Virgile's Vineyard Read online

  According to Krystina, Languedoc vines have been pruned since the Romans but not, it seems, those of Manu.

  ‘A lot of it’s a waste of energy,’ he announces. ‘All a vine needs is minimal pruning.’ (Leaving plenty of leisure for ‘maximum drinking’, I reflect.) ‘You see these vines?’ he continues, getting more dogmatic with every minute that he has to wait for his first glass of the day. ‘They may look as if they’ve got thousands of buds right now, but if you just leave them alone, only a fraction of them are ever going to burst. And when they do, it’s only those on the outside, where the fruit can get some sunlight, that will flourish. Those fancy fellows down the hill just don’t seem to realize that if they didn’t interfere all the time, the vine would simply find its own balance.’

  But as we descend towards the bottles awaiting us in Manu’s kitchen, I remain strangely unconvinced by this Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’. As I said before, I’ve tasted the wine.

  *

  The original two rooms that I knew when I visited Uncle Milo as an adolescent are now a sort of self-contained studio apartment that will be useful for guests, if I ever find time to invite anyone. The rest of Les Sources, according to Manu, evolved organically but rather haphazardly, as my uncle earned the occasional fee from a local resident for some domestic architectural design project.

  ‘What do you think he built first?’ asked Manu when he told me all this. ‘After the studio, that is?’

  ‘The kitchen?’ I offered prosaically.

  ‘No, the central staircase!’ he laughed delightedly. ‘And what did he do next? Installed the loo at the top of the stairs. Not the walls. Just the loo! The view was wonderful, he used to say. Shocked the wife though, the first time she saw him sat up there. Oh dear, yes. A very original man, your uncle.’

  The house’s gradual evolution is partly why it’s so clever. For instance, Uncle Milo had time to get used to the angles of the sun and the wind directions before he decided where he wanted his shade and shelter. However, the problem with this kind of organic growth is that every new idea, every fresh injection of cash seems to have brought some additional level of complexity. The water system is bad enough. Every time I clear a new patch of land I uncover yet more plastic pipes taking the spring water to undiscovered parts of the property for unknown purposes. I hardly dare touch any of the half-buried taps that link them all together for fear of the flood that might burst unobserved in some far-flung corner of the land. But even inside the house, things are rarely straightforward.

  ‘You know you’ve got four different ways of heating your water, don’t you,’ said Manu helpfully. ‘Electricity, obviously. And the oil-fired boiler that powers the radiators. But I bet you didn’t know you had a set of solar panels on top of that little conservatory – not much use today, admittedly … Then, the pièce de résistance, have you noticed the pipes under your log fire in the sitting room? Milo always boasted they’d heat all his water and a couple of radiators into the bargain. You just have to open the right valves,’ he explained as I followed him into a dark, windowless room behind the kitchen.

  The wall was completely covered with pipes, taps, valves, thermostats, dials and switches, all looking more complicated than the average submarine control room.

  ‘I remember, you have to open one valve and close another, if you’re using the open fire,’ said Manu. ‘And turn off the solar system, before you run the boiler. Various things like that. Your uncle did explain it all to me once. But I forget now which knob is which. Trial and error, I suppose.’

  Fortunately, a few of the controls were blessed with faded paper luggage labels giving barely legible clues to their functions and gradually the system and I seem to have sorted out a mutually acceptable modus vivendi. I have been scalded almost as often as I have been chilled and the plumbing sometimes gurgles for days at a time, but I think I may finally understand enough to get by.

  *

  ‘You know you’re supposed to have truffles on your land, don’t you?’ says Babette, as she dumps my first course of terrine aux truffes unceremoniously on to the plain paper tablecloth in front of me.

  There is no sign yet of the colourful Provençal cotton from the market but, looking round, I see numerous fellow lunchers composing shopping lists and other doodles on the current alternative. Nathalie from the shop, for instance, seems to be sketching out some kind of business plan for a man in a suit who looks as if he could be her accountant. So I wonder whether Babette’s intended upgrade will ever find favour.

  The truffle news, however, could hardly be more welcome, as I scrutinize the microscopically small speck of black set into the middle of my slice of paté and compare it to the size of the supplement that this luxury commanded on the café’s lunchtime menu. (Babette and I have graduated to hand-shaking terms by now but, sadly, the rising warmth of welcome still stops short of greater munificence on the truffle-shaving front.)

  ‘Trouble is,’ she explains, as she leans against the billiard table for a cigarette, ‘when Manu’s brother, Ignace, sold your uncle the land, he promised to tell him where to find the truffles before he died. But then he was up cutting branches off a cherry tree – Ignace, that is – and he made the mistake of cutting the one he was sitting on. Lost his memory in the fall, poor chap.’

  ‘So Uncle Milo never knew?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ve always suspected Manu knows but you’ll never get him to admit it.’ She returns to the bar, leaving me to speculate about the untold riches that may lie buried beneath my oak trees.

  As it happens, I’m already considerably the poorer for knowing the street value of a truffle. I was having some tea at Virgile’s after our pruning session when a small, shifty-looking young man called Luc turned up to confirm that he was on the track of a truffle. Apparently Virgile had ordered one for the weekend – proving, not for the first time, the high priority given to gastronomy in his domestic economy – and I heard myself recklessly surrendering to temptation when Luc offered to add me to his client base.

  ‘You know where to find truffles?’ I asked rather obviously.

  ‘I know where to find a man who knows where to find them,’ Luc answered, with the crafty wink of a middleman who had no intention of being cut out.

  ‘Finding a truffle would be much too much like hard work for Luc,’ laughed Virgile.

  ‘We’re nearing the end of the season,’ the young entrepreneur continued, ignoring Virgile’s jibe. ‘I can probably get you one for the end of the month but it’ll be around two hundred francs, for a reasonable size,’ he added, making a tight little circle with his forefinger and thumb to forewarn me of his disappointing notion of reasonableness.

  ‘So, you think I should invest in a truffle pig?’ I ask Babette, when she comes to monitor my appreciation of the precious particle adorning my starter. It was meant to be a joke but she draws up a chair to advise me in earnest.

  ‘Pigs are all very well but a dog would be more companionable,’ she counsels solemnly. ‘Although actually, you could manage perfectly well with a fly. You’ll always see them round the foot of a truffle oak. Just as good at sniffing them out and no overheads.’

  ‘If somewhat less easily led on a lead,’ I can’t help thinking. But the arrival of the village postman with his family of five to occupy the last available table denies me any more practical explanation of the low-cost option. Anyway, where would I start in my twelve overgrown acres? I can hardly trail from oak to oak with my tracker insect in a matchbox, waiting for a crescendo of buzzing to home me in on my gourmet target. Unless Manu could be persuaded to spill the beans … Perhaps when even less than usually sober? … But no, there are some prices that should never be paid, even for truffled self-sufficiency.

  *

  ‘How did those trees get there?’ I ask Manu, as the little red van rattles down towards Narbonne. I am certain they were not there yesterday but this afternoon all the dark winter hillsides are suddenly bright with yellow blossom.


  ‘Mimosas,’ says Manu, with exaggerated patience. ‘In flower.’

  ‘But all since yesterday,’ I answer lamely, wondering how a species can achieve such spectacular unanimity of timing.

  The ubiquitous splashes of yellow are all the more exhilarating in the clear winter sunlight but most exhilarating of all, when we finally reach the sea, are the colours in the sky. I have only ever seen such blues in the work of the painters who used to flock to this coast for the intensity of its light. The deepest are high above us, the palest nearer the horizon, with every brilliantly reflected variation pulled in different directions across the water by the breezes and currents. It feels as if all my life until this moment has been lived behind sunglasses.

  ‘Sorry, no time to stop,’ says Manu, his wife’s insistence on the repair of a wind-damaged shutter having already delayed our departure until after lunch.

  He has an unusually specific mission to accomplish this afternoon, an important point to prove in the light of researches he has been conducting in the tiny village library. He is not a regular reader and his first appearance there at this late stage in his life probably caused some surprise. It has, however, enabled him to identify a vigneron of incontrovertible distinction who nonetheless makes wine from his much-maligned Aramon.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he swaggers. ‘You should read more yourself. Then you’d know these things.’

  He swings off on to a sinuous, snake-like lane leading up the side of a small mountain – the Massif de La Clape, he tells me – separating Narbonne from the sea.

  ‘This used to be an island,’ he is able to boast from his researches. ‘Until the river and harbour silted up in what, if you studied history, you’d know as the Middle Ages. Look,’ he says, pointing back down the hill to the city’s distant, half-finished cathedral. ‘You can see how the money dried up when the sea trade evaporated.’

  Despite the little red van’s modest gear ratios, we soon catch up with a battered old lorry, grinding even more slowly up the road ahead of us, laden with dozens of large, wooden, box-like contraptions. They are beehives, Manu tells me, about to be set up for the spring, and it is easy to imagine the pine- and thyme- and rosemary-scented honeys that this landscape will perfume in the summer. Gradually, however, it is vineyards that start appearing amongst the spectacular white limestone rocks.

  ‘Great favourites with your Romans, the wines of La Clape,’ continues the fount of village-library knowledge. ‘Sent all the way to Rome, they were, leaving the plonk they made over there on the plain for the locals. There’s even the remains of a Roman villa up here, where we’re going. Château Pech Redon, it’s called, meaning “Round Hill” in Occitan.’

  As we reach the highest point of the former island, a roundish rocky outcrop does indeed loom into view behind a huddle of unpretentious buildings, from which a handsome young man in sweatshirt and jeans emerges to greet us.

  I have no idea what story Manu can have spun when making this appointment but Christophe Bousquet is very welcoming. He explains how his father and he moved here in 1988, having first sold all the vines that they used to harvest for a co-operative – the one back in Virgile’s village, as it happens. Pech Redon’s reputation was already rising. Its forty-two hectares had been extensively replanted by one of the region’s pioneers in the 1970s and ’80s. But what really attracted Christophe, he says, was the isolation: no neighbours to cope with, like Virgile’s in Saint Saturnin, for ever treating their vines in ways that conflicted with his own methods.

  ‘But it’s not an area without its difficulties,’ he explains, as we pass from the brightness of the sun to the shade of the little forge, which is now his tasting room. ‘It’s one of the driest parts of France. Less than fifty centimetres of rain a year and virtually all of it in November and March. We get temperatures of fifty-two degrees out there in July. Our well’s often dry by September and we have to do a bit of “Jean de Florette”, just to have water for the house. Not that it’s always warm like today. Well, you know the Mediterranean weather – up and down, like the mood of the people. But anyway …’ He takes a bottle of white wine from the fridge. ‘This is a mixture of Grenache Blanc …’

  ‘Grenache Blanc?’ I check, remembering Virgile’s black variety.

  ‘Exactly … and Bourboulenc.’

  ‘Bourbou …?’ I query. (This surely beats all previous obscurities.)

  ‘… lenc,’ he confirms. ‘Grown here since Roman times. The ultimate Mediterranean grape, I always think, thriving only if it’s right by the sea. Often called Malvoisie, in other regions. You know, I only really feel at home in the Mediterranean, so even my holidays are always in places like Corsica and Malta – which gives me plenty of opportunities to see what others get up to with their Malvoisie!’

  Fanciful as it sounds, the scent of the wine is unmistakably reminiscent of the Mediterranean herbs that lure those beekeepers to the surrounding scrubland. Indeed, the same impression is confirmed in the mouth, I decide, as the fridge yields a couple of rosés – in contrasting styles, so Christophe explains, for summer and winter drinking. But Manu is quite uncharacteristically distracted, continually craning over the tasting counter to check the labels on the cluster of reds awaiting their turn and, even as each is poured for us, curiously impatient to move on.

  ‘Ah, saved the best till last, you see,’ Manu nudges me smugly, when Christophe pours the final wine.

  ‘The Alicante?’ asks our host in surprise.

  ‘The Aramon, surely,’ says Manu, casting an eye around for a possible extra bottle.

  ‘Oh, now I know which book you found me in,’ laughs Christophe. ‘The authors made a mistake. I don’t grow Aramon. I mean, I may be eccentric but there are limits.’

  Manu listens crestfallen, as we hear how the Alicante is a crossbreed created in Montpellier. In the 1820s, it seems, a certain Louis Bouschet de Bernard crossed the notoriously high-yielding but colourless Aramon with the intensely deep-coloured Cher to create what he called the Petit Bouschet. Sixty years later, his son crossed the Petit Bouschet with the Grenache Noir and called it Alicante.

  ‘So it’s the only truly Languedoc cépage,’ says Christophe, holding one of the darkest, inkiest reds I have ever seen up to the light. ‘Yet it’s one of the few that’s actually outlawed – even for a vin de pays!’ (The label, I see, reads simply vin de table.) ‘I’d like to see a small percentage permitted for La Clape,’ he continues animatedly, ‘giving a bit of extra complexity. But even with my father being President of the Coteaux du Languedoc, I can’t see much hope. So I make it on its own, using very low yields. It’s my little amusement … My chance to show that there are no bad grape varieties – only bad wine-makers.’

  I do not think I have ever seen Manu look so downcast. I have certainly never seen him show so little interest in a glass of wine. Suddenly, all he can think about is how long it will take us to drive home, as if every moment spent away from Mme Gros were torture.

  It is already dark by the time we round the last of the bends to see the welcoming sight of our respective post boxes, perched on their poles at the bottom of the shared drive. It is not, however, too dark to notice an unfamiliar dark-coloured Deux Chevaux parked in the shadows beside them, or the glow of a cigarette from the driver’s seat. It is a couple of days since I checked inside my box and I really ought to do so now but Manu is strangely unwilling to stop the van. He hurries twice as fast as usual, up over the pits and bumps of the rough ascent, as far as Uncle Milo’s parking area. He would normally drop me at the point where my part of the drive forks away from his, but tonight he seems to want to usher me all the way to my door and see it safely closed behind me. However, he underestimates my stubborn desire to audit my mail. Having counted to a number high enough to allow the van to speed back down to the fork and up to Manu’s ramshackle garage, I steal outside again.

  The moon is fuller and brighter than I realized when we were returning in the van. From the corner of high land overlook
ing the stream that divides our properties, I am rewarded with the intriguing sight of Manu tiptoeing delicately down his garden path, with many a nervous glance in the direction of my house. Instinctively I conceal myself in the shadow of the big Mediterranean pine near the maset, as my neighbour scuttles furtively out of his gate and down the main drive towards the post boxes and the mystery car. Every so often he stops and listens and casts a secretive look over his shoulder but he fails to see me following him.

  March

  ‘In other words, you’ve been had,’ laughed Babette on the evening following Manu’s mysterious meeting.

  She had seen that I was in a bad mood as soon as I arrived. After all, I didn’t usually complain about the awkwardness of the billiard table filling the centre of the room or the fact that the plat du jour was always coq aux olives whenever I called in for a meal. But with the café nearly empty tonight, she had time enough to spare to puff her way through half a packet of Gitanes at my table and uncover the underlying cause of my grumpiness.

  ‘But now I want the whole story,’ she insisted, so I started reluctantly with the unexplained car.

  I told her how it had still been down there in the shadows beside the post boxes and how its driver had emerged as soon as Manu came close enough to be identified. I was too far away, I explained, to hear much of their exchange, except when the driver unwrapped the tiny parcel that Manu extracted from the pocket of his overalls.

  ‘Et alors?’ pressed Babette, serving me one of her less ambitious desserts in the shape of a banana. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’il a dit?’

  ‘ “A beauty!” was his exact response,’ I told her bitterly and she laughed some more. Then I related how the driver had started counting notes into Manu’s outstretched hand.