Virgile's Vineyard Read online

  ‘You don’t mean you were tempted?’ I asked, deferring all discussion of the mystery wine.

  ‘I hardly slept all night. Then I got up early and went to have a look at the vines the next morning. They were just amazing. They’d been lent to Olivier for a number of years, so they’d been really immaculately tended as part of Mas Jullien. The most beautiful wooden supports for the palissage, you wouldn’t believe it! And for some reason, Olivier no longer needs them. Maybe he’s bought something better. Or changed his blend. As you know, we no longer have that kind of conversation. But anyway, Jean-Pierre doesn’t need them either. So I made an offer. There and then, before anyone could read the paper. And just as well, because there were loads of other offers.’

  ‘So you actually own some vines now?’ I congratulated him, as he turned his attention to the puzzle in his glass.

  ‘I’m expecting to sign next week. But it isn’t just the question of ownership. It gives me a much better balance of grapes. I won’t have to declassify so much, on account of excess Carignan. Maybe nothing at all. But you know, the bank would never have let me do this without the Puech deal,’ he added defensively. ‘Do you know, he brought a party of fourteen the other day to taste the 2000 Coteaux du Languedoc that’s still in barrel? All squeezed into the cave, they were – Americans, Japanese …’

  ‘And were they pleased?’ I asked, still trying to read Virgile’s reaction to the wine in his glass.

  ‘Delighted,’ he said. ‘Except for the quantity. As one of the Japanese remarked, if they each took five cases, it would all be gone! “You need another twenty hectares, kid,” said one of the Americans. “And fast!” ’ He giggled at his barely recognizable American accent. ‘You must taste it yourself before the end of the year.’

  ‘And the sheep-shed?’ I risked enquiring.

  ‘Don’t ask!’ he sighed. ‘Well, actually you can ask. We did clear the manure in the end but it took me and Arnaud two whole days. They kept changing their minds about exactly where they wanted it spread. The final load was supposed to be for the garden of one of the sons but …’ Virgile snarled the next bit through gritted teeth. ‘He hadn’t quite finished his autumn clearing, had he? “Couldn’t I just leave it in the sheep-shed for another month or so?” he wanted to know. “After all, it was only a few barrels I wanted to move there, wasn’t it?” ’

  He looked for a moment as if he might do violence to the glass in his fist but the moment passed. The wine had all his attention again.

  ‘I could enjoy a lot of this,’ he murmured.

  ‘You should make some yourself then.’ I stifled a grin.

  ‘But you know my white wine problem. I’ve only got the Grenache Blanc.’

  ‘You could make this.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘It’s pure Grenache Blanc. From the Domaine de la Rectorie in Banyuls. You said you weren’t convinced it could work. But I thought, when I tasted this in Narbonne …’

  ‘We must go and see these people.’

  ‘It does work, doesn’t it?’ I pressed him.

  ‘The bank won’t like it,’ Virgile answered indirectly. ‘I’ll need some new equipment for a white wine. But somehow I don’t think next year’s Grenache Blanc will be going to the co-op.’

  *

  ‘Je ne suis pas d’accord,’ said Monsieur Vargas.

  I could hardly believe it. It was rare enough for him and his wife not to speak, quite literally, as one. But to find them in actual disagreement was, for me, a first. And on their wedding anniversary too.

  ‘It was me who’d been called up,’ he reminded us to assert the primacy of his own recollections. ‘Me and the five million others.’

  They had invited me over ‘pour un petit apéritif’ to honour their sixty-one harmonious years. ‘Que nous trois,’ they had warned. ‘The children live so far away now.’

  It was my first visit to the Vargases’ narrow little house at the bottom of the village street but I saw at once that very little could have changed in all their six decades of marriage. Even the ancient television set, blocking most of the light from the window, must have arrived around the mid-point.

  The nature of the anniversary had led quickly to an explanation that this should in fact have been their sixty-second. However, Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 and France’s declaration of war two days later had put paid to their wedding plans for that autumn.

  ‘We wouldn’t have minded so much, if it hadn’t been followed by all those months of phoney war,’ they reminisced, as M. Vargas carefully untwisted the wire securing his champagne cork. (He clearly didn’t do this very often.) ‘Un drôle de guerre, they called it, didn’t they? Hardly any different from peacetime. Certainly, none of the excitement and enthusiasm that our parents felt at the start of the Grande Guerre,’ they both agreed, as the cork finally popped.

  However, quite exceptionally, they were less united as to why there had been so little will to fight. Mme Vargas blamed defeatism – a sense that the Germans were unbeatable – while Monsieur attributed it to over-confidence: a conviction that the war could be won by economic blockades, without the need for battle. Hence those unprecedented words: ‘Je ne suis pas d’accord.’

  M. Vargas himself seemed as shocked by their echo as any of us.

  ‘Whatever the reason …’ he began hastily, so anxious to dispel any note of dissension that he spilled the champagne. ‘Whatever the reason,’ he tried again, as he dabbed at the drinks table with a handkerchief, ‘we just sat there waiting for something to happen. We scarcely did anything to help the Poles. Just hid behind the concrete defences of the Maginot Line.’

  ‘And the vendange?’ I asked, remembering that the Vargas family made wine in those days. This was the second time in little more than a generation that a war had been declared in the run-up to the harvest and I wondered whether it had all been left to the women and children again.

  ‘For once the government got its priorities right,’ answered Mme Vargas, raising her glass to toast us both. (She had already explained how she had married into the Languedoc from a Burgundian wine-making family – although I would never have guessed from the quarter-filled glass that she insisted was ‘déjà trop’.) ‘This time, they let the vignerons get their grapes in before calling them up or requisitioning their horses. But of course, afterwards, production suffered badly, not just from loss of manpower but from lack of vineyard supplies and so on.’

  ‘It took all of us by surprise, when it finally came, the May 1940 invasion,’ said M. Vargas, apparently keener to resume the military side of the history. ‘Even the British in Northern France. A Blitzkrieg, the Germans called it, didn’t they? Well, we neither of us had the right kind of tanks to resist it, you see. The British were driven out at Dunkirk and we were driven back to Paris. Just six weeks after the first German offensive, we were defeated.’

  I had known for a long time that defeat was followed by division – the division of France into occupied and unoccupied zones. But as usual, I owed the detail to Krystina. She had told me how the armistice signed by the new French government led by Marshal Pétain at the end of June 1940 provided for the German occupation of three-fifths of the country, the German retention of nearly two million prisoners of war and an unlimited French obligation to finance the German war effort until a peace was concluded. They were harsh-sounding terms but, as Krystina had emphasized, no one at the time expected peace to be very far away. With Britain left alone, a German victory seemed both imminent and inevitable and, by doing what he thought was only a short-term bad deal, the eighty-three-year-old Pétain hoped to secure a better negotiating position in the aftermath.

  ‘It was all the richer parts of France, in the west and the north and the east, that went to Germany,’ said the Vargases, once more in their characteristic unison.

  ‘All the top wine districts too,’ M. Vargas added. ‘Bordeaux, Champagne, Alsace, the Loire …’

  ‘With a special kink in
the demarcation line to take in the expensive end of Burgundy,’ his wife completed the list with feeling. ‘My parents started walling up their wines to hide them from the Germans.’

  ‘It was bad enough when they requisitioned the stuff to drink it,’ said M. Vargas. ‘But we minded even more when it was earmarked for distillation into fuel or industrial alcohol for things like antifreeze and explosives. Meanwhile Pétain and his cronies up in Vichy were doing everything they could to stretch supplies. When they weren’t just wittering on about “Travail, Famille, Patrie”, that is. They relaxed half the quality controls that had just been put in place between the wars. Previously outlawed varieties were suddenly permitted again, minimum alcohol levels were lowered …’

  This was already by far the longest solo speech that I had ever heard from M. Vargas, and his wife clearly thought it too long. She intervened with a little dish of last year’s home-grown Lucques, expecting her husband to join her, as he normally would, in a short hymn of praise for their favourite herb and lemon-peel marinade. But Monsieur was still in 1940.

  ‘It wasn’t just the wine, of course. The Germans’ systematic seizure of most of our raw materials and manufactured goods was creating desperate shortages – clothing, fuel and most especially food. Then to cap it all, the 1940 harvest was a disaster.’

  ‘You should have seen our wedding that winter,’ said Mme Vargas. ‘C’était pitoyable!’ she added in a way that tried to sound like the last word on the subject – but failed.

  ‘People were literally starving,’ her husband continued. ‘Especially in the towns. Béziers and Montpellier were two of the worst fed in France.’

  A small plate of biscuits spread with tapenade, a homemade olive paste, had no more success than the Lucques in re-routing the conversation.

  ‘I was back here by the autumn of 1940, you see. It was a term of the armistice that the army was demobilized. I was glad I hadn’t joined the navy. That was supposed to have been demobilized as well but Admiral Darlan was determined to hold on to it.’

  ‘How did we get on to all this?’ Mme Vargas protested more directly.

  ‘There were still thousands missing as prisoners of war,’ Monsieur pressed on regardless. ‘But the dominant feeling here in the south was relief that the Germans hadn’t invaded this far. There was very little interest in De Gaulle’s “Free France” activities over in London and not a lot in the Résistance. What really changed things was the German occupation of the south.’

  ‘You don’t think our guest might like to talk about something more cheerful?’ Mme Vargas tried again with a bowl of pistachios.

  ‘In November 1942, the British and the Americans invaded North Africa and the Germans immediately invaded the rest of France. Within a few days they were marching into Montpellier.’

  ‘Ecoute, Albert …’ Some crisps had no more success.

  ‘We were now experiencing for ourselves what the people in the north had been suffering for the last eighteen months. Thanks to an artificial exchange rate, the German soldiers were able to go through our shops like plagues of locusts, leaving us to do the best we could on the black market. Prices and wages were all controlled by the Germans but their demands for “occupation costs” continued to rise. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of men were being conscripted to work in Germany.’

  ‘Sérieusement, Albert …’ This was not at all the way Madame had planned their petit apéritif.

  ‘People were finally beginning to think an allied victory might not be a bad thing after all. And when Lodève was liberated on 22 August 1944 …’

  ‘Albert, c’est trop!’ Madame Vargas raised what little voice she had for the very first time in our year’s acquaintance.

  ‘I really don’t mind,’ I said. ‘It’s interesting.’

  ‘C’est passionnant,’ said M. Vargas.

  ‘Je ne suis pas d’accord,’ said Madame, embarrassed at her outburst.

  *

  A big, bold municipal sign pointing encouragingly eastwards from the main road south of Aniane might imply to the passing devotee that the Domaine de la Grange des Pères is going to be every bit as accessible as Daumas Gassac, which is equally clearly arrowed down the same route. From this point on, however, there is very little hope of locating Laurent Vaillé’s cave without further and better directions. And even if you found your way to his door, you still might not find your way inside.

  ‘He doesn’t normally do visits,’ said Le Mimosa’s David Pugh, when I pleaded with him to put in a word for me. ‘Partly because he’s got nothing to sell – all snapped up long ago – and partly because his time is limited and he’d rather give no visit than half of one.’

  But David did, it seems, put in the right word. The last lap of the route has been duly vouchsafed and Laurent Vaillé is extending a hand of welcome.

  I am once again without Manu. Urgent fairy-light hanging duties have come between my neighbour and the climax of the year’s tastings. The imminent return of the grandchildren for Christmas has prompted an unexpectedly festive departure from Mme Gros’s normally dour domestic decorative policy. Twinkling, multi-coloured lanterns are about to adorn the façade of her cottage. The lamps were actually Uncle Milo’s and I had been thinking of using them to garland a cherry tree or two myself.

  ‘But it would be a shame to waste them,’ said Manu when Mme Gros despatched him to persuade me that my own proposal might imperil the next season’s crop.

  Laurent Vaillé’s cave is barn-like yet distinctly ecclesiastical-looking. It once belonged to the monks of nearby Aniane, the eponymous ‘Granary of the Fathers’, he explains.

  Inside it, four enormous, immaculately gleaming stainless steel cuves dominate the far end but make surprisingly little impression on an otherwise almost empty area. There must be enough unoccupied space for maybe three times Virgile’s total operation. Yet for all the apparent under-utilized capacity – not to mention the legendary scarcity of the product – Laurent says there are no plans to expand beyond the present fourteen hectares. He is quite content with the luxury of space.

  He refuses, however, to say how many bottles he makes. I sense he has enough difficulty reconciling disappointed customers to their limited presold allocations, without them being able to translate these into precise percentages.

  ‘I do keep a bit back for friends,’ he admits. ‘And for my bon viveur builder. And for those picnics, when everyone says, we’ll bring the food, you bring the wine!’

  No doubt he knows that I know that almost everyone in the region regards him as the best but he says all this with a total lack of self-congratulation. He is altogether more good-humoured than I had expected and yet the natural expression into which his strongly chiselled features periodically relax is one of uncompromising determination.

  Everything around us is spotless. Even the assortment of overalls hanging neatly on a row of pegs looks pristine. A large, well-scrubbed worktable is empty except for a wooden case of wine, stamped ‘Domaine de Trévallon’.

  ‘I started my training over there,’ Laurent explains, ‘in Provence. Then with that name behind me, I managed stints with Chave in the Rhône and Comtes Lafon in Burgundy as well.’ (David Pugh recounted how much interest this pedigree managed to generate, before the first vintage – the 1992 – had even flowered.) ‘But you’ve not come to listen to my life story,’ he laughs, as he heads for the stairs to his subterranean cellars. Then he checks himself halfway down to ask one of the year’s more superfluous questions. ‘You would like to taste?’ he verifies.

  ‘Excavated by me and my father. And absolutely essential in this climate,’ he says, as we emerge in the first of several smoothly plastered, well-lit chambers below, where long rows of expensive-looking barrels stretch, apparently indistinguishably, ahead of us. ‘We make just the two wines,’ he explains, as he heads unerringly for the cask that he has in mind. ‘White and red. You’ll find some places founding all their reputation on some minute quantity of whatever they reg
ard as their top cuvée, putting all their effort into that and neglecting the rest. Well, here everything we make is the best!’

  So far my direction-changing New Year bottle of red has remained my only taste of La Grange des Pères. The white, with which Laurent is deftly filling a large pipette, is completely unknown to me. I watch him share it between two glasses, before thoughtfully sniffing his own. The piercing dark eyes under his intensely black eyebrows register approval. I taste it myself. It is only a couple of months old but already surprisingly complex – indeed, I have seldom felt more disappointed to be offered a spittoon, in this case a red bucket – yet he tells me that it has not even started its malolactic fermentation.

  ‘Maybe in the spring, maybe in the summer,’ he speculates. Unlike Virgile, he seems utterly relaxed on the subject.

  ‘We made this first in 1995. It’s normally eighty per cent Roussanne, ten per cent Marsanne – both traditional Rhône grapes – with ten per cent Burgundian Chardonnay. But this year we had almost no Chardonnay. It’s the first variety to ripen, and last spring, when there was little else going, some hungry wild boar simply scoffed the lot,’ he laughed, again utterly relaxed at the thwarting of his plans.

  The white from the 2000 harvest has completed its malolactic and is consequently richer, more complete, more ‘winey’, in fact, just as Virgile said. Like the 2001, it is still in barrel and Laurent explains that all his whites are matured in this way for two full years. Indeed, they are even fermented in the barrels as well. Yet, remarkably, they smell and taste only very subtly of oak.

  ‘Is that because it’s such a long, slow process?’ I ask. ‘Is that the secret?’

  ‘There are no secrets,’ he says with a smile, as we move to another vault where the reds are resting.

  Here the individual varieties – roughly forty per cent Syrah, forty Mourvèdre and twenty Cabernet Sauvignon – are kept in separate barrels until just before bottling. Laurent takes me through each of the 2000s. The 2001s are untastable, he says, having just begun their ‘malos’, but the 1999 vintage has just been blended for imminent bottling and we can quickly taste that as well.