Virgile's Vineyard Page 18

  ‘We’ll be happy to share a glass,’ they add, leaving Manu happily draining two, as a cheer goes up from the crowd and yet another bull evades its gang of would-be assailants.

  ‘In my day, I’d have managed a two-year-old on my own,’ swears Manu. His boasting is, however, rapidly silenced by a contemptuous contralto laugh at his elbow.

  ‘Ah, te voilà, ma chère,’ says a man whose liberty is about to be forfeit.

  *

  ‘Of course I knew about the local firewaters,’ said Krystina, producing a couple of outsized antique balloon glasses. ‘Languedoc brandy used to be just as famous as Cognac.’

  I took my pick from a well-stocked seventeenth-century-looking drinks cabinet and followed her out on to a starlit terrace.

  Virgile’s hardness-to-get had unfortunately left me still in the frame. But my house was teeming with sun-seeking families from obscure corners of my address book and Virgile had his brother visiting. So, reluctantly, I was risking alternative refuge in one of the château’s sumptuous guest suites, having first discreetly verified that it could be locked from the inside.

  ‘It was even your thirteenth-century friend, da Villanova, down at the Medicine Faculty, who introduced the technique to France,’ Krystina explained as she steered me towards a jasmine-scented pergola. ‘Admittedly, it was Cognac that established the country’s first distillery ages later, in 1624, but it didn’t take our local boys long to catch up.’

  I was too engrossed in my fruity Marc de Muscat de Frontignan to be over-disconcerted by the proximity enforced by Krystina’s tiny stone bench.

  ‘Brandy was a perfect solution for low-quality wine – mainly sold to sailors at first because it took up less space and travelled better than wine. It soon spread ashore though, particularly to the Northern European markets. A hundred thousand hectolitres a year leaving Sète by the end of the seventeenth century. A thousand distilleries …’

  Languedoc eaux de vie might soon have become my mastermind subject, if Krystina had not chosen this unlikely moment to pounce. I should have seen it coming, but I was too enthralled by the stars. I had never seen so many and so bright. And anyway, who would have expected the lunge, when it came, to be so sudden?

  The brandy balloon fell from my hand.

  ‘Oh, leave it!’ she breathed, no more bothered by the broken goblet than she was by the wasted marc.

  ‘No really …’ I tried to wriggle free. ‘I’ll get a broom.’

  ‘We were made for better than that,’ she panted and tried to pull me closer.

  ‘You could cut yourself,’ I persisted until, unwillingly, she accepted that the mood, like the glass, had been shattered.

  ‘Don’t bother to wake me in the morning,’ she called as she swept from the terrace. ‘I’ve decided not to come to Faugères.’

  *

  Matthieu gave me two Faugères addresses to find: two growers spear-heading the revival of an entirely different eau de vie, the ‘Fine de Faugères’ – a distillation of the local wine itself, he told me, as opposed to its grape pressings.

  As I arrive at the first, in the heart of the village of Lenthéric, a dusty, dented 50cc motorbike draws up from the opposite direction. By most people’s standards, Didier Barral has been enormously successful since he persuaded his father, Léon, to leave the local co-operative in 1993, but he despises what he sees as his profession’s usual badges of achievement.

  ‘That’s not how I see success,’ he says, as he treats me to a parody of the ‘modern wine-maker’ directing vineyard operations by mobile phone from the wheel of a Range Rover. ‘For me, it’s a question of happiness in what I’m doing, fulfilling work for the people who help me and a healthy balance of nature on my land.’

  From anyone less refreshingly down-to-earth, Didier’s aspirations might have sounded pompous, but from him they are both humbling and inspiring: the only possible honourable creed.

  He is already offering a glass of straw-coloured white wine before I can explain that I am really on the trail of the Faugères fine.

  ‘That’s not so easy,’ he explains, as he gives the greying stubble on his otherwise youthful cheeks a pensive scratch. ‘All in bond, you see – so we don’t have to pay the tax until it’s had its three years in wood. But that’s ninety per cent Terret, what you’ve got there – the traditional Faugères brandy grape. And like the fine, it’s aged in wood. That’s why there’s a slight oxidation in colour and taste. It’s a natural product you see.’

  I explain that, having sampled the fine at Matthieu’s, I am not so much hoping to taste it as to find out more about its ‘renaissance’. For this, Didier suggests I should try the second of my addresses – but not before I have tasted a formidable selection of his reds.

  It seems a shame to have left Manu behind, but ever since one of the grandchildren fell off the grotesque inflatable alligator which now dominates the deep end of the pool, my neighbour has been confined to base for lifeguarding duties. ‘Your friends really mustn’t feel excluded,’ said Mme Gros, when she saw them leaving for the beach this morning. ‘The kiddies are very happy to share.’

  Didier explains how he usually keeps the individual grape varieties – the Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre, Carignan and Cinsault – scrupulously separate until they are blended just before the final bottling, but every sample seems as rewarding as many another grower’s finished wines. He also keeps everything for two years before bottling – partly in wood for his top blend but otherwise in stainless steel – which avoids the need for filtering. Natural products again, he emphasizes.

  If there is a common characteristic running through all the different cuvées, it must be their ripe, fruity intensity. One of the ripest and fruitiest of all is his Mourvèdre – a variety outside the range that I have encountered with Virgile but one that I have heard is notoriously difficult to bring to maturity.

  ‘I never have any problem,’ says Didier unapologetically. ‘It’s all a matter of how you manage the land. The one thing Mourvèdre can’t stand is drought, but if your vineyard is a healthy, balanced, natural environment, you’ll have all kinds of insects and animals burrowing down into the soil, letting whatever moisture there is get down to the roots. It’s simple, natural things like that which make the difference.’

  His aim, he summarizes with a modest smile, is to make something irresistible: a bottle of wine that no one would willingly leave unfinished. It sounds so simple and obvious but I suppose the measure of his success must be my own almost Manu-like reluctance to hand in my glass.

  At the Château de Fabrègues, a couple of kilometres outside the village, the facts that I was looking for emerge with the speed and precision of a practised publicist who clearly longs to see both the name and the substance of Fine de Faugères on everyone’s lips.

  ‘Appellation Contrôlée since 1947,’ explains Jean-Luc Saur, the dark-green-boiler-suited proprietor of the château and president of the appellation. ‘Long before the wines got their classification in ’82. But ironically, no one was making much fine in ’47. Demand for spirits was declining and the distillery that had a virtual monopoly was holding massive stocks, up to a hundred years old – so there wasn’t much incentive to make any more. In fact, production dried up altogether in the fifties.’

  ‘Until Matthieu?’ I ask.

  ‘More or less,’ he acknowledges, as he ushers me into a long, tunnel-vaulted tasting room. ‘One or two people did experiment but, to qualify for the appellation, you have to do all the distilling and maturing in Faugères, as well as simply growing your grapes here. So until Matthieu set himself up inside the boundaries, anything distilled elsewhere ranked as simple Eau de Vie du Languedoc.’

  ‘So last year’s was the first authentic fine for half a century?’

  ‘Absolutely. With thirteen growers participating.’

  ‘And more than that this year, I assume?’

  ‘Less, I expect. Last year’s production will keep most people going for a while. I’
m sure we’ll make more ourselves, but remember, we’ve already got five thousand bottles’ worth from the last vintage, doing its three years in oak. And I’m not kidding myself that we’ll be selling it in cases of six! All of it still in bond, of course, but maybe you’d like to taste our wines,’ he offers. ‘You’ll find them different from most of the Faugères you’ve tried. We don’t believe in reds for easy early drinking.’

  I am grateful for the warning. I take a tentative sip of the first densely black sample and find it almost overwhelmingly astringent: the bitter taste of tannin, which Virgile has taught me comes from contact with the grapeskins and pips. I am prepared to believe its importance in making slow-maturing, long-lived wines, but for me, it is all too reminiscent of over-steeped tea and I can really only take on trust the idea that something fruitier might be lurking in the background for the future.

  Monsieur Saur, meanwhile, is positively relishing the austerity. ‘They’re tough in their youth but they’ve great potential,’ he promises.

  But it is Didier Barral’s irresistibility yardstick that comes to mind, as I eye my unfinished glass.

  *

  The last of my guests are gone – some more reluctantly than others.

  There were those who realized within minutes of arrival that they had made a terrible mistake. Those unfamiliar insects in the showers, the unexpectedly fresh temperature of the freshwater pool, that wildness and unpredictability everywhere, both outside and inside the house, were all so far removed from the sanitized Mediterranean villa of their imaginings. This group tended to console itself by sitting moodily in deckchairs and emptying glasses faster than I could open bottles.

  Others, however, embraced both the pleasures and the challenges of a life beyond chlorine and air-conditioning. They found such inspiration in my inexhaustible fig tree that they begged to monopolize the kitchen at mealtimes. They saw such charm in my picturesquely impractical granite sink that they fought for the privilege of washing up. They then harnessed themselves to my strimmer for the rest of the day to work up an appetite for the next round.

  Some were so enamoured that they now want to buy houses of their own here. One or two, indeed, want to buy my house here but I think I have convinced them that it is not for sale. I have yet to work out how I shall find either the time or the money, after this year, to keep it going in the manner which it deserves but it is emphatically not for sale.

  So yes, the last of my guests have finally gone. The last of the breakages is replaced and the depleted foodstores are replenished. At least, they will be, as soon as I have driven home from the Wednesday morning Clermont l’Hérault market.

  I ought to be speeding straight back with the more perishable purchases but it seems ages since I last saw Virgile, so I decide to make the small diversion to Saint Saturnin, to ask him when the long-awaited assault on the grape harvest might be likely to start. He asked me to be on stand-by for active service from the end of the month but I’ve not heard from him since.

  The familiar white Mercedes van is parked in its usual place beside the church but the cave is locked and there is no answer to my knock at the door of his flat. Pius spots me from the Le Pressoir terrace and beckons me over for a briefing.

  ‘He’s ill,’ he says with a frown. ‘Taken to his bed with a fever. A virus, he says, but more like simple exhaustion, if you ask me. Well, you know as well as I do the hours he’s been working.’

  ‘I couldn’t make him hear,’ I explain.

  ‘He doesn’t want to see anyone,’ says Pius, shaking his head.

  ‘But what about the vendange?’ I ask, in the hope of reassurance.

  ‘I’d say, it doesn’t look very promising,’ is Pius’s grim-faced reply.

  September

  ‘This is the most important decision of the year,’ said Virgile, when he finally called me from his sickbed. ‘To start or not to start the vendange.’ He was still feeling feverish but he had managed to drag himself out to do a round of the vines, to monitor the state of play. ‘I’ve taken some sample pickings,’ he explained, ‘to check on the sugar levels. I reckon I should be starting on Monday. The trouble is, there’s so much preparation that I ought to be doing in the cave.’

  ‘You’ll manage,’ I tried to reassure him. ‘You always do. Much better to get some rest.’

  ‘At least it should stay fine,’ he consoled himself through the muffling of his duvet. ‘Set fair until the next new moon, I hope, around the middle of the month. So we’ve a bit of time to play with. You know, I didn’t even start until that time last year but everything’s so much more advanced … I really must get the equipment sterilized.’

  ‘Get some rest,’ I urged him again. ‘But is there anything I can bring you? Some grapes, perhaps?’

  ‘Very funny,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you on Monday.’

  But when Monday came, Virgile had only half his team available. A couple of Polish girls who helped him last year had telephoned to say that their train from Warsaw was going to take them three days and Régine had defected at the last minute to his friend Olivier at Mas Jullien. So, pragmatically, he persuaded himself that a further delay would do no harm and said he would call me as soon as he was ready to push the button. By Friday, I was beginning to wonder what else could have gone wrong, but it was only when he finally rang on Sunday to say that my phone had been out of order for half the week that I realized I had missed the first three days.

  He sounded far too excited by the quality of the harvest to mind about my absent pair of hands. He had started on Thursday with his earliest ripening variety, the Grenache Noir, then followed with the Syrah from Jonquières on Friday and his Cinsault down at Nébian on Saturday.

  ‘The grapes are so healthy,’ he marvelled. ‘Such concentrated sugar. Amazing potential alcohols! Well, thirteen and a half for Syrah, that’s not so unusual. But fifteen for the Grenache and, you’ll never believe it, twenty for the Cinsault! That’s not wine,’ he laughed, ‘it’s confiture! The kind of vintage you dream about!’

  So I could hardly wait to be part of a dream.

  There is, however, nothing more likely to ensure the return of a sharp sense of reality than a Monday morning bent double, rummaging amongst the greenery for the grapes and cursing the fact that the Saint Saturnin Syrah is the one parcelle where Virgile decided to take a chance and go easy on the leaf-and-bunch-thinning. It is not so bad for the Polish girls, Magda and Margherita. They are short enough not to have to stoop so much and anyway, the others have all had three days to acclimatize. Even Arnaud, the lanky young electrician, still waiting for the ‘real job’, bows uncomplainingly to his task. But for me, as the morning advances, an all-consuming craving to stretch myself anywhere flat on my back – even in the stoniest space between the vines – eclipses even my hunger pangs.

  ‘And all for just three glasses per vine,’ I keep thinking.

  The bunches have been collected in small plastic crates – only about thirty centimetres deep to avoid putting too much pressure on the grapes – and Virgile wants to take a trailer-load back to base at midday.

  ‘Please, please let me be picked for trailer-loading duties,’ I think to myself, as I try to catch Virgile’s eye with a surge of what I hope will be convincingly muscular-looking grape-snipping. ‘I don’t care how heavy the crates are – anything for a change of posture.’

  But Virgile already knows the sinewy zeal that Arnaud will bring to the task and I am condemned to carry on crouching until lunchtime.

  Tiring as the work is, there is never a moment’s slackening of the team’s attention to detail. Even when Virgile absents himself briefly for a spot of troubleshooting elsewhere, a lingering sense of his quiet, perfectionist authority somehow keeps everyone motivated.

  ‘Did you ever see such healthy grapes?’ enthuses Florent, an incongruously stylish journalist friend of Virgile’s younger brother, who is ‘between newspapers’ but clearly needs a regular income to finance the expensively cut, floppy-fring
ed hairstyle that refuses to stay out of his eyes as he bends for the next bunch.

  ‘Not where I am,’ grumbles Gérard, the final member of the team, a neurotic-looking Northerner of indeterminate age who, as far as I can gather, has come to live with his mother in the Languedoc in the hope of forgetting a broken marriage. ‘Just my luck to chose a row with so many rotten grapes,’ he whines, as if nature were conspiring with his former wife to make his misery complete.

  ‘Careful,’ says Virgile, intervening. ‘Most of those grapes you’re cutting out from those bunches are just a bit dry. It’s only actual rot that needs to go.’ Unseen by Virgile, Gérard pulls a face, half-despairing, half-mutinous. I know how he feels – the two conditions look so similar.

  As if to rub salt in our weary wounds, we seem to be surrounded by neighbouring growers with huge mechanical harvesting machines, which are busy piling effortlessly indiscriminate mountains of grapes into enormous open trailers. No fastidious grape selection over there.

  ‘All destined for my friends at the co-op,’ says Virgile, with a wink, as he reads my thoughts. ‘Actually, I’ve decided it’s the only option for my unwanted Grenache Blanc. It’s going to be machine-picked tomorrow and taken down to Gignac, where at least I know the co-op won’t make a fuss if I change my mind next year. But I still wish I didn’t have to do it mechanically. It isn’t just a question of picking perfect grapes,’ he explains, as he shows me some bedraggled stalks from which a neighbour’s fruit has just been rudely ripped. ‘You see what it does to the vine. Leaves it confused, thinking there’s something still to be fed, instead of building up energy for the winter. But talking of food …’

  Saint Saturnin’s clock has now twice gladdened our hearts with a twelfth stroke.

  We return to the flat to find Virgile’s once fastidiously tidy kitchen looking as if it has been vandalized. More dishes than I thought he possessed are piled high on every surface. Domesticity is obviously alien to the Polish girls, who are ‘camping’ in the allegedly uninhabitable accommodation above the cave (the height of luxury, they say, after last year’s tent). Domestic order is presumably equally foreign to Florent, who has spent the last few nights even closer to the chaos, on the sofabed. But at least he can cook. Admittedly, seven ravenous grapepickers who have been hard at work since 7.45 may not be the most exacting gastronomes but awesome quantities of Florent’s hastily assembled pasta dish seem to disappear within minutes of being served.