Virgile's Vineyard Page 16

  ‘That’ll be Muscat de Frontignan – only a stone’s throw from Sète,’ my passenger hinted hopefully.

  ‘I thought you didn’t like sweet wines,’ I answered, still obstinately determined to see what survived of the seventeenth-century merchants’ offices on the waterfront.

  ‘Bawf,’ said Manu as a shorthand for ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ and we continued towards Sète.

  But then a signpost offered an alternative source of salvation.

  ‘There’s always Muscat de Mireval,’ he wheedled. ‘Smaller, more exclusive really than Frontignan. It’s hardly off route. More of a short cut really. We could still be in Sète for lunch. And Muscat would be something new for you …’

  He was right. I hadn’t even begun to explore the region’s dessert wines. So I capitulated and followed the signpost.

  There is, however, a price to be paid for spontaneity: we have arrived in Mireval with neither appointment nor address, on a morning far too hot for aimless exploration.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take you to the place,’ Manu insists. ‘Just as soon as the name comes back to me …’

  We are, I believe, on our third circuit round the village when he notices a placard outside the Domaine de la Capelle, attributing ownership to ‘Mme Maraval et Fils’.

  ‘Eh, voilà finalement! The Maravals of Mireval,’ he chuckles. ‘How could I forget?’

  Exhausted, I turn into the narrow drive beside the cave.

  ‘And look, we’re in good company!’ He flourishes a leaflet from a pile near the doorbell. ‘Supplier to the Elysée Palace, it says. The Ritz as well.’ He basks in the glow of his own discernment.

  ‘How did you get to hear of us?’ enquires the spry-looking, middle-aged woman who arrives to unlock the cave.

  ‘Ah, par réputation, Madame.’ Manu taps a knowing finger to the side of his nose (presumably persuaded that Maraval fils makes the Muscats, while mother minds the shop). ‘If a wine is good enough for the President …’

  ‘We like to think our limey soil makes the Muscats here more elegant than those of Frontignan next door,’ says Madame Maraval, oblivious to flattery, as she unloads an armful of bottles from the fridge at the back of her spacious, efficient-looking cellar. ‘More “vivid” maybe. But the truth is, it’s only politics that kept us out of the Frontignan appellation in 1936, making us wait another twenty-three years for our own! Not that this is a Muscat de Mireval,’ she cautions, as she pours our first wine. ‘It’s a Muscat Sec – a Vin de Pays d’Oc that we started in 1998.’

  Manu seizes his glass as if it were the last dry white of his drinking career, not just the last of the morning.

  ‘Perfect for aperitifs or asparagus, many would say. But I’d drink this with anything,’ Mme Maraval enthuses. ‘So much fresher than those other cépages.’

  No doubt a second glass would have helped Manu weigh the proposition further but Mme Maraval is already introducing us to the classic Vin Doux Naturel.

  ‘Naturally sweet,’ she says. ‘Or some would argue, unnaturally sweet, thanks to the mutage – the adding of alcohol to arrest the fermentation.’

  ‘Like Carthagène?’ I ask.

  ‘Similar,’ she acknowledges. ‘In a Vin Doux Naturel, the juice is fermented slightly more. So you add less alcohol to get to your required total of fifteen degrees. But the wine still retains a high level of “residual sugar” – a minimum of a hundred and twenty-five grams per litre, in fact, to satisfy the regulations. This one here we make in a light, fresh style, using relatively high acidity grapes and bottling early. Whereas this’, she pours another, labelled ‘Parcelle 8’, ‘is quite different – from our oldest vines, with eighteen months in wood: 1999, only the second year we made it. Much richer but still fresh enough for an aperitif, don’t you think? Although I can’t say we’ve quite made up our minds about the use of wood. The Muscat grape’s so delicate.’

  Each of these Muscats – whether sweet or dry – seems quite simply ‘grapier’ than anything I have encountered from other varieties. And a very long way from the oxidized wines that must have been shipped from Sète to London.

  ‘Is this the same as the table variety?’ I ask.

  Manu assumes a collusive ‘I ask you!’ look to disassociate himself from my ignorance. But this is important. I am thinking now of my own intended plantings.

  ‘No, this is Muscat à Petits Grains,’ she explains. ‘Much better suited to wine-making, with its smaller grapes and lower yields. You’d normally grow the Alexandria Muscat for the table. Or the black Hamburg variety …’

  I could usefully hear more but Mme Maraval is already picking up their 1997 experiment, labelled ‘Gelée d’Automne’. ‘Something completely different,’ she emphasizes.

  Manu perks up. A blockbuster red perhaps? A crisp, astringent rosé even? But no, the deep, straw-like colour in the clear glass bottle tells him this will not be his idea of ‘completely different’. However, stoical as ever, he proffers his glass.

  ‘We wanted to make something sweet but without mutage,’ Mme Maraval elaborates. ‘Using late-harvested grapes. And I do mean late – not like most of the so-called Vendanges Tardives that you’ll find in the Languedoc. The end of November, compared with the first week of October for the Muscat Sec. Only possible in the best autumn weather conditions, when the grapes can dry on the vine, giving super-concentrated juice and potential alcohols around nineteen.’

  ‘Nineteen!’ I look warily at my glass.

  ‘I did say potential alcohols. In practice the fermentation stops around fifteen …’

  ‘You’ll understand better at vintage time,’ says Manu condescendingly.

  ‘Again the stopping of the fermentation leaves unfermented residual sugar,’ continues Mme Maraval, not noticeably awed by Manu’s mastery of these matters. ‘But only about fifty-five grams per litre – less than half the amount in a Vin Doux Naturel.’

  Manu’s nostalgic glance at the Muscat Sec tells me this is still more than ample for him.

  ‘Oh, but maybe you’d like to try this as well.’ She takes a last bottle from the fridge with less than her usual enthusiasm. ‘Last year’s experiment. Another late harvest but this time Chardonnay. “Grains d’Automne”, we call it. What do you think? I’m not so sure myself. All right if you like these other cépages. But, if you ask me …’

  ‘… you can’t beat a good Muscat.’ An affable young man in, I imagine, his early thirties completes her sentence, as he offers us a forearm to shake in lieu of the hand that a hasty wipe on his work-soiled overalls has failed to clean.

  ‘My son, Alexandre.’ Mme Maraval smiles and – our tasting completed – she hands us over to the younger generation.

  ‘We really ought to be going,’ says Manu, his priority now being lunch.

  I was already thinking we had left it too late for Sète – better to make that visit alone some other day. But Manu has never willingly missed a meal and he is anxious to investigate the more limited Mireval options before there is any risk of last orders being taken. Monsieur Maraval, however, seems determined to give us a tour of the cave.

  ‘Everything is geared to preserving the freshness of perfectly ripe fruit,’ he emphasizes. ‘That’s why we use only these temperature-controlled, stainless steel vats. We pick everything by hand – with several successive rounds of harvesting in each parcelle for maximum ripeness – and then we rush it into the cave, using pneumatic presses to extract the juice. But unfortunately I can’t show you those,’ he apologizes, as we prepare to say our goodbyes. ‘We felt there was still a risk of oxidation with the big one that we used to use and the smaller ones on order haven’t arrived. If they don’t hurry up, everything’s going to be Vendange Tardive – even the red!’

  Manu stops, one foot inside, the other outside the cave. He must have misheard. Mme Maraval said nothing about a red.

  ‘The Cabernet Franc,’ says Alexandre. ‘Our other new experiment. Didn’t my mother …?’

  But
his words are lost on my companion. Lunch suddenly forgotten, he is back at the tasting counter.

  *

  ‘Your friend doesn’t take “no” for an answer, does she?’ says Virgile.

  ‘Krystina, you mean?’

  ‘With a K and a Y,’ he confirms, as he pours me a glass of red wine from Jean-Marc’s well-chilled decanter.

  ‘She’s tracked you down already? Offering fistfuls of cash, no doubt. But you told her “nothing for sale” and sent her here?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean “no” for an answer on the wine.’ He smiles a little bashfully. ‘She accepted that fairly easily. I meant the invitation to dinner at her château.’

  ‘What did you say?’ I ask, trying not to sound too obviously delighted at this apparent refocusing of her attentions.

  ‘What do you think?’ he answers, frowning at his glass. ‘I haven’t got time for a social life. I mean, you’d have thought last week’s storm would have wiped out a few of my grapes, wouldn’t you? But not a bit of it,’ he sighs. ‘I’m having to employ a couple of people for a vendange en vert – stripping the bunches back to my goal of six or seven per vine.’

  ‘But what if there’s another storm?’ I ask, thinking that surely Krystina won’t let a little thing like grape-thinning stand in her way. ‘What if you end up with too few for the magic three glasses?’

  ‘I’ll have to take a chance. If I leave it any later, the vines will have wasted too much energy on the grapes that need to be removed.’

  He sniffs the wine doubtfully. It didn’t seem so bad to me but he hasn’t told me what it is yet.

  ‘You don’t recognize this?’ he asks.

  It does taste familiar but I’ll make a fool of myself if I try to guess, and Jean-Marc is too busy rushing between tables to offer me any clues.

  With no bookings for the evening, he invited the two of us to join him for a quiet threesome over some interesting bottles. He even shaved for the occasion. But thanks to the weather, Montpeyroux’s Place de l’Horloge has been overwhelmed with unexpected customers. There is scarcely an empty place at any of his large, wooden-slatted outdoor tables and even Céline, Virgile’s favourite waitress, has had no time for more than strictly professional courtesies.

  ‘It’s not as if I haven’t enough to do,’ Virgile sighs. ‘I was out at five-thirty this morning, ploughing up weeds – too much competition for the vines, in this heat. But with so much else to do, I’ve left it all a bit late.’

  I’m impressed but the important thing is, will Krystina be?

  ‘I should really be spraying everything for vine worms – organically, of course, using a special micro-organism that’s eaten only by these particular butterflies. There’s no harm to other insects. But once inside the butterflies, it starts munching its way through their intestines.’ He grins with the vengeful satisfaction of one who has already sweated to annihilate the first and second of the three generations that beset the vines in the course of a summer.

  ‘I don’t seem to hear so much about the moon these days,’ I remark, still clinging to my faith in Krystina’s tenacity.

  ‘Oh don’t!’ he moans. ‘I can’t remember when I last even looked at my biodynamic calendar. It’s just gathering dust! But next year …’

  ‘What do you think?’ Jean-Marc interrupts, with a nod towards the wine, as he hurries past with a perilous pile of empty dishes. ‘Has our boy done well?’

  ‘He means this is yours?’ I ask, as I try to reconcile the reticence in my glass with the opulence that was so impressive last week.

  ‘Doesn’t taste half as good as the hand-bottled sample, does it? It’s gone completely dumb – traumatized by the bottling, I suppose. It’ll be fine in a month or so,’ he endeavours to persuade himself. ‘But at least, now that Puech’s lorry has taken all the bottles away, I can forklift the barrels round to the garage and make a bit of space in the cave. I’m miles behind in preparing it for the vendange!’

  ‘What else would you like to drink, my friends?’ Jean-Marc reappears, mopping sweat from his forehead with the trademark tea-towel.

  ‘Or maybe even eat?’ implores Virgile.

  It is nearly ten o’clock and he has to be up at first light to plough another patch of vines before his six o’clock grape-thinners report for duty. Even Krystina, I am beginning to fear, may fail to find space for herself in this schedule.

  ‘Soon,’ says Jean-Marc and he darts to the other side of the square to take a dessert order.

  ‘I’ve had a letter from the co-op,’ says Virgile, having pushed his own production aside and selected something himself from the wine racks indoors. ‘About the land I’m renting in Saint Saturnin. Serge, the owner, used to take the grapes to the co-operative and the letter says they’re refusing to let me vinify my crop independently.’

  ‘Can they do that?’

  ‘It’s a term of my lease that my production’s outside the co-op. But Serge should have served them with a formal notice. I suddenly remembered the other day and typed up something for him to sign. But I can’t remember whether it was two or three months before the vendange that it was supposed to be served. If it’s two we might be all right.’

  ‘And if it’s three?’

  ‘Strictly, it’s Serge’s problem but in practice it’ll be mine as well. At the end of the day, it’ll be a question of money. We’ll see. I may have been in time and the co-op’s letter may just be a bluff.’

  ‘Can’t you get some legal advice?’

  ‘The only specialist that I know of is away on holiday.’

  ‘I’d really like to know your opinion of this.’ Jean-Marc pauses long enough to deposit two glasses of yet another red wine. Then he vanishes to deliver some bills to the first of his customers who are ready to leave. ‘I’ll be with you any minute now,’ he promises unpersuasively, as he passes back again in search of another table’s first courses.

  ‘How about you?’ asks Virgile, now ravenous enough to take the law into his own hands and rustle up some bread and olives from the kitchen. ‘Are you winning up there?’

  ‘It doesn’t feel like it. I thought things would have finished growing by now. Maybe I’m trying to water too much but I can’t seem to get it right. If I don’t irrigate, things shrivel and die; if I do, they grow faster than I can keep them under control. And of course, the more I clear away the jungle, the larger the area that I have to maintain. The grass on my top terraces is nearly waist-high. In fact, I’ve borrowed a couple of horses from a cousin of the Vargases.’

  ‘Petrol-free lawnmowers?’

  ‘It seems like my best bet. The machine that Manu persuaded me to spend all that money on is really better suited to a more modest garden like his.’

  It is just after midnight when Jean-Marc does at last join us for a bowl of chilled gazpacho, but no sooner is he seated than a customer query calls him away. By the time he returns the soup has ‘gone warm’, and much to his irritation poor overworked Céline has presumed the dish abandoned and cleared it away. But perhaps this is just as well, as the patron now has a series of seemingly endless goodnights to be said.

  The village clock is just striking one when the last guest leaves and the plates of chargrilled lamb that are destined for our table finally appear in the restaurant doorway. However, before an almost tearfully weary Céline can deposit them, Jean-Marc suddenly has misgivings about disturbing the villagers if we remain in the square, so we carry everything, including wines and glasses, inside to the discreet upper room where we fêted last month’s mise en bouteille. Then, just as hope flickers that we might at last enjoy a pleasant half-hour with our host before falling asleep on our plates, he remembers that he has forgotten to stack and padlock the outside furniture.

  ‘Start without me,’ he calls, as he disappears back down the staircase.

  Sadly, we both start and finish without him. Indeed, he is still in the bar, apparently dealing with the sensitive subject of Céline’s resignation, when we descend to make ou
r excuses for departure.

  ‘But what about cheese and dessert?’ he protests as we edge apologetically towards our vehicles. ‘At least a coffee, surely? We’ve hardly spoken all evening …’

  *

  I woke very late, feeling curiously disoriented and wondering blearily why the noises from outside my shutters seemed so exaggeratedly near and loud. The usual rasp of Manu’s van, for instance, was inexplicably reverberant as it struggled up the track – now rougher than ever since the storm. The familiar rustling from his gardening activities was somehow magnified into a tumultuous and oddly immediate hubbub.

  Reluctantly I opened first my eyes and then the shutters. I blinked in the mid-morning sunlight and slowly focused on the fact that I was mistaken. It was neither Manu’s van nor his gardening that had penetrated my unconsciousness. It was a huge yellow lorry, completely blocking the entrance to my drive. And on the back of the lorry, rotating from a kind of crane, an enormous mechanical scythe was ripping its way violently through the trees and shrubs beside my entrance-way.

  Loath as I was to face the world, there was no escaping the conclusion that one or two questions needed to be asked here – and asked before rather than after the surrounding vegetation had been entirely razed to the ground. I braced myself for a confrontation.

  ‘It seems the modern goat needs electricity,’ said the foreman, pointing towards the new bergerie on the nearby hill. ‘The supply has to come from here, which means the little wooden post that you’ve got at the moment won’t be big enough. So we’re giving you a lovely new one, free of charge.’ He gestured down the track towards a second yellow lorry, loaded high with concrete pylons.

  ‘But this is my land. And those are my trees you’re hacking down,’ I spluttered.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think you’ll find they’re yours,’ he said, as he opened a file of papers. ‘We’ve got all the necessary permissions from the owners …’

  ‘But I am the owner of this little triangle,’ I insisted and went to get my copy of the land registry plan.