basketful of my small, firm courgettes. Then just as he is about to make a start on the runner beans, I trumpet an unexpected ‘Bonjour’ from half a metre behind him.

  ‘Nom de Dieu, tu m’as fait sursauter!’ he exclaims, as he drops the basket.

  His precious pickings tumble over the edge of the terrace but he rapidly recovers his composure. ‘I didn’t like to wake you. But you see, the thing about courgettes is, the more you pick them, the more they grow. And I said to the wife, if someone doesn’t get over there and do a bit of work, he’ll have a terrace full of marrows and wonder why I didn’t warn him.’

  *

  The landscape is changing.

  As I drove down to meet Virgile on the edge of Saint Saturnin, I could see that everywhere the once individually discernible vines were merging into continuous rows of greenery. A closer inspection revealed youthful bunches already starting to ripen, as they turned from hard green pellets into something more convincingly grape-like. A few of the individual grapes were even beginning to change colour from green to black. Acidity levels inside them, Virgile explained, would be starting to diminish, with sugar levels rising.

  You could be forgiven for thinking that nature rather than man was doing the work at this time of year, but not in Virgile’s vineyard. According to him, there were now far too many leaves.

  ‘It would have been better to leave those big outer ones,’ he said, trying not to sound too dismayed at my first ten minutes of foliage-thinning.

  ‘I thought we had to aerate the grapes,’ I mumbled defensively, wondering why my uncompromising exposure of his youthful Syrah had failed to please. Hadn’t he said that too much foliage harboured mildew and other diseases? Didn’t he tell me it encouraged butterflies to come and breed their harmful vine worms? Surely, the more I stripped away, the healthier the crop would be.

  ‘The grapes need shade as well as air,’ he explained. ‘Especially on the far side of the row, where the vine gets all the heat of the afternoon sun. But at least you’ve left those,’ he consoled himself, as he peered over the top of the row.

  Only because they were invisible, I thought to myself, as I massaged my aching back.

  ‘Remember, it’s sunlight on the leaves that ripens the grapes,’ he continued. ‘Not sunlight on the grapes. It’s the leaves underneath the grapes that need to go. And those in the middle, of course. And even more importantly, the side shoots …’

  So I had another go. Much more expertly, I thought. Plenty of shade. Plenty of material to ripen the grapes.

  ‘But now you’ve left all these side shoots,’ said Virgile, on his second inspection. ‘Any shoot growing out from the base of a leaf-stem needs to go.’

  ‘But these have all got grapes on them,’ I protested. ‘I left them deliberately.’

  ‘They’re not grapes, they’re grappillons,’ he said, leaving me little the wiser. ‘They’ll never ripen. So they need to come off. We have to focus all the energy on the proper bunches.’

  The trouble was, the grappillons looked so much like grapes. Just a bit farther behind in their growth. So how could I be sure? Maybe anything on a side shoot had to be a grappillon.

  ‘Ça va, Patrick?’ called Régine mischievously from a couple of rows away, where her more experienced efforts had been winning greater approval. ‘C’est simple, n’est-ce pas?’ she chuckled, as I braced myself for Virgile’s third assessment.

  But miraculously, it appears, I have finally got the balance right: well aerated shade and no grappillons.

  ‘The butterflies won’t like it one bit. They’ll go straight to the neighbours!’

  He smiles approvingly and we pause for some much-needed mineral water, splashing more of our precious rations than we can really afford over sweat-drenched necks and faces.

  There is little sign of the weather cooling. Yesterday some anti-insect candles, left out on my terrace, melted into puddles in the afternoon sunshine. It was far too hot to sleep in the evening and I just sat in the pool with the water up to my chin and counted stars until a hint of a breeze made it possible to think of bed. It was consequently all I could do to keep this rendezvous at nine o’clock – but Virgile and Régine have been hard at work since six.

  ‘I meant to tell you,’ he says, as he steers us back to work. ‘I’ve made the big decision. I’ve sold everything to Puech.’

  ‘Hundred per cent?’

  ‘Unfortunately. It was that or nothing. But the great thing is . . .’

  I never learn about the great thing because he is interrupted by his mobile telephone – something that has happened every few minutes throughout the morning. Some of the callers are casual labourers whom he is trying to book for the vendange but most are simply suppliers letting him down: in this case, the supplier of his boxes, announcing another fortnight’s delay. A compromise alternative design is suggested to speed things up but no, Virgile insists, he wants them to be perfect. He wants his distinctive signature printed on every box, just as it is on every bottle and cork.

  ‘Maybe now you can see why I needed Puech,’ he sighs, as he puts the phone back in his pocket. ‘I haven’t even time for the admin, let alone the sales side of this job.’

  ‘Won’t they let you keep anything, not even for friends?’ I ask.

  ‘Hardly anything for myself, even. But you and Sarah won’t have to go as far as Nîmes. You’ll be able to buy from Jean-Marc. His restaurant’s a wine shop as well, you know …’

  Virgile’s final words are drowned by a crescendo of counting from Régine. ‘ … neuf … dix … ONZE! Voilà, enfin, c’est fini!’

  She started downing tools as soon as Saint Saturnin’s church clock started striking, having agreed to work until eleven. She was, however, forgetting a curious eccentricity of many of the local ecclesiastical timepieces. For reasons that no one has been able to explain to me, the clocks are programmed to duplicate the ringing of every hour. The first and second peals are exactly two minutes apart but opinion is divided as to which of them should be taken as the accurate time signal.

  ‘The first is only a warning,’ laughs Virgile. ‘Still time for one more vine, Régine!’

  ‘Indeed, why not finish the row?’ I am starting to suggest, when a resounding ‘Ta gueule!’ persuades me that Virgile’s assistant will be sticking to the letter of her contract.

  *

  There is nothing like a white-knuckled motorway drive with Krystina to induce a sense of nostalgic regret for the days when there were only two ways to leave the Languedoc – either rough seas or stony donkey tracks. For centuries, it was virtually cut off by the surrounding mountains and its wines were more or less unknown outside the region. Or so Krystina has been telling me, as we speed past fields of heavy-headed sunflowers towards Carcassonne and beyond.

  Apparently Bordeaux monopolized the Northern European markets from the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the English King Henry II in 1152 onwards. Meanwhile Burgundy exercised an effective stranglehold on the river route to Paris. There were scarcely any usable roads and the maritime alternative round the coast of Spain was expensive, slow and beset by dangerous storms and pirates. The Languedoc was effectively land-locked.

  Until 1666, that is – today’s key date – the year when a certain Pierre-Paul Riquet began work on a canal that was to link the Mediterranean to the Atlantic: the Canal des Deux Mers or the Canal du Midi, as it is more commonly known.

  ‘Nothing new in the idea,’ says Krystina, as the BMW takes a sudden, skidding turn down a minor road signposted ‘Seuil de Narouze’. ‘The Romans wanted to do exactly the same. As did Charlemagne. But there was a technical problem. You noticed we were climbing for the last thirty kilometres or so? Well obviously, a canal would have to go up the hill and down the other side.’

  ‘But isn’t that why canals have locks?’

  ‘Locks can only get a boat uphill if there’s enough water coming down. And here the water needed to be coming do
wn on both sides of the hill.’

  Ignoring a no entry sign, Krystina has been racing towards a formidable-looking chain across the track ahead of us. At the very last minute she judges it robust enough to deter her from further acts of civil disobedience and slams on the brakes.

  ‘That’s what had defeated everyone,’ she explains, as we proceed on foot towards an attraction billed as the ‘Partage des Eaux’. ‘Until clever Monsieur Riquet spotted a spring up here that could be divided and channelled down in both directions.’

  We have reached what looks like a simple T-junction between two canals – the smaller waterway, the leg of the T, feeding the larger horizontal arms, which lead, it seems, respectively eastwards and westwards, towards the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Riquet’s spring has long since disappeared – swamped apparently by the various rivers that he diverted to augment what would otherwise have been a useless trickle.

  It all looks so simple and obvious – but the Inland Waterways Association of Great Britain was sufficiently moved to erect a plaque in 1981 as a token of its ‘grande admiration’, so I suppose I too should be impressed.

  ‘It must have taken a lifetime to build,’ I say to assure Krystina that I am.

  ‘Only fifteen years,’ she answers. ‘Despite needing tunnels and aqueducts to cross the more difficult terrain.’

  A burst of cheerful, heavily Dutch-accented greetings from a passing tourist long-boat, weighed low in the water by its cargo of Gouda, bicycles and sun-cream, prompts a footnote to the effect that the last commercial traffic died in 1989, before a brisk turn on a fashionable heel signals the end of the first part of the visit.

  Still on foot, I obediently follow Krystina down a tree-lined avenue towards a stumpy stone obelisk on a rocky plinth.

  ‘Poor old Riquet,’ she says at the foot of the obelisk. ‘He died just a few months before the canal opened in 1681. And he died completely penniless, having lost the whole of his personal fortune on the project. He’d made his money “farming” Louis XIV’s salt taxes. That’s how he came to be travelling so much and saw for himself how badly the region needed a better transport system. And the Royal Languedoc Canal, as it was known until the Revolution, fitted nicely into the King’s policy of opening up French trade routes. The only snag was, he couldn’t afford to contribute very much to justify the “Royal” bit, what with building Versailles and fighting his endless wars. But by this time, it had become a personal obsession for Riquet. Hence the poor man’s ruin …’

  ‘Krystina …’ I try to interrupt, having noticed some alarmingly black clouds approaching from the west.

  ‘Vast undertaking though, employing twelve thousand “heads” … “Heads”, you notice, not people. A man counted as one, but a woman only two-thirds … Anyway, a massive step forward. Opened up tremendous economic prospects for the Languedoc. Except for the wine growers.’

  She pauses long enough to register a distant peal of thunder but shrugs it off disdainfully.

  ‘Until the late eighteenth century, Languedoc wine still had Bordeaux protectionism to contend with. Heavy taxes, limits on barrel sizes and, cleverest of all, a ban on other regions’ wines, except in the weeks immediately after the vintage, when the new wines weren’t ready and the old ones had either been drunk or turned to vinegar.’

  A dramatic flash of lightning, illuminating the whole of the westward view, makes scarcely more impression than the thunder.

  ‘Consequently, most of the exports went by sea – from Louis’s new port of Sète, at the other end of the canal, on the Bassin de Thau. In fact, maybe we could go there on our way back . . .’

  ‘Krystina, look at that sky!’

  Reluctantly, she agrees to head directly for home. Equally reluctantly, she concedes that this might be one of the rare occasions that justifies the erection of the convertible’s roof – or rather, might have been, had it not become jammed from lack of use in the sunshine position.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll race the storm home,’ she promises, which strikes me as a greater cause for worry than the storm itself.

  However, almost true to her word, Krystina gets the BMW to within ten kilometres of the village before the rain catches up with us. Those are, however, ten kilometres too many, and by the time we reach the house, the whole of the courtyard is at least a couple of centimetres deep in water that cannot find anywhere dry enough to run away to. Waterfalls of rain are overflowing all along the normally ample gutters and the splashes bounce so far that even Uncle Milo’s deep arcades are inadequate to keep a would-be storm spectator dry today. Not that it matters, as those last ten kilometres have left us about as wet as we could ever be.

  We might almost as well join the tree frogs in the pool. When the swimming season first disrupted their routine, they took their stentorian croakings off to the stream, but tonight’s climatic conditions appear to have prompted a resoundingly jubilant return.

  Almost nothing is visible beyond the roses in the immediate foreground, their huge heads bowed almost to the ground. The valley and the hills on the other side have completely disappeared in the prevailing blackness. Only the romantic pile of rocks, that looks so like a ruined castle on the opposite skyline, stands silhouetted against a single patch of bright, white sky.

  ‘Glass of red wine, I think,’ says Krystina buoyantly, emerging from the house with an already opened bottle. ‘Warm you up!’

  The bottle that she has chanced upon happens, however, to be not just any old bottle. It is one of the tiny run of twelve that Virgile bottled by hand in advance of all the hiccups with last month’s mechanical mise en bouteille. I have had it for a couple of weeks but was letting it rest a bit before tasting it – something that Krystina’s spirited pourings may now be rendering futile.

  With glass in hand, I feel like a parent waiting for his child’s examination results: I so much want it to be good.

  ‘But this is amazing!’ comes Krystina’s speedy judgement, before I have more than sniffed the wine. ‘Where on earth did you get it?’

  I prevaricate a little but Krystina’s classroom days gave her plenty of practice at extracting truthful confessions from reluctant lips.

  ‘So that’s where you keep disappearing,’ she laughs, when the whole story is out. ‘I thought it was another woman!’

  I have an uneasy sense that life with Virgile will never be quite the same again, but for the moment I’m much more interested in his wine. Because it does indeed seem remarkable: all the complexity and elegance that might be hoped for in a much more lengthily matured wine, yet totally open and accessible poured straight from the bottle, just ten months after the vintage.

  ‘I shall be buying a lot of this,’ announces Krystina decisively.

  ‘It may not be quite so simple,’ I venture.

  ‘Nonsense,’ says Krystina. ‘You know me better than that!’

  *

  ‘She wants me out of the house,’ complained Manu. ‘It’s a golden opportunity. You can’t just stay here hoovering. Especially in these temperatures.’

  ‘But my house is just as deep in confetti as yours,’ I grumbled.

  ‘I know. She says I’m dropping it everywhere I go, even this morning. That’s why I’ve been ordered out. It doesn’t happen every day, you know!’

  ‘Only the morning after the Lodève carnival,’ I granted him, having paused to prevent Uncle Milo’s antiquated vacuum cleaner from overheating. ‘I bet they don’t have this much confetti in Rio de Janeiro!’

  I doubted in fact whether many of the elements of the previous night’s parade would have been familiar to the average Brazilian carnival-goer – the ‘float’ contributed by our village being no exception. Perhaps, if the committee had been willing to accept Krystina’s offer to underwrite a more ambitious budget, the crudely constructed château scenery might have wobbled on, intact, to the end of the circuit. Or maybe, if the podgy little daughter of the committee chairman had been lighter, her flimsy castle balcony might have supported h
er all the way to the finish. It would certainly have helped if Manu had put some more fuel in his tractor, before attempting to tow this rapidly disintegrating tableau vivant round the town. As it was, our carnival princess found herself mortifyingly immobilized in front of the very revellers who had just witnessed her undignified crash into the puny arms of her infant troubadour.

  The ones I really pitied were the majorettes who were next in the cavalcade behind us. They must have been sweltering in their red and silver toy-soldier jackets. But they still had to twirl their batons through every routine in their high-kicking, fishnet-stockinged repertoire, on one of the steepest hills in the Languedoc, while someone fitter than Manu sprinted off to fill a jerry can. Hence the prodigious quantities of confetti, dispensed at this juncture to distract the crowd from an embarrassing hiatus in the evening’s proceedings.

  ‘Is any of this really happening?’ a bewildered M. Vargas had asked – only recently recovered from his concussion and understandably suspecting a relapse.

  Mme Gros had watched the pageant from the comparative safety of one of the café terraces farther down the route – her place secured an hour or two before the spectacle began and a single Noilly Prat made to last the whole evening. This spared her the worst of both the paper snowstorm and her husband’s humiliation but word travelled fast and she has been slow to forgive, which only added to Manu’s desperation to escape.

  Almost anywhere, it seemed, would do, even my own unfinished ‘historical business’ down on the quays in Sète. Indeed, he was so relieved to have lured me out that he submitted uncomplainingly to my reiteration of the basics hammered home by Krystina on our storm-swept return from the canal.

  The most docile of pupils, he heard how the opening of the port in 1670 created important new export routes to England and the Netherlands, even sometimes to Paris, via Gibraltar and the Seine; how the early exports were mainly spirits and liqueurs – travelling better than table wines and commanding higher prices per volume; and how an explosion of planting in the immediate hinterland created a major new market in the sweet Muscat wines to which the location was particularly suited.