Virgile's Vineyard Page 25

  *

  At the foot of the village memorial, devoted to the dead of both World Wars, were a few bedraggled floral wreaths that had been decaying there since Armistice Day.

  It was the first time I had studied the roll of villagers morts pour la France but anyone who did so was bound to notice the extraordinary number of Vargases carved in the granite – considerably more than any other family. There was a smattering of other familiar names as well but not a single Gros.

  ‘Funny that,’ said Krystina. ‘Obviously the ancestors were as war-shy as Manu is work-shy.’

  ‘Maybe the Groses were just “survivors”,’ I protested, wondering why I felt obliged to defend my neighbour’s forebears.

  Before she could argue further, a chill gust of wind convinced Krystina that a table in front of the café’s wood-burning stove would be a more congenial setting for the rest of the morning’s tutorial. To her great indignation, however, the table that she had in mind has proved to be occupied.

  ‘What’s he doing there?’ she protests, when she sees that Monsieur Privat has abandoned his habitual place in the corner for this warmer alternative. ‘He shouldn’t be here at all yet. It’s not even lunchtime!’

  M. Privat’s smile, as he catches my eye, suggests that he has followed rather more of Krystina’s English than she assumed.

  ‘You saw how that first war decimated the labour force,’ Krystina resumes, having reorganized the remaining café furniture to sit as close to the stove as the competition permits. ‘A million and a quarter soldiers killed out of eight million mobilized. Twenty per cent of the male population between twenty and forty-five wiped out in four years. Not to mention the other three-quarters of a million permanently injured.’

  Babette appears with a small carafe of rosé for M. Privat. Krystina unilaterally orders hot chocolate for both of us and returns to August 1914.

  ‘The amazing thing was the incredibly positive mood …’

  ‘Even the village priest joined up,’ M. Privat contributes unexpectedly in impeccable English. ‘He fought alongside my father. But of course, he was not expecting to miss so many services. The same with the wine-workers. They were all expecting to be home for the harvest …’

  ‘Certainly everyone on both sides expected a short decisive campaign,’ Krystina reasserts herself primly. ‘But they were wrong. The whole thing turned into a long war of attrition.’

  ‘The vendange was left to the women and children and the old men,’ M. Privat joins in again, more animatedly. ‘So my mother used to tell me. Well, obviously, the shortage of labour was a problem everywhere. Just the fact that the … comment dit? … breadwinner was away – or dead – that was a big problem. But lack of man-power was especially difficult for making the wine. It was still so labour-intensive, you see. And horses – they were still the main form of transportation but most of them had disappeared to the front as well. And as for important supplies like copper sulphate …’

  Krystina opens her mouth to reaffirm her usual ascendancy but no sound emerges, so M. Privat fills the vacuum.

  ‘The 1914 vintage was I think you say … a “bumper”, no? But the Languedoc growers had a clever idea to get rid of it. They gave two hundred thousand hectolitres to the military hospitals. Rouge, of course – more masculine!’ He chuckles as he glances at his quarter litre of rosé.

  ‘Anyone can give their wine away,’ Krystina quibbles, unaccustomed to this supporting role.

  ‘Anyone but Manu,’ I add and M. Privat laughs as if he too has known the Cuvée Emmanuel Gros.

  ‘No, the medicine was so popular,’ he explains, ‘the government was soon buying huge quantities for regular distribution. The soldiers’ daily rations started at a quarter of a litre, if I remember correctly, increasing to half as the going got rougher.’

  Krystina, unable to get a word in, contents herself with adding extra logs to the stove to heat our more distant table.

  ‘By the end, officers were authorized to raise this to three-quarters and then the men themselves were allowed to purchase a further quarter at special rates. I don’t know the English word but my father’s job was organizing the supplies, you see. He told my mother in his letters how he was commandeering wine from all over France but still he couldn’t keep up with demand. So he’d have to … what’s the word … “fob” them off with Spanish and Italian imports.’

  Krystina has had enough. With Babette busy serving M. Privat his chicken liver salad, she pushes a large denomination banknote under her cup and prepares to leave. M. Privat, too carried away to notice even the arrival of his food, continues innocently unaware.

  ‘By the end of the war, the returning soldiers had acquired a taste for their daily litre. Marvellous for continuing demand but the problem was, so many didn’t return. The loss of all those young men created a glut …’

  Krystina exits without even a goodbye and M. Privat pulls a face, as if to ask: ‘Was it something I said?’

  We sit in silence for a moment.

  ‘What happened to your father?’ I ask eventually.

  ‘I never knew him,’ says M. Privat, turning his attention to his chicken livers. ‘He’s out there on the monument, amongst the Ps.’

  December

  ‘You weren’t joking were you?’

  Virgile winked as Babette brought us each a plate of coq aux olives. (It had seemed only fair to warn him about her limited repertoire before he made the journey up from Saint Saturnin.)

  ‘It usually tastes better than it looks,’ I encouraged him, as he pushed aside the chaos of paper spread around us.

  ‘It does,’ he confirmed. ‘But we haven’t made much progress, have we?’

  The hastily tidied piles of papers were why we were there: Virgile had offered to buy me lunch if I spared a couple of hours to help him with the paperwork that he had to sort out for the Appellation Contrôlée authorities. More information than anyone would have thought they could possibly find interesting had to be collated into some sort of intelligible order. He should have done it months ago but he hadn’t been able to decide how best to organize the material. It was all there somewhere, he assured me, but scattered across whatever scraps of stationery had come most quickly to hand at earlier stages of the year.

  I knew that I ought to be back at Les Sources, making a final land-reclaiming push before the end of the year. With almost every autumn leaf now fallen, the extent of the challenges remaining had become depressingly unambiguous. Yet the postman’s news of early-morning ice on the plateau behind the village somehow sapped my motivation for outdoor activity before I had even finished sharpening the chainsaw.

  ‘I’m sure they meant well,’ said Virgile.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, preoccupied with thoughts of secateurs and strimmers.

  ‘The Appellation Contrôlée authorities – when they first dreamed up all this bureaucracy in 1935. Sometimes I think it was a good thing that they took nearly fifty years before they bothered very much with the wines down here. I mean, nobody sympathizes more with focusing people on quality instead of quantity. But look where we’ve ended up!’

  He scowled at the heap of papers and poured us each some more of the best he had been able to find on the undistinguished café wine list. (Babette had not taken kindly to his request to ‘bring his own’ next time.)

  ‘The vignerons suffered badly between the wars,’ he continued. ‘My grandfather never stops telling me. Both internal and external markets were severely damaged – especially Germany and Russia, surprise, surprise. The general economic depression made things even worse. No wonder village after village embraced the relative financial security of the co-operative movement. I read somewhere, there were about four hundred co-ops in the Languedoc-Roussillon by 1940 – nearly all producing cheap, indifferent plonk.’

  ‘The dreaded three-starred litres of my youth,’ I reminisced.

  ‘But after all the efforts of the last twenty years, she still comes up with this!’ Virgile whispere
d, as he peered disbelievingly at the label on Babette’s ‘top of the range’. ‘Mind you, for all the EC subsidies on offer in the eighties – both for ripping out vines and distilling surpluses into industrial alcohol – we still had the winelakes. But then again, consumption was falling. People were drinking less but better. And drinking more mineral water, even tap water as the quality of that improved. One way or another, the traditional glass of rouge was dying. Hundreds of thousands of corner cafés were closing. My grandfather never stops complaining.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, as I toyed with the last of my cockerel bones. ‘Manu says there used to be five in this little village. But this is the sole survivor … Isn’t that right, Babette?’

  ‘C’est exacte,’ confirmed a husky voice behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘Your young friend there doesn’t know how lucky he is!’

  *

  ‘People forget,’ says Samuel Guibert, checking the last of his e-mails and spinning his swivel chair to give me his full attention. ‘When my parents bought this place in 1970, it was quite an achievement just to sell a Languedoc wine in a bottle, let alone make a “Daumas Gassac”. But then, when they came here, there were no thoughts of making wine at all.’

  ‘It wasn’t a wine estate?’

  ‘No, you see, my father was a leather-goods manufacturer up in Millau – the family company had supplied gloves to the British Royal Family for three hundred years – and my mother was studying Irish Celtic ethnology in Montpellier, where she teaches now. They’d recently married, in my father’s case for the second time – he was already in his mid-forties. They needed somewhere halfway between the two towns … Well, maybe not halfway,’ he laughs. ‘My mother did well there!’

  The Mas de Daumas Gassac, on the outskirts of the village of Aniane, must be about thirty kilometres west of Montpellier and at least three times that distance from Millau.

  ‘They both fell in love with the place. Well, who wouldn’t?’ He gestures towards the mellow stone farmhouse and unspoilt landscape, visible through the window of his crisply modern, predominantly white office. ‘That’s why we’ll never expand our vines beyond the present forty hectares. We want to preserve its charm as a place to live and also maintain a healthy balance with the surrounding garrigue. Respect for nature, you see.’

  It is easy to believe that Samuel, aged somewhere in his late twenties, has recently returned from six years in New Zealand. It is not just his faultless English. It is something less tangible in his well-travelled confidence. He has been working mainly, he explains, for the giant Montana winery but concentrating on imports and exports rather than the more obvious learning curve of New World wine-making technology. And although he is quick to emphasize that there are no such narrowly defined roles here at home, it is marketing which continues, for the time being, to be his principal focus within Daumas Gassac.

  ‘Gassac’s the name of the local stream,’ he explains. ‘And Daumas is the name of the family that was farming here. Old-style, struggling polyculture.’

  ‘A bit of everything?’

  ‘Yes. A few vines but mostly abandoned. My parents wanted to bring the land back to life with something but they’d probably have settled for sweetcorn – even olives – if they hadn’t come across this guy from my father’s native Aveyron.

  ‘Henri Enjalbert, the geography professor at Bordeaux University, convinced them that this was an exceptional terroir for wine-making. All the conditions were right. The soil was well drained, rich in minerals – especially copper, iron and gold – and very poor in organic matter, to push the vines to their limits. And there’s a cooler microclimate in this narrow part of the valley. Ten degrees at night in summer when Aniane, just over there, is registering twenty. It gives us longer growing seasons and later, richer harvests. Enjalbert was very excited. “You could make a grand cru to rival Lafite and Latour,” he said. “If you’re mad enough to try.” ’

  ‘So, tell me, monsieur, do I look like a madman?’ says an older voice from behind me.

  Guibert père invites me to join him in his own rather cosier, lamp-lit office, while Samuel, more at home behind his streamlined workstation, loses no time in reconnecting to the Internet.

  Still strikingly handsome, Aimé Guibert must, I calculate, have reached his late seventies but I can see at a glance that he has lost little, if any, of the energy, determination and fastidious perfectionism that first made Daumas Gassac great. It was, he modestly acknowledges, an ambitious project by any standards but especially so for a couple with absolutely no wine-making experience. He read exceptionally widely (the broad, wooden antique table that serves as his desk is piled with books today) but, more crucially and very much against the odds, he persuaded a second distinguished Bordeaux professor to take an interest.

  Emile Peynaud, who held the chair of oenology, was no stranger to extra-curricular hand-holding but it was usually confined to the starriest of the claret châteaux. On this occasion, however, something – maybe the novel challenge of a ‘virgin’ start – enticed him to step outside his norm. He made it clear that actual visits to the Languedoc would be once a year at most but he volunteered an invaluable telephonic ‘helpline’, provided all calls were made at 9 p.m.

  ‘Is it thanks to him that you’re so opposed to cloning?’ I ask, having heard from Samuel how virtually all the vines here derive from different, individually selected cuttings.

  ‘That’s more the result of my experience in the leather trade,’ he answers. ‘Seeing the damage done when science interferes with nature – crossbreeding and inbreeding destroying some of the world’s finest species. But I’m convinced it’s our single most important quality factor. Complexity from diversity. As well as naturally lower yields – we never need a vendange en vert. Respect for nature, you see.’

  ‘And the choice of Cabernet Sauvignon?’ I ask, having also learned from Samuel that this classic Bordeaux variety has always dominated their production. ‘Was that Professor Peynaud’s influence?’

  ‘Not at all. It was simply what I knew,’ he explains. ‘My father had a cellar full of fine Bordeaux. But remember, it’s only eighty per cent Cabernet. Fifteen other cépages – some of them pretty obscure – make up the balance. It’s the same story with the white. Mainly Chardonnay from Burgundy, Viognier from the Rhône and Petit Manseng from Jurançon but mixed with tiny quantities of a dozen different oddments.’

  ‘For complexity again?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s like the chef’s tiny pinch of spice,’ confirms Monsieur Guibert. ‘The pepper on a strawberry. The exact balance of the recipe changes every year. It depends on what nature gives us. So does the precise approach to the wine-making. A different response to the challenges and opportunities of each vintage. No hard and fast rules. Respect for nature again. A bastion against the savourless, “technical” homogeneity of the modern world. A museum of Old Europe!’

  ‘But not exactly traditional Languedoc wines either?’ I suggest.

  ‘No. And in the early days, that certainly didn’t make them easy to sell,’ he remembers wryly. ‘Henri Enjalbert had warned us that it might take two hundred years to get recognition and it’s true that nobody took us seriously at first. Well, you could see their point. A total novice’s unknown “country wine” from a joke wine region …’ (Samuel has already explained that, even after the arrival of the Coteaux du Languedoc appellation in 1985, anything made with Cabernet could only be labelled as vin de pays.) ‘A serious price and not even made for easy, early drinking – needing up to a decade in bottle to show its best. In 1978, our first vintage, we found ourselves with eighteen thousand bottles, which nobody wanted to touch. Only when we finally got it into a couple of Paris restaurants did word start spreading.’

  ‘And now?’ I prompt.

  ‘We get three thousand visitors a year and sell ninety-five per cent of our sixteen thousand cases before it’s even bottled.’

  ‘Could I make that ninety-five point nought one for next year?’ I a
sk and resign myself to leaving empty-handed.

  *

  ‘I’m not trying to catch you out,’ I explained, as I took the foil-wrapped bottle from the fridge and poured Virgile a glass. ‘I just want to know what you think.’ I poured myself a glass and tasted it myself. I already knew what I thought. I thought it was wonderful. But I wanted to see what Virgile thought. I wanted to see whether I could change his mind.

  ‘Languedoc, I assume?’ he asked.

  ‘Close,’ I said. ‘It’s Roussillon.’

  ‘A bit remote for you, isn’t it? Have you been exploring farther afield? It seems so long since I last saw you.’

  ‘I found it in a restaurant in Narbonne and managed to buy a bottle in the wine shop next door. You don’t have to guess. It’s just that I thought of you when they told me about this. It reminded me of something you said … But anyway, what have you been up to? How did the Salon go?’

  The Salon had been a mammoth Montpellier trade fair, dominating the whole of Virgile’s last week. It was not an event for wine-marketing – that would dominate another week in the spring. It was an occasion for all the ancillary businesses, the barrel-makers and bottle-blowers, to market themselves to the vignerons, and Virgile had suddenly found himself in urgent need of label-printers. After all the agonizing over his serigraphic labelling back in March, Puech had ruled it out as a style that belonged in the supermarket. It would have to be replaced with something more conventional before the second half of the 2000 Coteaux du Languedoc was bottled in the spring.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ he beamed, with surely more excitement than mere label-choosing could inspire. ‘It was right at the end, on the last day. I bumped into Jean-Pierre, Olivier Jullien’s father. He told me he was selling a couple of hectares of Grenache Noir. The advert was going to appear in the paper the next day.’