Virgile's Vineyard Page 5

  ‘You didn’t just eat the olives straight off the tree?’ they asked in characteristically unified astonishment, as they took a break from fertilizing and hobbled down to shake my hand. ‘What you have to do is, you put them in an old pillow-case for a couple of weeks, with plenty of rough salt …’ Even these more extended utterances were somehow managed in more or less synchronized harmony. ‘Give it a good shake every time you pass to drain the bitterness away. Then soak them in some oil – maybe some herbs …’

  Any remaining stages in the Vargases’ recipe (happily, a stiff-jointed gesture of finality suggested that there might in fact have been none) were drowned by the roar of a car being driven far too fast around the corner towards us. The Vargases’ body language changed as fast as their infirmity allowed to that of mortal terror but the vehicle swerved to avoid us all with only a handful of the roadside vines destroyed.

  ‘Krystina. With a K and a Y,’ the driver introduced herself to the trembling Vargases. ‘Oh, don’t worry, I know the grower,’ she continued breezily, as she turned the BMW on the now flattened corner of the vineyard. ‘I’ll settle up with him tomorrow. But you seem to have forgotten about our date in Narbonne,’ she rounded on me, with an imperious opening of the passenger door.

  ‘Key date for today: 118 BC. Foundation of Narbo,’ another quick-fire disquisition began, as the Vargases disappeared in the dust cloud thrown up by our back tyres. ‘Important port and capital of the Roman Province of Narbonensis – that’s all of modern Languedoc to you, with a good bit of Provence thrown in. Anyway, the surrounding area saw such a rapid explosion of vines and olive trees, people used to think there’d been a climatic upheaval. Planting rights all reserved to the Romans, of course. Mostly veterans of the Legions …’

  As the fusillade of facts continued, I caught fleeting glimpses of signposts to what Krystina informed me were other places founded by the Romans: Lodève, our nearest local market town, followed by Pézenas and Béziers. Then finally her convertible reached the coastal motorway.

  ‘You don’t think we should put the roof up?’ I suggested tentatively, as an elegant Gucci sling-back settled into some serious speeding.

  ‘What, and waste all this sunshine?’ she laughed, too pre-occupied with angling her cheekbones at the sun to notice the illuminated warning about violent winds. Or for that matter, the non-illuminated sign that told us we were following the Roman Via Domitia. But of course, she knew all about the latter.

  ‘Also founded in 118 BC,’ she shouted above the wind and the noise of the traffic. ‘Vital trade and communication route, running all the way from the Rhône to the Pyrenees, linking Italy to Spain.’

  ‘Taking wine to the Legions?’ was all I could manage as I struggled for breath against the constant buffeting.

  ‘Absolutely. But it wasn’t just a matter of quenching the military thirst,’ she answered, completely unperturbed by the elements, indeed exalting in the sweep of the wind through her improbably red hair. ‘Wine was also an important trading commodity, used almost as much like a currency as precious metals. Not that the Romans weren’t keen on drinking it. Even slaves were given about five litres a week for strength. Except when they were sick, when their rations were halved. The only Romans who didn’t do well on wine were the women. Distinctly frowned on for them, it was …’

  I was almost tearful with relief when Krystina took the motorway exit for Narbonne East. However, just as we seemed to be slowing down to enter the reassuring haven of a city centre car park, she made a violent last-minute turn to the right and accelerated out of town again.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she announced, cutting ruthlessly through the petrified pedestrians in the bicycles-only square in front of the town hall. ‘Nothing of substance left in Narbonne. I should have taken you to Nîmes for the Maison Carré and the Arena.’

  She relented only a fraction to allow me a glimpse of the few square metres of well worn Via Domitia cobbles, uncovered in the middle of the square, then tore out of town towards an open road between vineyards and olive groves.

  ‘At least the Roman landscape survived,’ she consoled me as she finally performed an emergency stop in a deserted car park, deep in the countryside.

  Ahead of us, impervious to the gale, was a curious, ultra-modern construction, built on concrete stilts, with huge, wing-like roof structures arching over what looked like an abandoned building site on either side.

  ‘Amphoralis,’ announced Krystina, with a sweeping gesture to encapsulate the totality but leaving me none the wiser. ‘Amphoras were the most popular vessels for making, storing and transporting both oil and wine until wooden barrels appeared around the first century AD. So the more the Romans planted vines and olive trees, the more they needed local potteries. And this was one of the biggest,’ she added.

  I looked bemusedly at the uncompromisingly contemporary building that we were about to enter.

  ‘THIS,’ she barked and pointed impatiently at the confusion of seemingly half-finished walls and ditches, stretching on either side of us between the tips of those extraordinary roof wings. ‘It’s an archaeological dig, for heaven’s sake,’ she sighed despairingly, as she led me into the Amphoralis Museum.

  ‘Amphoras had one great advantage over barrels,’ she continued in better humour, once inside. ‘They kept on breaking, leaving lots of archaeological evidence wherever you took them – proving, for instance, that the Romans transported Languedoc wines as far afield as Britain and Egypt …’

  She was just advancing on a map that would illustrate her thesis when the whole museum was engulfed by the world from which her advantageous marriage and subsequent divorce were supposed to have delivered her. A coach had disgorged a swarm of teenage schoolchildren.

  ‘Presumably Rome itself was self-sufficient?’ I asked, as we were jostled straight past the map.

  ‘Normally. Except in AD 79,’ shouted Krystina above the clamour. ‘The Pompeii vineyards were devastated by Vesuvius, so they embarked on a massive emergency planting campaign in the Languedoc, to make up for the shortages. But that then led to a glut, so Emperor Domitian decreed that half the vines had to be ripped out again. You’ll see the same thing in later centuries,’ she persisted, quite scandalized at the lack of discipline all around us.

  ‘Do the amphoras tell us anything about the wines?’ I prompted, in my best placatory manner.

  ‘Not a lot,’ she continued, shouting as a wave of adolescent laughter threatened to drown her out completely. ‘We know they coated the insides with pitch to make them watertight, which can’t have done much for the flavour. But maybe no worse than all their other additives and colourings.’

  ‘Like the Greeks?’ I prompted again, with a sense that, for Krystina, there was only one thing worse than unruly schoolchildren and that was unruly French-speaking schoolchildren.

  ‘Like the Greeks,’ she bellowed. ‘With the same taste for strong, sweet wines, often drying the grapes for extra concentration.’

  ‘Do we know the grape varieties?’

  ‘Not unless you’re familiar with the “soot grape”.’

  A violent turn on a Gucci heel made me wary of the anger that might soon be vented on an innocent accelerator pedal, but as soon as we are back in the relative peace of the car, she acknowledges more moderately that a wine made exclusively from another favourite Roman grape can be sampled on the route back home. So a little north of Pézenas, we double back sharply to our left, in search of Clairette du Languedoc.

  The modestly proportioned courtyard of the eighteenth-century Château la Condamine Bertrand is full of windswept activity when we arrive. The owner, Bernard Jany, is manoeuvring a miniature forklift truck, loaded high with somebody’s substantial purchase, while his son, Charles-André, cleans up after the day’s activities in their crowded cave. It therefore falls to the charming young son-in-law, Bruno Andreu, the man in charge of public relations and sales, to deal with Krystina’s brusque demand for a tasting.

 
He starts to tell us how it was his father-in-law’s aunt, Marie-Rose Bertrand, who single-handedly secured the Clairette du Languedoc appellation in 1948, long before the rest of the Coteaux in the 1980s, but then he notices the restless drumming of Krystina’s heavily ringed fingers on the tasting counter. (She succeeded, under the duress of the car journey, in extracting a full confession about my sorties with Manu and her only reason for coming here was to score the necessary point against a rival. She is therefore impatient to leave as soon as the opposition can be considered bested.) So, sensing a short attention span, Bruno loses no time in pouring a delicious, crisp, fruity white, bearing no resemblance whatever to the oxidized, adulterated Clairette, beloved of Krystina’s Romans. He then rapidly follows it with a sweeter, honeyed style, from the same variety.

  ‘You can’t make a living these days from Clairette alone,’ he says. ‘The domaine’s been in the family since 1792 but the present generation’s made so many steps forward.’

  He gestures towards the dozen or so different wines on a display-shelf behind him but we have already hit Krystina’s boredom threshold. She extracts a wodge of banknotes, asks him to deliver whatever he thinks best to the château and battles her way back through the continuing tempest to the BMW.

  Once on the road, it rapidly becomes clear that Krystina’s reluctance to linger sprang partly from the notion that our respective days might each be rendered perfect by an intimate soirée à deux at the château. In so far as it is possible both to snuggle and drive down narrow avenues of plane trees at 150 kilometres per hour, Krystina snuggles. As her hand confuses my thigh with the gear stick rather more often than can easily be explained in an automatic car, I try desperately to come up with an alibi. The best I have concocted, as we approach the village, is an urgent domestic inspection for possible storm damage and Krystina is unimpressed.

  ‘I’ll say goodnight here then,’ she says tartly, as we approach the village gateway, leaving me to cover the last couple of kilometres on foot.

  When I finally reach Les Sources, all does at least seem reasonably well, despite the furious winds which have scarcely abated at any point in the day. Around bedtime, however, the merely dramatic turns positively apocalyptic. I have closed all the shutters but they continue rattling alarmingly, as if still unanchored. And the clatter from the rounded terracotta roof tiles sounds as if they are reducing themselves to shards. The bedroom which I selected for its view seems to be bearing the brunt of the storm so, in desperation, I tip my bed on to its side and drag it to another room at the more sheltered end of the house. But sleep is still impossible and I grope my way back across the landing to the telephone.

  ‘Est-ce normal, Manu?’ I blurt out anxiously, as soon as my neighbour’s receiver is lifted. ‘Will the house stand up to it?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ answers a sepulchral female voice at the other end. ‘As a man sows, so shall he reap.’

  *

  For hours I drifted fitfully in and out of sleep, wondering paranoically which of my unspecified wrongdoings were judged to blame for the hurricane. Even in the calm and clarity of the morning light, I still felt oddly vulnerable, as if some dark art might indeed have been practised on the other side of the stream. An empty fridge, however, soon obliged me to immerse myself in the bustling normality of a Saturday morning market, where I could at last begin to rationalize those sinister-sounding words. Surely just an eccentric gloss on the effects of global warming, I told myself amidst the reassuring benignity of the foodstalls.

  The weekly market in Lodève requires a twelve-kilometre drive from the village but there is no substantial town any nearer, and anyway, I like Lodève. It is a no-nonsense, few-frills town, once extremely prosperous from textile wealth but now just shabby enough at the edges to give it an enjoyably gritty authenticity. The market is blessed with a more than usually souk-like atmosphere, thanks largely to a substantial Algerian population. The majority of this community works in the principal surviving remnant of that former textile glory, the Gobelin tapestry factory. This is a name that I have always associated with France’s historic châteaux but apparently the factory still supplies the nation’s more modern public buildings.

  To reach the foodstalls, I have to jostle my way round the swarming loop of the main street and it is here that I spot Babette buying metre after metre of bright, floral-patterned Provençal cotton.

  ‘I thought I might make some tablecloths for the summer,’ she explains, as I push on past mountains of inconceivably inexpensive clothing to find M. Vargas self-consciously trying on a new and better-fitting pair of corduroys behind a makeshift curtain, strung between the trouser stall and a lamp-post.

  ‘We’re neither of us getting any plumper,’ calls Mme Vargas shakily, from my side of the improvised arras.

  I wave to her husband and battle onwards, successfully resisting all the various bargain bed and radiator promotions that are competing loudly for my attention. My goal is the crowded square surrounding an old market hall at the end because it is there that the fresh food is sold.

  Food can scarcely be fresher than the produce offered this morning and I find it hard not to buy vastly more than I need. The bright-eyed fish on the fishmongers’ stalls must surely still have been swimming at dawn, while a poultry-seller’s chickens are actually alive and noisily protesting their innocence from overcrowded cages. Where vegetables in England might advertise their country of origin, here I find baskets that cite specific villages, even farms, in their pedigrees. Only the oranges come from as far afield as Spain. My naïve request for basil is simply laughed at. If it isn’t seasonal, it isn’t here.

  My purchases are putting a serious strain on Uncle Milo’s pair of semi-derelict straw shopping bags by the time that I notice the familiar, monumental figure of Mme Gros dominating the herb and spice stall on the opposite side of the street. Surprisingly for one whose cooking is so plain, she appears to be assembling a particularly complicated set of ingredients from a shopping list.

  ‘For one of her spells,’ whispers Manu, appearing at my elbow with a wink.

  *

  ‘I think you ought to try some proper pruning,’ said Virgile when he telephoned last night.

  I was surprised. After all he had told me about the strategic importance of the pruning work, I never thought he would dare to delegate it. Maybe he decided there was only so much horticultural (and therefore economic) damage that I could inflict in a couple of hours. But I still felt apprehensive when I first confronted this morning’s Grenache Noir in the windy plain below Saint Saturnin.

  ‘Look, I’ve bought myself this pair of electric secateurs,’ he announced, as he offered me his latest, daunting-looking asset. ‘Give it a try. You’ll find it much easier.’

  I gingerly donned the harness incorporating the battery pack and gently released the safety catch. The lightest touch on the start button sent the twin blades snapping together with a convulsive force that made the whole thing buck violently in my hand, which accidentally activated the start button again . . . and then again … until I finally got a grip.

  ‘It takes a bit of practice but once you get the hang of it, it’s very quick. I decided it was the only way I’d ever get the pruning finished. But you have to be a bit careful,’ he warned me, as the cutters embarked on another of their involuntary spasms. ‘Make sure the vines are all you cut!’ And here he flourished a heavily bandaged hand, which added nothing to my confidence.

  ‘Remember, we’re aiming for high quality, low yield,’ Virgile stressed. (So far so good. I’d remembered that much.) ‘So we’ll be pruning back to a maximum of five or six healthy, well-spaced shoots per vine.’ (Seemed clear enough.) ‘Where you’ve got several possible shoots more or less together, always choose the lowest.’ (Getting more complicated but I’d manage.) ‘Unless the bottom one is unhealthy. Or if it’s growing in towards the stock. Or growing too much out at right angles to the row …’

  By now I was paralysed by agonies of indeci
sion. There were so many conflicting priorities. Any cut that might be justified according to one of Virgile’s guiding principles seemed to be automatically proscribed by another. And even when I’d groped my way through this tortuous decision path, I still had to decide precisely where to cut.

  ‘Always cut back to the third bud on your shoot,’ he emphasized. ‘No, that’s the fourth. Look, here’s the first.’ He pointed to a microscopically insignificant protuberance at the base of my selected shoot. ‘And always cut directly across the bud …’

  After a few more apparently irreconcilable stipulations in the same vein, Virgile left me to psych myself up for my first solo snip. He moved rapidly on up the row, while I stood transfixed by the fear that my lethal weapon might be about to decimate his precious vineyard. At least these vines were the ones that had been tended by him last year and were therefore not nearly as wildly out of control as last month’s newly rented vines. But even so, they never seemed to stay still for long enough in the wind for me to decide where best to risk a cut. And the smoke from a neighbour’s bonfire made it even more difficult to focus. Then just as I was stiffening my resolve for some fearlessly uninhibited, confidently radical action, Virgile threw me straight back into anxious confusion with a casual ‘If in doubt, remember it’s always safest to prune too little.’

  *

  ‘Can’t understand all this fuss about pruning,’ snorts Manu the next morning.

  He knows nothing about Virgile or my labours down in Saint Saturnin but, as a thinly disguised pretext for the liquid hospitality that is threatened in a few minutes, he has invited me over to the terraces directly behind his cottage to admire his own vines. If that is indeed what they are. Manu’s terraces may not be quite as spectacularly out of control as mine but the so-called vines look more like giant thornbushes. A few are even growing up the occasional tree.