Virgile's Vineyard Read online

  I have to keep reminding myself that this is the patient half of the marriage.

  ‘But what have you got there?’ she calls, when I successfully stretch my hand through a crack to touch glass at last.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I say, as I inch my way downward with an unlabelled bottle.

  ‘What does it say on the cork?’ she asks.

  ‘1995,’ I manage to read at my awkward angle.

  ‘No, put it back,’ she says. ‘I must have got the crates muddled. It’s ’96 we want. Much more forward than ’95 for Pinot Noir, so we’ll sell it first. Try the next one along,’ she suggests, as I struggle back up again.

  After more gymnastic activity than my limbs have known in a decade, we finally assemble the precise six bottles that she had in mind and retreat across the windswept courtyard to a smart little tasting room at the top of a short staircase on the side of the house. We sit on cold metal chairs at a café-style table and Mme Boyer pulls her sheepskin coat more tightly round her. The room is not significantly cosier than the cave. It is sparely decorated but a poster on a freshly painted wall underlines the fact that the Clos Centeilles forms part of a recently recognized, superior sub-section of the Minervois, called La Livinière.

  ‘I’m happy to belong,’ says Mme Boyer. ‘But you have to appreciate, these Appellation Contrôlée rules aren’t about making wine good. They’re just about making it less bad!’

  She cites the minimum planting densities, which have been puzzling me since someone mentioned them earlier in the year. I could understand a maximum but why a minimum?

  ‘A crude way of limiting yields,’ she explains. ‘Close planting makes the vines struggle a bit, reducing their yields. So setting a minimum makes up for growers too lazy or ignorant to prune as hard and debud as thoroughly as they should. But take my word for it, the vines’ suffering always shows …’

  Happily, Mme Boyer’s reservations about the regulatory framework are not interfering with her bottle-openings. I already have a glass of 1998 ‘Capitelle de Centeilles’, made exclusively, she tells me, from Cinsault – the variety which, according to Daniel, made the Languedoc’s reputation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Into a second, she is pouring a 1999 ‘Carignanissime’, made exclusively, as its name suggests, from Carignan.

  ‘Ironic really,’ she admits. ‘Daniel’s advice to his pupils has always been, “Rip up your Carignan and start again – don’t tinker around trying to redeem its deficiencies with cépages améliorateurs.” Pretty iconoclastic stuff in the seventies. The traditionalists practically threw him out of his teaching post, forgetting that Carignan was unknown here until after phylloxera. But now, of course, with every second vigneron making his hundred per cent Syrah, they simply shrug their shoulders and tell him “c’est normal”! It makes him apoplectic.’

  ‘But presumably he didn’t … practise what he preached?’ I venture, as I lift my glass of Carignanissime.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ she says. ‘Daniel’s original four hectares, about ten kilometres away, were all replanted by the end of the seventies, well before most of his imitators. Syrah, Mourvèdre and Pinot Noir, he used – traditional Languedoc cépages, he insisted, from the days before phylloxera. Even this Pinot Noir,’ she adds, as she pours me the so-called ‘Guigniers de Centeilles’ that cost me so much muscle-ache to extract from its crate.

  ‘Then in the summer of 1990, we suddenly lost the use of the cave we were renting over there – I say “we” because I’d also appeared on the scene by this time. So we had absolutely nowhere to vinify the harvest. Talk about panic! But right at the last minute, some other purchaser backed out of buying this place. We loved it as soon as we saw it but the house was semi-derelict, the cave only just about usable and it came with an additional ten hectares of Grenache Noir, Cinsault and Carignan, all in urgent need of picking. With only primitive cellar equipment, we were so desperate we thought we’d have to sell everything in bulk for a song. We didn’t even dare to taste the wines until the spring. And then we suddenly discovered how rich and concentrated the Cinsault was.’

  ‘But the Carignan?’ I prompt.

  ‘Ah yes, the Carignan.’ Mme Boyer pulls a face, which is difficult to reconcile with the attractive, fruity wine in the glass. ‘It left us pretty cold, to be honest, seventy-year-old vines or no seventy-year-old vines. Heavy tannins, no aroma and a tendency to dry out as it aged. But we couldn’t eliminate it all at once because of the time involved – not just the ripping up and replanting but the wait while alternatives established themselves. So I suppose we got used to it. We certainly came to despise it less. We learned, for instance, that we could soften the tannins and enhance the aroma with a macération carbonique.’

  ‘And the ageing problem?’

  ‘Drink it young,’ she laughs, as she completes my somewhat bewildering row of samples with her top wine – a Syrah, Grenache and Mourvèdre blend called ‘Clos de Centeilles’.

  Before she can elaborate, there is an ominous-sounding crash from the direction of the cave and she rises quickly to her feet.

  ‘I’d better leave you to it. I told you about the low neurone count out there.’ But then she pauses with one foot halfway out of the door. ‘You have to understand why we went into wine-making. We loved fine wines, Burgundy especially in Daniel’s case – hence the passion for Pinot Noir. Unlike most growers who never touch a drop from outside their own domaines, let alone outside their regions.’

  Another crash.

  ‘You know, sometimes I’m not sure the combined IQs of the tractoriste and the cellar boy add up to treble figures,’ she sighs, looking despairingly down the stairs, but still she lingers a moment longer. ‘We weren’t interested in being the biggest or the best or the most expensive,’ she says. ‘We wanted to make wine that people would enjoy. That’s what we believe wine is for.’

  Yet another crash.

  ‘Maybe not even double figures,’ she calls, as she speeds down to the cave.

  *

  ‘Close that door!’ orders Virgile, when I linger for a moment in the entrance to the cave. ‘I’m trying to keep the cold out. There are three electric heaters in here. It’s warmer than my flat.’

  It seems such a short time since it was the heat that we were doing everything we could to keep out – almost as short indeed as the interval since ice buckets were rudely chilling the same red wines that we now nurse up to ‘room temperature’ in carefully cupped hands. But the swift return of colder weather has left Virgile with a temperature-related problem on his hands. While most of his malolactic fermentations have obligingly finished, with every last drop of malic acid eliminated, the cooler temperatures have encouraged two of them – the Grenache and one of his Syrahs – to stop halfway.

  ‘If the heaters don’t get them going, they’ll stay like this until the spring,’ he says.

  ‘And would that be serious?’ I ask.

  ‘It would be inconvenient,’ he says, preparing to lock up, ‘not being able to finish with a process and move on. It would also mean I couldn’t give them any more sulphur dioxide, exposing them to bacteria over the winter. I’d certainly sleep easier if they started up again. The Syrah, I think, may already be under way – you can hear a bit of bubbling, if you put your ear to the cuve – but I’m not sure about the Grenache. I’m waiting for a fax with the latest analyses. I think the concrete may be insulating it too well but I’m afraid there’s just too much of it for me to move it out into the only fibreglass cuve that’s empty.’

  ‘And the sheep-shed?’ I enquire, as we abandon the snugness of the cave for the chilly square outside. ‘Still waiting to hear from the Poujols?’

  ‘They rang me this morning.’

  ‘To say “yes”?’

  ‘To say they haven’t managed to meet yet.’

  *

  ‘Tous pour chacun; chacun pour tous,’ muses Manu at the sight of the combative slogan set in stone on the façade of the Maraussan Cave Coopérative,
between Béziers and the Minervois. All for each and each for all.

  ‘They needed a fighting spirit in 1901,’ says the aptly named Michel Bataille, the co-operative’s energetic-looking young President.

  ‘To found this place, you mean?’ Manu slowly latches on to the significance of the bright centenary posters in the entranceway.

  ‘Correct,’ says the President, as he takes us into a rather soulless meeting room lined with fading black-and-white photographs of the pioneering participants. ‘Remember, the turn of the century was a time of crisis. Wine wars and all that … But Maraussan’s initiative was a bit more positive.’

  ‘Was this the country’s first wine co-op?’ asks Manu, still worrying away at the message on the posters.

  ‘Correct again. You see, the Languedoc wine trade was dominated by two extremely wealthy groups – the major châteaux and the powerful négociants, the middlemen, who had such a stranglehold on pricing they could buy up the wines of the smaller growers for next to nothing. That is, until Elie Cathala, a socialist lemonade-maker of all people, had the bright idea of cutting the middlemen out. He saw an opportunity to sell directly to the numerous purchasing co-operatives that the fast-expanding working populations of Paris were already establishing. Provided, that is, that the growers could achieve a sufficient critical mass and be seen to be sufficiently socialist themselves.’

  Manu could not have chosen a better moment for a listless wander down the room and a myopic squint at a well-preserved coloured chart hanging between the photographs. M. Bataille explains that this is an early graphic explanation of the establishment’s original principles, produced for the benefit of the Ministry of Agriculture, where I suspect official eyebrows may have been raised as high as Manu’s are this afternoon.

  ‘Twenty per cent of the profits went on proletarian propaganda,’ the President elaborates. ‘A further five per cent to the central co-operative movement, twenty-five per cent to other workers’ organizations and only the remaining fifty divided between the co-op’s actual members. And divided, what’s more, in equal shares, regardless of contribution … But it worked,’ he responds to Manu’s involuntary shudder. ‘By 1905, they had over two hundred and thirty members in a village of only four hundred families. They had their own railway trucks and soon they established a network of over thirty distribution centres round the country. They were shifting fifty thousand hectolitres a year at a time when many of their neighbours were pouring last year’s wine into the river to make way for the next vintage.’

  ‘And all made here?’ I ask, as we follow him into a cavernous cave, lined with gigantic wooden barrels.

  ‘Not at all,’ he replies. ‘Not at first. These earliest collective efforts were more about marketing than wine-making. And even when they got this building up in 1905, it couldn’t handle more than fifteen per cent of the volume they were selling. Until it was extended, the rest was made and stored at members’ homes.’

  I am surprised how little activity there is today. Even allowing for the fact that this is a relatively quiet period, the cave has a neglected air that is hard to reconcile with all the certificates for wine fair medals adorning the walls. But M. Bataille anticipates my thoughts. In 1995, he tells us, Maraussan banded together with half a dozen neighbouring co-operatives to form the Vignerons du Pays d’Ensérune – the largest co-operative wine enterprise in France, with 1,880 members and nearly fifty salaried staff – enabling them to concentrate production in the three most modern sites.

  ‘But we haven’t forgotten those fundamental values,’ he insists, turning back to one of the centenary posters and its quotation from the co-operative supremo for the département, extolling the virtues of ‘solidarity, equity, the sharing of knowledge, means and risks … the collective struggle in the service of the individual and against individualism …’

  Manu winces more convulsively than before.

  ‘We no longer reward everyone equally,’ M. Bataille reassures him. ‘You could do that with a single product, the one anonymous vin de table. But now, with more than twenty different wines, at widely different prices, we have to have different rates, based on quality as well as quantity.’

  At the age of forty-two, Michel Bataille has been elected President of the Ensérune umbrella structure, as well as that of Maraussan, for each of the last four years. He rushed back this afternoon, in his city suit, from a conference in Montpellier, where he had been discussing falling market shares with his opposite numbers. This evening, he says it will be pullover and jeans for an emergency meeting to rally the uncomprehending troops in the face of ever-strengthening New World competition.

  ‘You see, they were promised a good return in the eighties,’ he explains. ‘They were told that all they had to do was rip up their Carignans and replant with Syrahs and Cabernets. So they can’t understand that it’s not that simple any more. The trouble is, a lot of them take no interest at all in the way a wine is made . . . You think I’m joking but some of them are barely interested in drinking it. Grapes are just a crop to them. They might almost as well be growing potatoes! We have to change all that – get them to understand why we’re telling them to thin the bunches, not just blindly follow instructions. And all the time, all I really want to do is go home and prune my own vines.’ He sighs regretfully. ‘I only ever see them at weekends and even then my wife complains, so I delegate most of the work.’

  ‘So why do you do it?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, someone has to,’ he answers with a smile. ‘And I guess I’ve persuaded myself I’m less of an idiot than some of the others. But we can’t afford to get this wrong.’ The smile fades. ‘Amidst all these jolly centenary celebrations, we’ve got serious problems. The whole region, I mean. Not just us. This is the worst crisis in Languedoc wine for twenty, maybe forty years – with only two years at the most to crack it!’

  I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. To go from Virgile – apparently capable of selling his wines several times over, at prices he hardly dreamed of – to Michel Bataille in Maraussan, convinced that the region’s production needs to be reduced by four million hectolitres, maybe even double that if there’s no public subsidy: it just doesn’t seem possible.

  Then I remember a vague impression of gathering protest throughout the summer, an undercurrent of simmering violence, reported in the local papers. There was a story in July, for instance, of a hundred and fifty vignerons forcibly clearing foreign wines from hypermarket shelves; an editorial recalling the notorious 1976 riots at Montredon, near Carcassonne, in which both a grower and a policeman died; another co-operative president insisting, ‘It’s a choice between being well regarded and dead or badly regarded and alive.’

  ‘It’s the same old story,’ says M. Bataille, ‘falling consumption and overproduction – some say, even fraud. But now there’s the extra factor of competition from the southern hemisphere. A third of the area’s vines may have to be destroyed. We can only hope it’s the quality hillside sites that are spared this time. When subsidies for ripping out were last on offer in the eighties, it was mostly the lower-quality, easy options in the plains that survived.

  ‘But we don’t help ourselves with our ridiculous over-regulation,’ he complains. ‘The Australians grow German Riesling, Californian Zinfandel, whatever they like, but here they’re illegal. And while the rest of the world slims down to simpler product branding for international markets, what do we do in France, with our four hundred and fifty Appellations Contrôlées and goodness knows how many vins de pays – only a handful of which anybody can remember? … We create more!’

  *

  As I drew back my bathroom curtains a pair of partridges scuttled self-protectively away through the gaunt, black, dead-looking silhouettes of the almond trees: the first of the trees to lose their leaves, just as they were the first to unfold them in February. There used to be four of them – the partridges, that is – paying regular group visits to the house, but the hunting season started a couple of mont
hs ago and I fear the other two were early casualties.

  On every Saturday and Sunday since early September, the nearby lanes have been dotted with huddles of hunters, dressed like sinister mercenaries in khaki, planning their next assault on whatever wildlife has hitherto escaped them. This morning, however, I am sweeping fallen leaves from the courtyard at the front of the house when I spot a small but aggressively gun-toting battalion striding confidently up the drive. Their yapping dogs look set to race ahead and savage the first living flesh – almost certainly mine – that they can lay their fangs on, but at the very last minute the contingent turns sharply away and saunters nonchalantly through my neighbours’ habitually open front gates.

  I know that both of them are out – away indeed, paying another of their six-monthly visits to the teetotal sister-in-law – because I happened to hear Manu’s heart-rending protests falling on deaf ears yesterday morning. And maybe the invaders know this too. Certainly, their swaggering progress up through Manu’s little vegetable patch appears to be free of any scruple that their trampling of his onion sets might be unwelcome. But then I see that the entire platoon is heading unmistakably for the bramble-tangled fence that marks the boundary between Manu’s festering compost heap and the point where my own upper terraces loop round behind his.

  Fortunately, the expected incursion is sufficiently inhibited by the combination of compost and brambles for the last of them still to be straddling the fence when I have crossed the stream and run up to confront them. The steepness of the climb, however, ensures that little of my indignation successfully bypasses my breathlessness.

  ‘Propriété privée,’ I pant almost unintelligibly.

  ‘There’s no sign,’ they chorus in what is clearly their standard defence.

  I have, of course, carelessly overlooked the necessity for signs to keep my neighbours inside their private property and outside my own and, were it not for the painful heaving of my lungs, some pithy riposte to this effect would already have stunned them. But as it is, I am forced to content myself with the fact that only modest additional carnage is inflicted between here and their exit by the back gate.