Virgile's Vineyard Page 27

  ‘But there’s not much time before dark, if you want to see the vines,’ he gently hurries me.

  Reluctantly I follow his example and empty the remains of my sample back into the barrel, but once upstairs, it seems there is just enough time for the 1999 white, which is also waiting for bottling in one of the stainless steel cuves. It has a power and persistence that seem to eclipse even the reds but there is no time to consider further. Laurent is turning out the lights.

  ‘You weren’t thinking of going in that, were you?’ he laughs at the sight of my modest Renault. ‘Assuming, that is, you were hoping to drive it home again.’

  I clamber obediently into his four-wheel drive.

  ‘The family land down here in the valley wasn’t suitable for vines,’ he explains, as we climb a winding road into the hills. ‘At least, not for quality vines. My father had farmed it for the co-op but we ripped everything up, planting grain instead. We searched for a year before we found what we needed,’ he continues, abruptly abandoning the road for a steep and rugged track, which he tells me they carved through the limestone with dynamite and bulldozers. (He was right, of course, there are potholes and ditches on this ascent in which the Renault might almost have disappeared.)

  ‘Incredibly infertile,’ he beams contentedly, as we emerge on to the spectacularly barren-looking plateau at the top. ‘We found a few vestiges of nineteenth-century vines and olive trees, but basically nothing but scrub had grown up here for well over a hundred years.’

  The land is also incredibly stony, the density of the round white pebbles looking almost snow-like in the pink evening light. There is not another vineyard in sight. The sense of quiet and isolation seems very nearly tangible.

  ‘It must be the highest in the area,’ I suggest in hushed, almost reverent tones.

  ‘Nearly three hundred metres,’ confirms Laurent more matter-of-factly. ‘You can make out the Pyrenees in better light. But you see that hill over there? That’s where the famous Robert Mondavi was hoping to buy.’

  The Mondavi story is one that has been on a lot of lips this year. The local socialist mayor had agreed to let the Californian wine-maker acquire and clear about fifty hectares of woodland in return for much-needed support for the underfunded, underachieving village co-operative and the deal had bitterly divided opinion. Many, including Laurent Vaillé himself, argued that Mondavi’s arrival would give the Languedoc invaluable publicity, which it could never afford by itself. Others, like the Guiberts at Daumas Gassac, thought it inexcusable to destroy a forest when there were plenty of perfectly good vineyards for sale around the region – ignoring, of course, American efficiency’s insistence that everything should be conveniently contiguous. In the end, the newly elected Communist Mayor of Aniane simply reversed the deal – as he had always pledged to do in his election campaign – and Mondavi, unamused, was reported to be severing every last link with France. The co-operative would be unlikely to find another saviour.

  The sense of bareness up here is perhaps exaggerated by the fact that all the vines appear to be grown exceptionally close to the ground. Unlike Virgile’s and every other vineyard that I have seen this year, they have no central trunk. Laurent believes the method must once have been traditional in the region because it can be found in the very oldest vineyards.

  ‘Is that the secret?’ I ask him, but he merely smiles and assures me once again that there are none.

  Looking closer, I see that he has already started his pruning – a painful kneeling operation, I imagine, at the height of those vines.

  ‘I started at the end of November,’ he confirms. ‘I’d been doing so much work in the cave, I just had to get out of doors! It always lifts my spirits, to come up here. Same with my brother.’ He points to a tractor doing a pre-prune in the distance. ‘He always prefers to work in the fields.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a brother,’ I say. Most people have talked about La Grange des Pères as if it were Laurent and Laurent alone, and he is clearly the public face for what little public contact there is.

  ‘People say I hide him because he knows the secrets,’ he laughs. ‘But it’s like I told you, there really are no secrets.’ He laughs again at people’s unwillingness to believe him.

  But I don’t believe him either. Over an hour after we left the cave, I can still taste that 1999 white as vividly as when it first touched my tongue.

  *

  ‘Count on me,’ Virgile had said.

  I was in fact counting first on his friend Luc. Putting February’s irritations behind me, I had commissioned him to procure me a Christmas truffle back in November, but last week he reluctantly admitted there was not so much as a whiff in the whole of the region. Everyone, it seemed – even Manu, presumably – was paying the price of a hot, dry August.

  ‘Don’t worry about Luc,’ Virgile promised me. ‘My family’s full of truffle hunters. There’s never a shortage in the Vaucluse.’

  But now it is Christmas Eve, and for the first year that any of them can remember, the combined expertise of the Jolys has failed to unearth a single specimen even for their private consumption. His mother is making do with dried cèpes, he tells me.

  I am wondering what alternative compromises may have occurred to Sarah and the other houseguests who have volunteered to cook my unfamiliar capon. (In the excitement of the Saturday morning market, it struck me as a more authentically ‘local’ choice than turkey for tonight’s dinner.) But at Virgile’s suggestion, I have delegated Christmas decoration duties as well so that I can join him for a final tasting of the new wines before we both drive up to sample this ‘austerity-cookbook’ chapon sans truffe.

  We are working our way through the various cuvées that I have been privileged this year to follow from grape to glass – or rather from pruning cut to bud and thence to leaf and flower and grape … and only finally to glass.

  The Cinsault is light and amiable; the Syrah (the two different cuves now blended) is dark and concentrated but relatively severe; the Carignan (similarly blended) is gutsy and spicy; and the Grenache – despite the recent traumas – perhaps the most fruitily engaging of all. The mixed vin de presse, on the other hand, is predictably bitter on the finish but it may yet be useful in the final blend. Then lastly there is the special Nébian Cinsault: the sweetly concentrated, utterly irresistible ‘confiture’. Virgile is now very excited about this. Two years in wood, he believes, will make it even more impressive, and although the style will only be achievable in exceptional years, he is resolved from this point on to target everything he does at Nébian towards the possibility.

  ‘It’s a bit early to say for certain,’ says Virgile, ‘but a lot of people think this is going to be the best vintage since the Languedoc got serious.’

  ‘I was really lucky then … But you haven’t yet started your pruning?’ I ask, with a curious sense of reluctance to broach the subject. I suppose it was pruning time when we first met and to ask the question is to acknowledge that the year has nearly run its course.

  ‘I prefer to leave it until after Christmas, when the sap will be rising,’ he says. ‘Apart from being too busy. The last of the malos have finished, you see – even the Grenache – so I’ve been doing the final rackings. And I’ve also been off to the Cognac region, choosing barrels for next year. I found this incredible guy. Really small scale. Even lets you choose the particular trees that you want him to use, if you can wait two years. Which sadly I can’t …’

  He will be barrel-ageing all of this year’s Coteaux du Languedoc over a second winter, he explains. The early bottling of the first half of last year’s production was driven purely by cash flow. With Puech behind him, only the Carthagène and the proportion of the wine that has to be declassified as vin de pays will be released in the spring.

  ‘But that reminds me, I’ve forgotten to book the bottling lorry!’ he announces to my surprise.

  It is not that the thing itself is unfamiliar. Only the other day, when I visited Daumas Gassa
c, one of these giant bottling factories on juggernaut wheels was making short work of their 2001 white. I just hadn’t expected Virgile to be filling Saint Saturnin’s square with one of them next year. Times have changed more quickly than I would have thought possible in January.

  *

  ‘Don’t I get a kiss, then?’ asks Babette, as a lungful of cigarette smoke blows past my left cheek.

  I owe this eleventh-hour marker of my social progress to a lack of commerciality on her part, which must, I think, be one of the core skills acquired at café-management school. New Year’s Eve is a date in the calendar when much of the village might be expected to venture forth for festive refreshment. Yet perversely this is just when Babette can be relied upon to hang up her ‘closed’ sign.

  She is not, however, the first to arrive at my party. Manu predictably claimed that prize but he is sadly unable to shower Babette with further cousinly kisses. This is because the hanging of the fairy lights was not an unqualified success. The lights themselves look well enough – or as well as can be expected, given his wife’s refusal to pay for the replacement of the numerous defective bulbs. The trouble was that Mme Gros’s preferred emplacement for the illuminations was higher than a man of Manu’s stature should really have tried to reach, even from the top of his longest ladder. And although his fall, when it came, was partly broken by a pile of fallen branches, gathered from my little forest and waiting to be cut into Yuletide logs, they failed to prevent him from cracking his jaw.

  He is thus heavily strapped and bandaged and not at all in kissing mode tonight. Indeed, the discomforts of merely eating appear to have lost him several kilos over the Christmas period. His only consolation is that the doctor’s advice that he should drink everything, including wine, through a straw seems to have accelerated his already unrivalled imbibing rate.

  ‘Good stuff, this,’ he congratulates me between slurps and gurgles.

  It is in fact some of the château’s ‘house champagne’, sent up by Krystina. Presumably she did not want to be embarrassed in front of the handsome young man who seems to be her latest disciple.

  ‘Greek God,’ insisted Babette, when she tipped me off last week. ‘But it’ll never last. Only history he’s interested in is the history of Krystina’s alimony.’

  ‘He makes even me feel old,’ admitted Virgile, when the golden youth made his first public appearance on Krystina’s arm this evening. ‘But then, Versace jackets never did suit me,’ he added as the boy dropped one of Krystina’s Christmas presents casually in a corner.

  I feel rather less casual about my own present from Krystina. Heaven knows how she managed it but she found me a bottle of Fine de Faugères dating from the nineteenth century. The exact date was unfortunately obscured by the thick black marker pen, with which she had written ‘Thanx – It was Fun – Luv K’ across the label. I have hidden it where Manu will never find it on any of his ‘caretaker’ visits next year.

  ‘Are they planted?’ Virgile whispers theatrically, already briefed by me that the same degree of secrecy is desirable for his own gift.

  I know it will be several years before any of the three tiny truffle oaks in his Christmas Eve parcel yields its hoped-for riches – by which time, I hope to have found a way to live here full time. But I would still rather Manu remained ignorant of their location.

  ‘I’m still dithering about where to put them,’ I reply no less furtively, ‘and I‘ve only tomorrow to decide.’

  Normally, I would have asked Manu’s advice on these things, but in the circumstances I had to fall back on the nature book. Somewhere well drained, it said. But then again, not too dry. Shaded, but then again not dark. I ended up completely confused.

  ‘I’d better come up to help before you go,’ Virgile offers. ‘But I brought you this …’

  He is drowned by the courageous attempt of Mme Gros at his elbow to engage M. Mas in a polite discussion of the Christmas truffle crisis.

  ‘Enormous!’ she shouts above his ever-screeching hearing aid.

  ‘Enormous!’ she repeats at ear-splitting volume, having shrewdly assumed his toothless response to be the usual confession of failure to hear.

  The extra decibels assure her the attention of most of the gathering, as she broadcasts her privileged enjoyment of what sounds like the largest example of truffle life reported in the whole of the Languedoc.

  ‘My husband has his sources,’ she informs us all smugly.

  ‘I brought you this as well,’ Virgile tries again.

  He allows me a covert glimpse of a bottle in a carrier bag, which I am clearly meant to hide along with Krystina’s brandy. It is unlabelled but he tells me it is a hand-bottled, advance sample of his superior, barrel-aged Coteaux du Languedoc from last year.

  ‘We ran out of time on Christmas Eve and you’ll not be here for the bottling.’

  He looks at his feet.

  ‘I’m going to miss you,’ he says, embarrassed. ‘I’ll miss your feedback,’ he adds. ‘No really. Especially now that Olivier … Well, anyway, I’m really pleased with that,’ he continues more chirpily, with a gesture towards the wine in the bag. ‘I’m convinced it’s one for long keeping. Ten years maybe to show its best.’

  ‘Perhaps I should take it back to England – as a reminder,’ I say and then I look at my own feet. ‘I’ll miss you too,’ I mutter. ‘I’ll miss your cave almost as much as this house …’

  ‘Are you two getting maudlin?’ asks Sarah, from behind the tray of canapés that took her most of the day to prepare. ‘You’ve been monopolizing this boy for long enough,’ she rebukes me, as her arm slides under Virgile’s and she leads him away to a quieter corner, leaving me alone for a moment with the carrier bag. But only for a moment, because Manu’s infallible antennae have already detected its bottle-shaped contents and he is limping over in the hope of investigating.

  ‘Tried them yet, have you?’ he mumbles, as ebulliently as the facial dressings allow. ‘You’ve given them pride of place, I see.’

  It is fortunate that my present from him was the one that needed no concealing. Its length rather precludes concealment. Indeed, as Manu has proudly noticed, it tends to dominate even this, my longest room. I have always thought these long-handled fruit-picking devices measured a couple of metres at the most. But with Manu’s newfound fear of ladders, I suppose the outsized model was only to be expected – especially with even more of the picking burden falling on him next year.

  ‘Been talking to that Virgile fellow,’ Manu changes the subject. ‘He’s got some very interesting ideas, you know. Surprised you haven’t picked up a bit more from him, given how much time you’ve been spending down there. I mean, he tells me for instance … Well, this is maybe a bit technical for you … But he says that, if I worked with lower yields, I’d get higher alcohol. Never thought of it like that but it certainly bears thinking about. Always willing to learn,’ he chuckles, as he hobbles away in pursuit of more of Krystina’s free-flowing champagne.

  ‘Do they give you a lot of holiday?’ Mme Gros accosts me animatedly, her steely grey hair tonight somehow radiant with optimism. ‘It must be breaking your heart,’ she adds cheerfully, her own cardiac condition remaining conspicuously sound, as she accepts an unaccustomed, celebratory second Noilly Prat. ‘Leaving your lovely house. Leaving all of us to our own devices. Of course, we’ll do all we can to keep an eye on things. Pop a bag of your fruit in your deep freeze, when you can’t be there at picking time. Anything along those lines,’ she assures me and she wafts herself exultantly away to monitor her husband’s consumption levels.

  ‘Such a shame,’ agree the Vargases in reedy unison, as they struggle to juggle glasses, plates and walking sticks between two pairs of hands. ‘Letting go of the land again, just when you were beginning to get on top of it. We’d offer to help, at least with the olive trees,’ their frail duet assures me warmly. ‘But the truth is, we’re finding our own a bit of a struggle these days.’

  ‘You can leave the vin
es to me,’ says Virgile, joining us. ‘It’s the least I can do.’

  ‘But they’re right,’ I acknowledge glumly, as the Vargases excuse themselves to totter away to a sofa. ‘I can never make sense of this place in a few weeks a year.’

  ‘Then stay for another fifty-two,’ Virgile dares me. ‘Stay for ever.’

  ‘Be realistic!’ I laugh, unsettled by the intensity of the challenge in his stare. ‘I’ve got to go back to work. I need the money.’

  ‘I am being realistic. Remember my Che Guevara postcard?’

  ‘ “Demand the impossible”?’

  ‘Why not? I mean, how much money do you need to live here?’ he presses. ‘You can let your English house again. Or sell it. You can be practically self-sufficient here.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Think of the new fruit trees. Think of your truffle oaks.’

  ‘I just can’t.’

  ‘Think of all you’ve learned. Especially after what the Vargases have just been telling me. Apparently half your land here is Appellation Contrôlée. You didn’t know that, did you? You should stay and make wine.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. I couldn’t possibly.’

  ‘You could,’ says Virgile with another of his challenging stares. ‘Si tu veux, tu peux.’

  Afterword

  If you were to seek out Virgile in the Languedoc today, you would find that much has changed.

  Not the least important difference is the fact that Saint Saturnin is no longer, as Virgile once lamented, a ‘village of bachelors’. Magda, one of the two Polish vendangeuses, returned for another season in 2002 and this time she stayed on to marry Virgile! They now have two sons, César and Alexandre, born in 2004 and 2007. And, as Virgile is anxious to stress, Magda has become very much an equal player in the business, focussing specially on developing a Polish market for their wines, but closely involved in all that they now undertake.