Virgile's Vineyard Page 2
‘But I had far more Carignan than anything else,’ Sylvain continues. ‘So I had to sell it on its own. Which meant it couldn’t be Coteaux du Languedoc.’
‘C’est pas vrai! You mean, they’ve criminalized Carignan as well as Aramon?’ asks Manu, sensing a fellow-feeling with this young man after all and magnanimously extending a reconciliatory glass for a refill.
‘It can’t be more than fifty per cent of the blend, monsieur. So most of mine ended up as humble vin de pays.’
‘Even though it’s grown on Coteaux du Languedoc land?’ I ask.
‘Precisely. You see, the bureaucrats didn’t think the wine-buying public would get sufficient mental stimulus from just the one complicated system. So they carved up the map a second time, into hundreds of different vins de pays. A completely different set of names, running parallel with the first. The same land but different names and different conditions. Less restrictive but less prestigious.’
‘Some of them seem to command pretty prestigious prices,’ I say, remembering the New Year extravagance that started all this.
‘Nowadays, maybe. But in 1990 I could hardly give my Carignan away. Except to passing tourists who were too ignorant about names and grape varieties to be prejudiced.’
I take this as my cue to enquire whether there is any to spare for a passing local today. The telephone has hardly stopped ringing while we have been with him and I am not particularly optimistic but he says he could manage a case. And then we leave him to take a call from yet another hopeful, wanting to reserve an allocation of something he probably once spurned.
*
The village appears to be farther from the house than I thought and I suspect this morning’s expedition may well be the first and last time that I walk down in search of breakfast croissants. With most of my belongings at last unpacked and sufficient fallen branches cut into fire-sized pieces to keep me warm for the next few days, I felt it was time for a proper exploration on foot. But I soon realized that what is probably less than a kilometre as the crow flies must be much more than two by the dilapidated tarmac lane that follows the contours round the hill between the vines and the olive trees.
The vines were, of course, completely bare at this time of year – some neatly pruned, others still a ragged tangle – but the delicate, silvery grey foliage of the olive trees gently counterpointed the starkness of the rugged, fir-clad hills immediately behind me to the north. And somehow, the thought that this must be about the highest altitude that vines and olives can tolerate made these defining features of the Mediterranean seem all the more precious.
Halfway to the village and far from any home, an elderly couple were working in a tiny, terraced olive grove rising steeply beside the lane. Each appeared equally impervious to the cold. The woman’s dress was covered only by a thin nylon overall wrapped tightly round her frail-looking figure. The husband was jacketless in a woollen shirt, with braces supporting well-worn corduroy trousers which hung loosely off his waist, as though they once belonged to some plumper younger brother. They paused as soon as they saw me, apparently grateful for an excuse to massage the stiffness in their backs.
‘Bonjour, monsieur!’ they called out together, as if one voice alone might not have been strong enough to carry on the wind. ‘The English nephew, we suppose.’
I was startled to think that my well-worn overcoat and jeans had so quickly betrayed both my Englishness and nephewness but then I remembered that the lane really leads nowhere but to me and the Groses. So it didn’t need Chief Inspector Clouseau to crack my identity.
‘Did you get a good crop?’ they asked in their characteristic, tremulous unison.
‘I’ve no idea,’ I confessed. ‘I’ve only just moved in and I can hardly see the olive trees for the brambles and whatever else is climbing over them.’
‘Don’t leave it much later,’ they counselled, as they waved me on my way with a quavery ‘bon courage!’
Rounding the corner, I had the postcard view of the village, perfectly positioned on an oval hillock between two river valleys and surrounded by darker, more dramatic hills climbing up to the sheer white cliffs that support the Larzac plateau high above. As many ancient houses as the ingenuity of successive centuries could contrive clung tenaciously to even the most vertical of the hillock’s edges, with a picturesquely fortified château crowning the summit.
The main street was long, narrow, straight and steep. There was no pavement but rather a pair of deep stone ditches filled with fast-running water, making each side narrower still. Most of the houses rose as high as a fourth storey, the ground floor remaining invariably windowless, with a small door for people and a larger one for animals or machinery. Many of them had wrought iron balconies, with enough washing hanging on them to satisfy me that I was genuinely in the South of France but few enough geraniums to reassure me that I was still in one of its less discovered parts. Every twenty metres or so, an even narrower alleyway offered a miniature view of the countryside beyond, often no more than a tiny glimpse beneath one of the curious, arching, stone bridges that the residents seem to favour to link the upper levels of the buildings on either side, facilitating who knows what degrees of neighbourly intimacy.
There was, however, no sign of the master baker whose trading presence I had so rashly assumed. I did pass one shop professing to butchery but its faded red and white blind looked as if it had not been raised in fifteen years. The only indication of commercial life was a tiny general store up in the Place de la Fontaine, near the Salle des Fêtes. It had three small rooms, strung together in an awkward ‘Z’ shape and filled, remarkably, with almost everything that the villagers might need, from handmade cheeses to photocopying services. But no croissants. The pretty young woman who appeared to be the owner explained that it operates as a ‘dépôt de pain’ but only ten croissants are deposited each day and six of those are reserved for the château. You have to be up early for the leftovers.
I settled for a baguette and crossed the square to investigate what appeared to be the village’s only café. An outside terrace was shrouded in a zipped-up wall of transparent plastic sheeting. The whole establishment looked closed for the season but encouragingly convivial sounds from within suggested otherwise. I was searching in vain for an alternative entrance when the harassed-looking patronne came out to take pity on me and show me the secret panel in the plastic.
About a dozen customers nodded civilly but silently in my direction. They were all male and all perched at the bar on an assortment of stools. The bar itself had started life as a traditional zinc, before suffering its more recent mock-wood extension. The centre of the room was completely dominated by a billiard table, swaddled in a protective plastic sheet, which in turn was half-covered by menus, bread-baskets and sauce bottles. Squashed between this and the bare stone walls, a line of small imitation-marble tables, already laid with cruets and cutlery, completed the impression that eating might be the café’s secondary sport.
The twelve pairs of muddy boots at the bar testified to several hours already spent in the fields and most of the group were enjoying a mid-morning, restorative, aniseed-flavoured pastis or, failing that, a glass of red wine or beer. However, remembering my breakfast baguette, I confined myself to a coffee.
The bustling, chain-smoking patronne gave no sign that she considered my order effeminate. She simply darted about, as petite as most of her clientèle were burly, her outfit as curiously matched as her décor. The formal, slightly prim cashmere top contrasted oddly with a loose, almost slovenly skirt, and the neat patent shoes belonged to a different woman altogether from the untidy ponytail. Maybe she was simply trying to be all things to all customers.
Everyone else called her ‘Babette’. In fact, everyone else gave her careworn cheeks at least three kisses on arrival or departure and I wondered how long I should have to be here to count as an insider.
‘Et le pauvre Manu?’ she asked, when she brought me the coffee. ‘Comment va-t-il?’
Again I had the eerie impression that someone must have pinned a note of my address to the back of my jacket. Was I really the first stranger they had seen all winter?
‘Manu’s my cousin,’ Babette explained, as she lit a new cigarette with the stub of the old and left the latter smouldering in my ashtray. ‘He said you’d be down before long. By rights, he ought to be my best customer. But guess-who placed the café out of bounds. I’m supposed to inform on him, if he comes here on his own, but I sometimes smuggle him in and out the back way!’
She offered me a well-thumbed copy of the local newspaper and returned to the bar to embrace another wave of thirsty labourers. I had been wondering whether tomorrow’s weather forecast might augur well for a first assault on my olive jungle but I didn’t think I could face the gothic horrors predicted on the back page. I was just immersing myself in a more comforting report of a local onion-growing competition, when a new female voice intruded from a half-hidden corner behind the billiard table.
‘I can see that you’ve been wondering whether I’m English,’ it said.
I was, in fact, wondering nothing of the sort. What I am wondering is how much henna it must have taken to produce the mass of vividly auburn curls bearing down on my table. I suspect, however, that, beneath the expensive cut of an intimidating black trouser suit, she is neither as young nor as slender as she would like to be.
‘Krystina,’ she booms, above the clank of her costume jewellery. ‘With a K and a Y. I live at the château. Bought it with my divorce money. Don’t worry, I know who you are,’ she assures me, as she draws a chair rather closer to mine than an acquaintance of this brevity would normally justify. ‘Steeped in history, of course, the château. Which I love. Used to teach it, you see. History. Before I married my serial philanderer. So it feels like I’m getting back to my roots …’
The torrent of self-explanation continues in these conditions of unlooked-for proximity for another minute or two. When I finally have an opportunity to turn the monologue into something closer to conversation, all I can think of to ask is a rather pedestrian ‘How much do you know about the history of the Languedoc?’ Then I foolishly add that I’m terribly keen to learn all about the region’s wine-making history. Not that I’m uninterested, of course, but I really should have foreseen how avidly the merest flicker of enthusiasm would be pounced on.
‘I don’t even know when it started,’ I fumble. ‘Under the Romans, I’ve always assumed …’
‘Wrong!’ My history mistress unexpectedly slaps a hand on mine. ‘I shall have to take you to Agde to meet my favourite Greek boy. Tuesday would be a good day for me. I’ll come up for you at nine. Don’t worry, I know where you are. In fact, would you like a lift now? It’s raining, I see.’
The rain is actually extremely heavy but I suspect I am in enough trouble already, so I extricate my hand and insist on walking home. However, by the time I arrive it is nearly midday and my soggy baguette has lost most of its appeal.
Maybe I should just drive back to the café for lunch.
*
‘Does it ever snow?’ I ask Manu. It has been bitterly cold since I arrived and there were icicles on the plants beside the terrace fountain this morning.
‘Here?’ says Manu, as a shorthand for ‘Don’t you northerners understand anything?’
We are returning from an expedition to purchase the terrifying quantity of tools that Manu assured me would be indispensable, if I were to have any hope of reclaiming the olive trees. He goes hunting with the manager of the local DIY hypermarket (a great leveller, la chasse) and he promised that his networking skills would guarantee me massive discounts. But my credit-card limit has nonetheless suffered a serious assault and somehow Manu’s insistence that I buy everything at the top end of the market encourages a sense that many of the more luxurious items in the back of his van are also destined for active service on a neighbouring property.
‘Well, maybe it snows once every fifteen years,’ he continues. ‘Like 1986, for instance. You wouldn’t believe it. Completely snowed in, we were. I mean, completely. Up to the windows. For three days it was like living in an igloo. But that must be, what? Fifteen years ago now.’
Making us just about due for another of nature’s specials, I calculate, as a car coming towards us from the heights of the Larzac plain passes with snow spilling off its roof. Not quite my vision of life in the balmy south.
‘But is there any danger for the vines?’ I ask.
‘Not in the Languedoc,’ says Manu. ‘It very rarely goes below minus five down here and you’d need something like minus eighteen to damage a vine.’
‘I’ve heard the Russians bury theirs.’
‘Unnatural!’ snorts Manu, as if at some scandalous depravity. But then an unfortunate flash of free association reminds him of some rather special vodka, stashed away in his cellar, which I really have to sample before lunch.
*
This morning I made a start on the liberation of the olive trees. Manu’s preferred models of strimmer and chainsaw have been put into action and I feel unexpectedly exhilarated. All my previous urban gardening efforts in England now seem depressingly mean and pointless: paltry struggles to create tiny patches of passably abundant life where none would naturally belong. Here, the opposite adventure of taming twelve acres of nature’s super-abundance seems infinitely more exciting.
Unfortunately, however, it also seems infinitely more infinite. It is not simply a matter of everything being overgrown. There is, for instance, also the little matter of water. The house is called ‘Les Sources’ in honour of the natural springs that Uncle Milo ‘captured’ to provide the sole supply of water. After so many months of abandonment, it is amazing that the taps are still running – still more so that the water is the best I have ever tasted. Yet elsewhere nature has started to reassert itself. The spring that is routed through the courtyard fountain flows on into a deep freshwater pool farther down the hillside. Memories of clear, refreshing swimming there on my early visits have successfully put me off bright blue, chlorinated rectangles for life. However, today it has all the murky greenness of a forgotten village pond. Another spring that once fed a little brook running down through the orchard to the river has silted up, leaving the apple trees paddling in a bog.
There is enough work here for a lifetime, never mind a year. However, by lunchtime, protesting muscles in every part of my body were demanding some respite from the morning’s unfamiliar impositions. So I generously agreed to treat them to lunch at a little village restaurant called Le Pressoir, which I spotted in Saint Saturnin when we were coming back from Montpeyroux. Some homemade chicken liver paté and tender lamb chops grilled on a fire made from gnarled old vine-stocks had revived me just enough to face the afternoon shift. However, hobbling back to the car, I spotted an intriguing, freshly chalked legend above a set of peeling double doors on the other side of the square.
‘Virgile Joly – Cave Particulière – Depuis 2000,’ it said.
And in the second week of January 2001, how could I fail to be impressed? So, for all my good intentions on the olive terraces, I tried a tentative knock.
A cheerful ‘Come in, if you can squeeze in!’ is the immediate response, because Virgile Joly’s cave proves to be as minute as it is recent. Though little bigger than a lockup garage it is packed with far more equipment than anyone would have thought possible in such a confined space. Some of it looks conspicuously new, like his dozen or so wooden barrels and the four tall, fibreglass fermentation tanks, or ‘cuves’ as he calls them; the rest, including a variety of strange machinery with unidentifiable roles in the wine-making process, looks much more obviously second- or third-hand. Everything, however, is impeccably tidily ordered. Indeed, my arrival has clearly interrupted a fastidious scrubbing of the concrete floor, but Virgile still seems only too happy to lean on his broom for a chat.
‘Last year was my first vintage,’ he explains enthusiastically, in precise, well-educated French with just
an occasional southern twang. (He is well-spoken, well-dressed, well-groomed and, seemingly, well under thirty.) ‘Not the first vintage I’d worked on. I’d already been helping other people for nine or ten years. But the first with my own vines. Why don’t you come and have a look at them?’
I climb into his elderly but spotless white Mercedes van and we drive a few kilometres outside the village to a spot where rows of vines appear to stretch as far as I can see across the gently sloping plain.
‘This is my Carignan,’ he explains, pointing to one expanse of vines. ‘And here’s my Syrah,’ he continues, pointing to another apparently identical patch. ‘Then over there, I’ve got some Grenache Noir.’
‘Does that mean that you make three different wines?’ (I realize I shall simply have to get used to some unfamiliar grapes down here: no sign yet of my old friends, Cabernet and Chardonnay.)
‘Not at all. I mix them. In fact, for Coteaux du Languedoc, you’re obliged to mix at least two varieties, or cépages, as we call them.’
‘You mix them after you’ve made the wines?’
‘No, before. Some people make the assemblage afterwards but – well, you’ve seen my cellar – I don’t really have room to keep them separate. And, in any case, I think you get a more complex wine, if the grapes ferment together.’
‘And these vines – you bought them only last year?’
‘They’re rented. It’ll be a while before I can afford to buy anything. But yes, it was only last March that I got hold of them – just in time to give them a hasty prune.’ He laughs at the memory. ‘The only piece of equipment I had was a pair of secateurs. Everything else, including the cellar, came later, as I persuaded the bank manager to lend me a little bit more for the necessities of each new season. The trouble is, I can’t get it all in. I’m going to have to move the wine press out to make room for a bottling machine that I’m borrowing.’