Virgile's Vineyard Read online

  ‘But I make the wine,’ says our hostess, cheerfully impervious to Manu’s incredulity. ‘I’m responsible for the cellar and my uncle looks after the vineyard. Would you like to taste?’

  Claude Jourdan’s offer sends my companion’s features into a torment of indecision. Should he seize the opportunity for another glass of the wine that he relished so unreservedly at lunchtime? Or did the heat of the day make him recklessly uncritical of something that ought to have been approached with greater circumspection?

  ‘There’s no need,’ I tell her to put him out of his misery. ‘We got to know your wine extremely well over lunch.’

  While Mlle Jourdan sorts out my purchase, she tells us how they made their first Picpoul as recently as 1992 and how a first gold medal followed in 1993. Indeed, to judge from a fat file of press cuttings, few have ever quarrelled with their overnight success. Few, that is, except Manu, who continues to regard this female intruder in the masculine world of wine-making with undisguised suspicion.

  Later in the evening, as if to demonstrate more acceptable womanly ways, Mme Gros makes an unprecedented appearance on my doorstep. She is holding a plate with a small round pastry-covered pie, exuding a mildly unappetizing fishy smell.

  ‘We found it down at Hyper U,’ she announces. ‘My husband says you missed out on these at lunchtime. Tielle.’

  I am touched by the gesture but, after one bite into the squid-filled cardboard crust, I know I didn’t miss out on much. Perhaps because she knows this only too well, Mme Gros stays to watch me finish the last mouthful.

  *

  Virgile is worried.

  This unseasonably mild weather is no good for his vines. They are supposed to be having a quiet rest after the rigours of carrying last year’s crop, patiently sitting out the cold and using the carbohydrates stored in the autumn as a kind of anti-freeze. Instead, the thermometer has been confusing them with spring-like messages and their sap is rising too soon. If it carries on like this, Virgile explains, the buds will burst prematurely and then be damaged by some sudden return to wintry normality.

  He is also worried by the sheer quantity of pruning to be coped with in the next two or three months. He has rented some additional parcels of land to increase his production and it is going to be a lot of extra work on his own.

  I cautiously follow Virgile’s confident four-wheel-drive down a rough grassy track, winding through the endless, anonymous-looking rows of vines on the plain to the south of Saint Saturnin. There are no fences or other badges of ownership and at first I wonder how Virgile can possibly remember which are supposed to be his. But then I notice the subtle changes in pruning styles and maintenance standards every twenty rows or so. When we slow down beside an exceptionally chaotic tangle of last year’s growth, where only the metre-wide spacing between the rows seems to have prevented each from intertwining with its neighbour, I feel depressingly certain that we have located his newly rented Syrah.

  ‘Do you see how each of the vinestocks is trained in a sort of T-shape?’ asks Virgile, as he pulls aside a jumble of stems to reveal a pair of barely visible horizontal arms, branching off from a central trunk and following a long low wire that stretches down the row. ‘It’s called “Cordon Royat” – a method of training the vines that’s relatively new in the Languedoc but most people use it now for the new varieties. The more traditional method’s what you see over there, behind you.’

  He nods towards a field already pruned to expose a very different style of vinestock, unsupported by any wires. I recognize this as the way in which most of the vines near Les Sources are pruned. Indeed, it is one of the most striking features of the local landscape, with four or five gnarled and twisted branches curling up from each trunk, as if to grip some enormous bowl or cup.

  ‘Goblet pruning,’ Virgile succinctly explains, as he hands me a small pair of secateurs. ‘Mainly reserved for Carignan these days.’

  The untamed shoots of Virgile’s Syrah have been blown in all directions by the wind and the idea is that I go ahead of him, cutting off the worst: a pre-pruning that might have been avoided if the previous grower had exercised a bit more discipline. It’s a slow, backbreaking exercise and, to make things worse, one that seems to be perfectly within the capabilities of a rapid-action machine, operating in one of the adjoining fields. But Virgile wouldn’t dream of using a mechanical cutter, even for a pre-prune and even if he could afford one.

  ‘Pruning is one of the most important skills,’ he emphasizes, keeping a careful eye on my work. ‘Apart from just keeping things manageable, it’s the main opportunity to impose my policy on the crucial question of yield.’

  ‘Is that the “hectolitres per hectare” that people keep talking about?’ I ask.

  ‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘About twenty-five, in my case – half the official Coteaux du Languedoc maximum. But what I’m aiming for, you see, is a low-volume, high-concentration harvest. And by limiting the number of buds, I can start to limit my eventual number of bunches.’

  ‘But what does it all mean in practice? You’re talking to someone who doesn’t even know what a hectolitre looks like.’

  ‘It looks like a hundred litres,’ he laughs. ‘And a hectare looks a lot like ten thousand square metres.’

  ‘So your yield of twenty-five …’ I struggle with the maths.

  ‘Means one litre from every four square metres,’ he rescues me. He has done the calculation before. ‘But “hectolitres per hectare” doesn’t mean very much, unless you also take into account the number of vines per hectare. If you’ve got low-density plantings, you can achieve the same yield of twenty-five with a lot less work. But the grapes won’t be as good because the vines will have had a much easier time. My own densities are quite high – around five thousand per hectare.’

  I am once again wrestling with my mental arithmetic but he saves me the trouble.

  ‘My twenty-five hectolitres per hectare means that the four square metres producing that litre are occupied by an average of just two vines.’

  ‘You mean only half a litre per vine? About three good glasses?’

  The idea seems immensely depressing as I look back down the row to measure our results so far.

  My hands are aching as I struggle to keep ahead of the expert. He takes considerably less time over the more critical, detailed, final pruning than I seem to need for the rough-and-ready preliminaries. His crisply laundered jeans and designer cardigan also remain as pristine as ever, while I end up covered in the mud that the recent sunshine has failed to dry.

  With such a meticulous master in command, there’s naturally no question of strewing the cuttings wherever they happen to fall. They have to be laid out neatly at right angles between the rows. A mincing machine will then be able to travel down the gaps and turn them into a kind of organic fertilizer.

  ‘I try to make everything as biologique as possible,’ he stresses. ‘That’s why I also leave some weeds.’

  I always thought this was a sign of a carelessly tended vineyard but Virgile explains that the weeds help to make the vine work harder, pushing their roots down deeper in search of water and picking up tastier minerals as they go.

  ‘A book of Uncle Milo’s says pruning starts on the 22nd,’ I say as I pause to straighten my aching back. ‘St Vincent’s Day.’

  ‘Don’t believe all you read!’ laughs Virgile. ‘It can start whenever the leaves have fallen in the first frosts, usually some time in December. The only thing that really matters is that you’re finished by the end of March, when the buds start bursting.’

  But this is an objective that seems distressingly unattainable as we finish our labours for today, with only two rows, out of I hate to think how many, completed.

  *

  Marseillan is another attractive little port, slightly west of Bouzigues on the Bassin de Thau and, according to Krystina, once another sub-colony of Marseille, as its name suggests. But its major claim to modern fame must surely be the production of one of the
few alcoholic beverages that have ever – on the rarest of high days and holidays – been known to pass the lips of Mme Gros: the distinctive vermouth, Noilly Prat. So for once, it is she who has urged the expedition upon me.

  ‘Your car, I think,’ she announced decisively, when the idea was first mooted. ‘My husband will be quite happy in the back. Then we can arrive with a bit of style for once.’

  My ancient three-door Renault may not be quite the celebrity limousine of my neighbour’s dreams but at least it is not a little red van. Unfortunately, however, the car’s designer knew nothing of Mme Gros’s taste in millinery. Otherwise, he might have raised the ceiling several centimetres and found a different location for the rear-view mirror. For despite the return of the torrential storms, Mme Gros has graced the occasion with an enormous and unseasonably flowery hat that makes driving extremely hazardous.

  In fact, the whole of Mme Gros’s outfit is incongruously summery, from the billowing, floral-patterned dress to the unaccustomed pink high heels. The entire effect looks as if she were expecting to open the vermouth factory, instead of merely visiting it. Even Manu has been pressed into a tie. And the fact that he has somehow arranged a private tour in the middle of the normal fermeture annuelle (another hunting contact?) accentuates the general air of visiting royalty. Or it would have done, if Manu had succeeded in finding the out-of-season entrance before the silken herbaceous border festooning his spouse’s headgear was irretrievably sodden.

  She is therefore in no mood to be amused by the rapt attention that he is paying to the vivacious young blonde who has been deputed to act as our guide. After all, who would have expected him to be so fascinated by the fact that a vermouth starts its life as ordinary table wine (in this case, a blend of Picpoul de Pinet and something I have yet to investigate, called Clairette du Languedoc)? Or so enthralled by the addition of fruit-flavoured spirits and a long list of herbs and spices (in a recipe curiously reminiscent of the ancient Greek cocktails that Krystina spoke about but omitting, I trust, the ground-up marble)?

  ‘Pay no attention to my husband,’ snaps Mme Gros – a strategy that has clearly commended itself to her over nearly fifty years of marriage. ‘A man who manages to forget my umbrella on a day like this.’

  The lack of waterproofing is suddenly uppermost in everyone’s minds because the blonde has steered us outside again to a rain-drenched courtyard filled with hundreds of ancient-looking barrels.

  ‘Here we observe the special process that makes Joseph Noilly’s 1813 invention unique,’ says her impeccably memorized script. ‘A year’s exposure to Marseillan’s special combination of blazing sunshine and refreshing sea breezes.’

  The irony may be lost on our guide but not on Mme Gros. She glowers first at the heavy black clouds that have so thoroughly soaked her and then at the feckless incompetent whom she holds responsible.

  ‘The heat evaporates six to eight per cent of the wine in every barrel,’ the script continues. ‘The “angel’s share”, we call it.’

  ‘Ah, the waste!’ sighs Manu, too captivated to notice how dearly he is going to pay for his failure to bring any form of rain-protection.

  ‘But essential, you see, to turn an ordinary bright, fresh wine into the distinctive, rich, amber-coloured liquid that sets Monsieur Noilly’s product apart from the opposition.’

  ‘And Monsieur Prat?’ asks Mme Gros, with menacingly icy calm.

  ‘Monsieur Noilly’s son-in-law, Madame. Our first Marketing Director.’

  ‘No wonder his name’s on the label,’ says Manu, still blissfully unaware of the impending storm, as he leads the retreat indoors for a tasting. ‘Anyone who could get my beloved to buy one of his bottles deserves the Légion d’honneur!’

  *

  Virgile is worried again.

  We are having lunch in the small, sparsely-furnished first-floor flat that he is renting from the Mairie in Saint Saturnin, until the house above his cave can be rendered fit for even his own, relatively undemanding, human occupation. The demands of wine-making leave little time or money for homemaking but lunch is something that Virgile does believe in.

  ‘Food and sleep,’ he says, as he lifts two heavy slices of rare lamb from a frying pan and passes me a large bowl of salad. ‘Two things I won’t compromise on. Otherwise I can’t do anything else.’

  But he is still worried. His longer-maturing wine ought to be racked. It is still in its fermentation tank, on top of a bed of sediment known as the lees, and it urgently needs pumping off into a clean tank before the flavour’s spoilt.

  ‘Could you taste a hint of rottenness the other day?’ he asks, unable to persuade himself that he can’t. ‘It’s the weather that’s the problem,’ he continues, as he tops up our glasses with the D’Aupilhac Carignan that I brought him. ‘We need a nice, crisp, sunny, anti-cyclonic day.’

  ‘But surely racking is an indoor job?’

  ‘We need high atmospheric pressure to push down on the lees. It keeps them settled at the bottom while we’re pumping the wine. But look at the miserable wet skies that we’ve had for the last few days. And that’s only part of the problem. In an ideal world, we’d wait for the moon as well.’

  ‘Wait for the moon to do what?’

  ‘To be in the right place,’ he says and pulls a much-thumbed booklet out of a drawer. ‘Have you not seen one of these before? It’s what we call a biodynamic calendar.’

  ‘Bio… . ?’

  ‘Dynamic. The bio aspect really just means ordinary organic principles. But the dynamic bit involves doing things when the planets are favourable.’

  ‘Like new moons and full moons, that kind of thing?’ I ask disbelievingly.

  ‘Not so much that as the movement of the moon in relation to the rest of the zodiac. You see, the calendar divides the year into four different categories, each of them earmarked as favouring one of a plant’s four key elements: the roots, the leaves, the flowers and the fruits. And if we’re doing anything that relates to the wine itself, we try to do it in a fruit period.’

  All this sounds a great deal wackier than the weather worries but, before I can betray too much scepticism, Virgile dials a number for a telephonic weather forecast.

  ‘Not good,’ he sighs, as he puts the receiver back, looking even more depressed. ‘Maybe in a couple of days’ time.’

  ‘But won’t that be a flower day?’

  ‘Too bad,’ he says. ‘The wine won’t wait. And the weather’s more important. I’ll call you when the skies are clear.’

  February

  On Sunday morning I was woken by the unrelenting ringing of a telephone.

  ‘Bonjour, c’est Virgile,’ said the handset, as I fumbled in the dark for the light switch. ‘The weather’s changed. We need to rack the wine as soon as possible. Can you come straightaway?’

  By the time I arrived, he was already busy with a bucket of soda solution, methodically sterilizing everything that he was about to use, from the empty fermentation cuve to his ancient, second-hand pump. Then the whole operation was carefully repeated with citric acid. Finally the tap on the tank that needed to be emptied could be turned. The deep purple liquid gushed out into a large plastic tub. The pump swung into juddery action and the frothing wine surged up a pipe to its new resting-place.

  ‘Now this is the really vital bit,’ he said, as he dashed over to stir some minutely measured sulphur dioxide into the foaming tub.

  ‘Not very organic,’ I ventured.

  ‘But absolutely indispensable,’ he explained. ‘Even the Greeks used it as a preservative. It fights bacteria. Prevents oxidation. Without it, you simply couldn’t make wine. But the big question is …’ He bit his lip as he watched the level rising in the receiving cuve. ‘Have I left it all too late? Has the wine already been tainted by the lees? ’

  As soon as the transfer was complete, he opened the big circular door in the now empty tank. He put his head inside, lingered a moment and re-emerged, smiling shyly. The wine was not only sound but …
dare he say it … really promising.

  Virgile was happy.

  *

  The whole of the south-facing end of Les Sources’s dining room – from terracotta floor to stone, Romanesque-arched ceiling – is magnificently glazed. An obvious enough idea, perhaps, if you have a view like Uncle Milo’s but the masterstroke here was to project the bare stone walls and vaulting of the interior for a foot or so beyond the glass. It makes the window seem to disappear, as inside and outside worlds merge together. More cleverly still, it isolates the room from the extremes of the elements. It will no doubt offer vital shade in summer but, on winter days like these, it is only the rarest and strongest of southerly winds that ever makes the raindrops obscure the glass. It is, of course, impossible to curtain but even dark February nights feel detached and snug, as the warmth of candlelight is reflected back on itself.

  On a bright February morning, however, there is no escaping the cruelly panoramic view of all the work that is waiting to be done on the land. Throughout my breakfast, for instance, I tried to ignore the remaining black olives that were obstinately, tauntingly clinging to the tree in front of the window. But in the end, I reluctantly accepted the fact that there is nothing like a glistening, ripe black olive to catch the morning sunlight. And nothing more certain to rob me of inner peace until the survivors were finally picked for the table. Whatever Manu said, if the black Lucques make such a good oil, I couldn’t believe they could be altogether bad for eating.

  I took a confident bite to test my theory, gasped with amazement and went straight to the terrace fountain for some water to take away the appallingly acrid taste. Something seemed to be seriously wrong. Perhaps this was what happened when you left them too long on the tree? I needed some advice but I wasn’t going to ask Manu and expose myself to another long-suffering ‘What did I tell you?’ So I nipped down for a quick word with the aged roadside double-act that regular passing pleasantries have revealed to be M. and Mme Vargas.

  They were working as usual on the steeply-banked terraces beside the lane leading to the village. They live, so they tell me, just inside the medieval gateway, in one of the main street’s tall narrow houses, and normally they bring all their tools out here in a wheelbarrow. Today, however, the brouette was full of horse manure, so the tools had travelled in Mme Vargas’s two-wheeled shopping trolley.