Virgile's Vineyard Read online

  ‘Assume total ignorance,’ I reply, having only the haziest idea how the odd-looking contraption in front of me is proposing to turn the mound of steaming marc inside it into eau de vie.

  ‘All you really need to understand is that alcohol and water evaporate at different temperatures,’ he says. ‘Seventy-eight degrees for alcohol and a hundred for water – so the vaporized alcohol is drawn off first. It recondenses in the form of alcohol as it passes through here.’ He points to an arching pipe that rises from the ‘dustbin-lid’ and descends to a smaller receptacle on the other side. ‘In fact, it goes through twice to achieve sufficient purity and strength but that’s basically all there is to it.’

  ‘Is this mine?’ calls Virgile from the garage, where he is lifting the lid of an immaculately gleaming stainless steel container.

  Matthieu nods affirmatively and, scooping a little out in a glass, Virgile explains that it’s a blend of Syrah and Grenache. It was made from the best of his marcs, delivered last week and already finished.

  ‘Except that it’s eighty per cent alcohol,’ he warns, and he laughs at my sharp intake of breath as I taste it. ‘It has to be watered down for normal consumption.’

  ‘And aged for about three years to round it out,’ adds Matthieu. ‘But fortunately for his cash flow, he only pays the tax when he takes it away.’

  ‘Otherwise I’d be broke,’ says Virgile. ‘With two hundred litres in here and another fifty from last year!’

  Matthieu is just proposing a modest diminution of the fifty for comparison, when the telephone interrupts him.

  ‘A couple of minutes,’ he assures the caller. ‘Promise,’ he adds and replaces the receiver. ‘That’s why I told you in August that I’m not going to get too big,’ he says, as he reaches for his coat and his keys. ‘If my son says he’s home from school early, I want to be there.’

  *

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ fumes Krystina in front of the third pair of firmly locked gates since our morning espresso.

  It all began at a sunlit café on Béziers’s broadest boulevard. She was explaining how the city had changed beyond all recognition on the back of its early nineteenth-century brandy wealth, with a hundred and fifty distillers and a weekly eau de vie market which was one of the most important in France. Then, it seems, around the middle of the century, the brandy wealth had adroitly turned itself into wine wealth as demand for wine and competition from other spirits, especially Cognac, both increased. Finally, the resulting fortunes had been channelled into château-building: a remarkable hundred or more springing up within fifty kilometres of Béziers.

  Unfortunately, however, they are proving rather less accessible to the public than Krystina confidently assumed when she insisted on a day’s deferral of my apple-tree pruning. They encompass, she assures me, just about every style you can think of – even an oddly English Neo-Gothic – but their gates (and we have now failed to get past a fourth pair) are tending to look very much the same.

  ‘The Languedoc nobility built very few grand houses under the Ancien Régime,’ says Krystina, putting on her bravest face, as we drive on to number five. ‘Not just because they were relatively hard up but because they were far enough from Court to avoid the ruinous royal progresses that forced so many of their northern colleagues into expensive building programmes. These are all “new money”,’ she explains, as she rings fruitlessly at another bell. ‘Either directly from brandy and wine or indirectly from ancillary trades like barrel-making.’

  With a last despairing tug on the bell chain, even Krystina knows she is beaten, but the sun is shining, the leaves of the autumn vines are glowing red and gold and, most important of all, we have a picnic in the boot of the BMW.

  A break for lunch, however, implies no break in the history lesson.

  ‘They weren’t just investing in bricks and mortar,’ she continues seamlessly, whilst I unpack an elaborate suite of picnic furniture. ‘They were also spending money on experimental crossbreeds and improved technology. Not what you’d think of as modern, of course. More a matter of horse-drawn ploughs replacing mattocks, that kind of thing. But quality and keeping potentials were genuinely improving.’

  ‘A golden age?’ I ask, wondering whether we really need the second parasol.

  ‘Until disaster struck,’ she confirms, with a peremptory signal that we do. ‘Ironically, it was all a result of that international crossbreeding activity. First came powdery mildew, from North America – oïdium, as your friend Virgile would call it.’ Her tone implies the abandonment of all ambition to make him her friend, as does the savagery with which she stabs the parasol spike into the ground. ‘The wretched fungus reduced the Hérault crop by sixty per cent within three years of its arrival in 1851.’

  ‘But surely oïdium was treatable with sulphur?’

  ‘So they discovered after three or four years of crisis,’ she grants me. ‘But almost as soon as they’d done so, a second calamity threatened to wipe out every vineyard in Europe.’

  ‘The phylloxera fungus?’ I ask, determined to win what few points I can on botanical health hazards.

  ‘It wasn’t a fungus,’ snaps Krystina, impatiently watching me struggle with her absurdly heavy hamper. ‘It was a parasitic aphid, about a millimetre long, which fed on vine roots and eventually killed them. But it also came from North America.’

  She pulls a luxurious-looking bottle of champagne from the hamper.

  ‘It arrived in the Hérault in 1867 and by 1881 the whole département was infected. At first, nobody understood why the vines were withering. Growers blamed the weather, the exhaustion of the soil, even divine retribution! By the time the real cause was recognized, it was out of control.’

  She spoons a family-size jar of caviar between two plates.

  ‘The official response was hesitant and slow. They tried flooding the vines to kill the eggs but that was expensive, short-term and only possible in the plains. They also tried insecticide but that killed all the other insects and sometimes the vines themselves. The only solution that worked – the expensive grafting of European vines on to phylloxera-resistant US rootstocks – was long resisted. Understandably perhaps, when all these problems were seen as America’s fault in the first place.’

  Alternate mouthfuls of Krug and caviar are making the discourse less intelligible.

  ‘When they finally tried it, they found a lot of the imported rootstocks were infected with downy mildew.’

  ‘But surely that was treatable with lime and copper sulphate?’ I try to reassert my expertise in these matters.

  ‘So they discovered – eventually. But by then, a lot of smaller growers had been driven out of business. The vineyard area more than halved in ten years and many of the better vineyards on the hillsides were never replanted. That’s why you find so many abandoned “ghost villages” up near us. Yet the region over here, around Béziers, got off relatively lightly. Phylloxera didn’t arrive until 1878, enabling the rich local growers to get richer, while prices quadrupled. So they were much better placed than most to reconstitute their vineyards …

  ‘Not to mention building their châteaux,’ she adds, with the ominous emphasis of a woman determined to penetrate at least one of them before allowing me to go home.

  *

  The horses will have to go. It’s a pity because I’ve grown fond of them. But they have started damaging the supporting terrace walls, as their success in devouring the more accessible expanses of hay has forced them into less obvious corners of the land. And now that the autumn rains have made the soil so much softer, the scope for more widespread destruction decisively outweighs any potential benefits from continuing hospitality.

  More agreeably, the wet weather has brought a permanent return to the pool of the syncopated croaking of the tree frogs, without yet achieving the Wagnerian volume of the early summer broadcasts.

  It has also encouraged the sprouting of a perplexing assortment of unidentifiable wild mushrooms. There are some lu
ridly bright and, to my untutored eye, unashamedly toxic-looking orange ones around the roots of some of the olive trees, while those in the orchard look innocuous enough for the table. Yet how can I be sure that nature isn’t tricking me with false clues?

  The book that guided me so authoritatively through the world of fouine droppings covers only a handful of examples, and Manu uncharacteristically disclaims any expert knowledge in this territory. ‘The wife’s department,’ he informed me. Yet something in Mme Gros’s poisonous look when she last lamented the state of the drive told me it might be tempting fate to ask her advice. So, rather unadventurously, I am resorting to a purchase in the drizzly Clermont l’Hérault market.

  ‘Why not try the trompettes de mort?’ suggests the wizened, elf-like mushroom salesman, half-hidden by the rainshield that he is improvising with the local newspaper. ‘Délicieuses avec un peu de persil et de l’ail.’

  But somehow that look from Mme Gros has diminished the appeal of these sinister-looking, jet-black delicacies and I opt for some dependably innocent cèpes.

  ‘Vendange still going strong?’ asks the stallholder, having noticed my dark-purple-stained hands, which uncountable scrubbings have failed to whiten.

  ‘All over,’ I assure him, adding, ‘I was doing a décuvage on a macération carbonique’, then instantly feel ashamed of my slide into cellarspeak obscurities.

  ‘Well, bonne continuation!’ is my salesman’s baffled valediction.

  I do, however, feel strangely proprietorial about the macération – perhaps because Virgile and I dealt with it on our own, without the aid of Arnaud, who had disobligingly gone to an interview for an electrician’s post.

  It was clear as soon as the tap was turned that this was going to be quite unlike the traditional fermentations. So little juice emerged that I assumed there must be a blockage but Virgile explained that most of the wine was locked inside the grapes. Indeed, when he opened the porthole, it was clear that the grapes on most of the bunches piled high inside the cuve were more or less intact, looking almost perfect enough to eat. We tried them. They were little explodable capsules of rich, slightly effervescent winey juice. Every bunch had to be dragged out by hand, hence my arms being purple up past the elbows. We put four or five loads into the winepress and took it in turns to give each an exhausting double pressing. Then finally we tasted the results: immensely drinkable, intensely fruity, ‘red-fruity’ to be specific, but smaller in quantity, Virgile tells me, than if the grapes had been conventionally fermented.

  ‘Oh well, tant pis!’ say my aching arms. ‘You can have too much of a good thing.’

  *

  I have learned something important very late.

  I now know that Uncle Milo’s house is only twenty minutes’ drive from what has ever since last night been my favourite restaurant.

  But as I said, this life-changing discovery has come painfully late, for today Le Mimosa will be callously closing its menus for a five-month fermeture annuelle. The New Zealand cook and her Welsh wine-waiting husband will be paying monstrously self-centred visits to distant families and otherwise indulging unreasonable winter wanderlust, leaving me bereft. To make matters worse, the belated discovery was made in Saint Guiraud of all places – a village that I must have driven through two or three times every week since January, on my way to Virgile’s. And most sickening of all, I owe my introduction not to Virgile but to Mme Gros.

  In a moment of madness, I had invited her to a birthday dinner in her favourite restaurant. (Well, all right, there was a modicum of method as well: given my extended absences next year, it was clearly in my interest to leave her feeling loved.) But Le Mimosa was not, of course, her ‘favourite’ restaurant. She had never been there either. However, she had, I suspect, heard sufficient to know that it would be prudent to save it for an occasion when the bill would not be paid by Manu. (Perhaps, on reflection, the extended fermeture is not such a bad thing after all.) Anyway, so determined was Mme Gros to allow my generosity free rein that she allowed us to order the six-course ‘menu capricieux’, invented daily by Bridget Pugh according to the inspirations of the market place. She even sanctioned the ‘dégustation’ of six accompanying wines, selected by David according to the inspirations of his wife’s dishes.

  ‘I don’t believe that woman eats her own food,’ whispered Mme Gros suspiciously, as soon as Bridget took our order. Her advance intelligence had not encompassed the proprietors’ overseas origins and she was suddenly doubtful of the wisdom of her choice. ‘In fact, I don’t believe she eats at all,’ she persisted, watching Bridget’s slim and graceful form return to an open-plan kitchen, which was surely smaller than my own. ‘Hardly what you expect in a cook,’ she snorted.

  However, by the time our delicately presented first course arrived, we had learned that cooking was only the second of Bridget’s career accomplishments. Her first – unmistakable in her rigidly straight-backed poise, as soon as we knew – was that of a ballerina, the two of them having met when David was pursuing his own first profession as a violinist with the Royal Ballet in England.

  ‘Mon dieu,’ whispered Mme Gros, as if foreign restaurateurs were bad enough, without them being artistic.

  ‘I’m doing something special tonight,’ said David with infectious enthusiasm, as he brought us the first of our wines. ‘All six will be from one of the best of our neighbours, Mas Jullien in Jonquières.’

  ‘Only a little for my wife,’ cautioned Manu, no doubt hopeful that his own six pourings might be correspondingly enhanced.

  The name of Olivier Jullien evidently meant nothing to either of my guests but hardly a week has passed this year without some express or implied acknowledgement from Virgile of Olivier’s importance as friend and mentor. So a tasting of two different whites, a rosé, two reds and a late-harvested dessert wine, all of his making, was a treat that felt long overdue.

  It also helped to distract me from the evening’s embarrassments – like Mme Gros diluting her wines with mineral water. (‘Very nineteenth century,’ said David, with scarcely a flinch. ‘Disinfecting the water with wine.’) Or Manu greeting the biggest selection of cheeses that I have ever seen with a confession that he was ‘très, très amateur du fromage’ and wanted to sample them all. (‘Two plates would have been more honest,’ said David dryly.)

  More importantly, the tasting left little doubt about where the Renault should be pointed this morning.

  Unusually there is no sign of either Manu or Mme Gros. Maybe they are both the worse for wear or maybe they are writing their thank-you letters. Either way, I am able to get away alone. However, in my haste to do so, I forget to telephone to see whether a visit would be convenient, and although Olivier’s greeting is as warm as I could wish, it is clear from the level of activity in his cave that my timing could have been better. I fumble an explanation about the Mimosa and my consequent resolution to effect a significant depletion of his stocks but he shakes his head and smiles, as if at my innocence.

  ‘Nothing left at this time of year,’ he apologizes. ‘You’d need to come back after Easter. But you’ve come all this way and I need some coffee, so why don’t you join me?’

  Olivier looks to me like restless energy personified and the notion that he is accustomed to coffee breaks seems profoundly unlikely but it would be churlish to refuse.

  ‘Once organic, always organic,’ he says with a grin, as he empties the dregs from his breakfast cafetière into a kitchen pot plant.

  I ask whether I could at least reserve some of each of the wines that I enjoyed last night.

  ‘Out of the question,’ he replies but then smiles and explains that he no longer makes the majority of them. ‘Take the reds,’ he continues, as he passes me a mug. ‘The two you tasted were deliberately different, from contrasting soils. “Depierre” and “Cailloutis”, I used to call them. But then I got so sick of customers saying, “Oh, you’ve only got Depierre when I so wanted Cailloutis” or the other way round. So now I’m blending it
all into one, called simply Coteaux du Languedoc.’

  He tells much the same story for his whites. ‘Les Vignes Oubliées’ (The Forgotten Vines), which David served us, used to be made from some of the older grape varieties of the Languedoc, like Carignan Blanc, which had almost disappeared. It represented a balance between tradition and experiment and it summed up a lot of what Olivier stood for. But his customers started caring less about the contents of the glass than the romance of the concept. It had become a straitjacket. He felt typecast. So now he is trying to recover some autonomy by slimming down to one ‘basic’ red and one ‘basic’ white – each free to blend different grape varieties from different soils and each free to seek its own version of perfection from vintage to vintage.

  Olivier says that he will, however, continue with one additional red wine. He calls it ‘Les États d’me’ (literally, states of mind or, more precisely, soul) and, as the name suggests, it is an improvisation. It reflects his mood of the moment and defies description precisely because it explores a different direction every year: an emblem, it strikes me, of the modern Languedoc’s restless spirit.

  Like Virgile, Olivier is interested in the biodynamic approach but last year he learned the hard way the dangers of embracing it too literally. He allowed the frosts to kill some newly planted vines, instead of taking avoiding action earlier. He now believes that, if there are eight factors to be taken into account, the biodynamic calendar should always be the eighth. Otherwise it simply paralyses.

  ‘You can wait for ever for the ideal moment that never comes,’ he says ruefully.

  It is easy to see why he has been such a source of inspiration to Virgile and yet I am sure he does not see himself as any kind of leader. He is much too individualistic and mercurial for disciples. But he does have a strong sense of his ‘role’. If he were in Burgundy, he explains, he would have a totally different responsibility: to follow time-honoured traditions and bring out the best from a particular patch of land in a single, traditional grape variety. But what is the function of Mas Jullien in the Languedoc?