Virgile's Vineyard Read online

  ‘Et combien?’ she urged.

  ‘I couldn’t see. But it wasn’t as much as Manu seemed to expect, so the driver reluctantly added another and that seemed to satisfy him. Then they said a quick goodnight and I just had time to beat a retreat before Manu started panting up the gradient behind me. He made a last check that no one was watching and vanished inside his own front door. Then almost immediately there were car lights bumping up the drive. A dark grey Deux Chevaux was paying me a visit and it was driven by Virgile’s friend – Luc, the truffle-man.’

  ‘Oh, j’adore!’ giggled Babette.

  ‘He said he’d “just made it”. The end of the month, that is. Like he’d promised. And no extra charge for delivery to the door.’

  I winced at the memory, as I told Babette how Luc had produced a little loosely screwed-up ball of newspaper and immediately started justifying his pricing policy. The small black lump nestling inside was much bigger, he emphasized, and therefore (he knew I’d understand) much more expensive than his estimate – at this end of the season, an absolute bargain for 400 francs.

  ‘Exactly twice the sum I’d budgeted,’ I lamented.

  ‘But twice as good for being home-grown,’ chuckled Babette.

  *

  ‘I’ll say one good thing for the Church,’ said Manu, as the single village bell swung into a faltering summons to the faithful. ‘They did at least keep the vineyards going after the Romans gave up on us.’

  A fairer man in his situation might have conceded a second good thing because, unfortunately for me and my liver, the call to Sunday morning Mass had given Manu an effective dispensation to pour us each an unprecedentedly large tumblerful of the dreaded house red. It’s only on rare occasions that the diocese rustles up a priest for a parish as small as ours but, whenever it does, Mme Gros can be relied upon to add her formidable contralto to the shaky descants of the sparse and predominantly aged congregation. Moreover, she makes a point of walking all the way there and back, whatever the weather, like some medieval penitent, which gives her less religiously-minded husband nearly two hours of unsupervised drinking time.

  The morning was supposed to be dedicated to the mending of Manu’s roof, which suffered even worse than mine in last month’s winds. I could scarcely afford the time with so much work needed on my own house, but the quantity of terracotta he talked me into buying for my own repairs turned out to be substantially more than I needed.

  ‘Je suis désolé!’ he apologized, in his most convincingly desolated manner. ‘I must have miscounted. But if it helps at all, I think the extra tiles might just be enough to plug some gaps over at my place. That is, unless you had other plans for them.’

  We had, however, hardly replaced the first of Manu’s breakages when the tolling of the church bell occasioned the most abrupt reordering of priorities. No sooner had Mme Gros’s Sunday headscarf disappeared around the bend towards the village than Manu was down the ladder with the speed of an athlete half his weight and a quarter of his age.

  As he pours me a second glass, my survival instincts tell me my only hope is to keep him focused on ecclesiastical history. The only trouble is, I suspect I know even less about the subject than he does.

  ‘You mean, the Church took the lead in wine-making when the Roman Empire declined?’ I offer feebly, to keep the conversation on track.

  ‘Had to, didn’t they?’ says Manu, emptying the last of the bottle. ‘Needed it for the Mass... Blood of Christ and all that. But not as much as you might think, because for centuries the priests used to drink the wine on behalf of everyone else…’

  For a few moments, it seems that Manu might have been successfully sidetracked but the pulling of a second cork soon disabuses me of that happy thought.

  ‘It was the monks who really saved the day,’ he resumes with glass recharged. ‘Part of their daily rations, you see. Only a bottle a head, it’s true. But they gave you more if you were sick …’

  A charming vision of a tonsured Manu, permanently laid up in the monastic sickbay, is interrupted by the baleful crunch of Mme Gros’s sensible lace-ups coming back up the gravel drive. I have just enough time to make both my excuses and my escape but, as I tiptoe away by the back door, the late morning air is already ringing with the wrath of the returning righteous.

  ‘Manu’s quite right,’ concedes Krystina, from behind her enormous sunglasses. ‘Every monastery had its vineyard. And I don’t mean just a few little vines in the back yard. We’re talking whole wine districts here. Like most of the Coteaux du Languedoc belonging to this place,’ she explains with a toss of her copious curls (surely even redder than the last time I saw her) towards the pair of abbatial doors behind us.

  As the day had dawned unexpectedly sunnily, I was summoned to lunch in Saint Guilhem-le-Désert, a brazenly picturesque little village, huddled round a diminutive Romanesque monastery in a narrow, rocky river gorge. ‘Too popular to visit after Easter,’ Krystina announced when she telephoned. ‘But we’ll be all right today. The only thing is, do you mind if we meet there? I have to stop at my manicurist’s.’

  For once I arrived with my nerves intact. Krystina was already sunning herself in front of the eleventh-century abbey church, her fingernails newly filed to unnerving glossy red points.

  The medieval-looking square was filled with brightly colour-coded tables, in four separate groups belonging to four different cafés, but like everyone else, we ordered in ‘yellow’ because that was the only way we could sit in the sun. However, by the time the food arrived, the shadows had moved, so Krystina insisted on eating her first course in ‘blue’ and her main course in ‘red’. Initial reluctance to accommodate our peripatetic meal soon warmed into a series of enthusiastic welcomes as portions of Krystina’s divorce settlement were discreetly disgorged from her handbag.

  ‘Benedictine,’ she says, resuming her monastic theme, as we shuffle across the flagstones to ‘green’ for coffee. ‘Founded in 804 by Guilhem – that’s Occitan for William – Count of Toulouse, friend of Emperor Charlemagne and star of umpteen troubadour epics. Spent most of his life driving Arabs back into Spain.’

  ‘The Arabs had invaded the Languedoc?’

  ‘Absolutely. Captured Agde, Narbonne and most of the major coastal towns. Totally opposed to alcohol, of course. Biggest threat to wine-making the region ever knew. No wonder everyone considered William such a hero. Such a saint indeed, when he took to the cloister … Anyway, dozens of abbeys were springing up all over the place, thanks largely to a childhood friend of William, the great Benedictine reformer, Saint Benedict of Aniane – so-called to cause maximum confusion with Saint Benedict of Nursia, the founder of the Order, a couple of centuries earlier. Our Benedict didn’t really approve of wine but he more or less bowed to the inevitable because, quite apart from any alcoholic expectations on the part of the monks, their abbeys were important resting places for travellers, especially those on the Compostela pilgrimage route to Spain. Talking of which, it’s time we walked off our lunch on a bit of the pilgrim path.’

  She thrusts more cash than lunch can possibly have cost under her saucer to avoid the tedium of waiting for a bill and strides purposefully off up a narrow lane.

  It is definitely time to be leaving the village square. All the colours-of-the-rainbow tables are now in the shade and the sunlit rocks above us look much more inviting – or they did, until I saw what a punishing pace Krystina’s designer sandals were going to set. I think she must have doubled as a gym teacher. She is certainly a lot fitter than I am, and the steep, almost blinding white path up the hillside does nothing to stem the information flow.

  ‘Pure self-flagellation,’ she calls, as I scurry to catch her up, ‘pilgrims choosing this route to Spain, when they could have taken the Via Domitia by the coast. But a gift of a chunk of the True Cross from Charlemagne had turned this into a three-star stopover.’

  We are climbing high above the irregular red roofs of the village, past a ruined keep where everyone would ha
ve sheltered, if the abbey was under attack, to a rough, arid landscape, dotted with fragrant tufts of thyme, straggly flowering rosemary bushes, stark wind-warped pines and stunted, scrubby evergreen holm oaks.

  ‘They call this the garrigue,’ continues Krystina, with never a hint of breathlessness, ‘garric meaning holm oak in Occitan, apparently. It gives you an idea of what the monks were up against when they wanted to plant a vineyard.’

  ‘I know just how they felt,’ I wheeze, remembering my own terrace-clearing, scheduled for the late afternoon. However, Krystina insists that we can squeeze in a second monastic case study, if we are even less than usually scrupulous about the prevailing speed limits.

  ‘Cistercian, this one,’ she announces in the Abbaye de Valmagne car park, before I have a moment to marvel at any of our luckier escapes en route. ‘Founded in 1155 – a time when wine was becoming an important source of wealth and power. It was also a time when monasteries were doing remarkably well from the Crusades. Knights departing for the Holy Land made endless gifts of vineyards to ensure that prayers were said for their souls. The Cistercians probably did best of all. They were more rigorous than the Benedictines generally and they were more serious about wine-making – part of their commitment to perfection in all things. You name it, they researched it: pruning, training, grafting, soil types …’

  Her list tails off. She has noticed that it is almost six o’clock. By the time we have sprinted to the ticket desk, the entry deadline has passed, but happily there is a significant shortfall in the abbey’s restoration budget and Krystina has remembered her chequebook, so we are favoured after all with an unhurried private view.

  ‘Much better than trudging round with a French-speaking guide,’ she says, as she snaps her handbag closed. ‘But I wanted you to see the Languedoc’s only monastic building which still functions as a wine estate.’

  ‘But not as a monastery?’ I ask, as we enter the abbey church.

  She gives me one of her more withering looks.

  ‘There was this little thing they called the Revolution.’ She points to some enormous oak barrels squeezed between the arches of the nave. ‘Most of the abbeys were simply treated as stone quarries but the relative cool and darkness here made it excellent for wine storage.’

  ‘Are the barrels still in use?’ I ask and receive a second withering look.

  The modern wines, it seems, are made in rather more modern conditions and Krystina’s benefaction proves also to have been sufficient to secure us a leisurely private tasting in one of the adjoining château-like wings of the abbey. We start with a curiosity made from Morrastel – allegedly a medieval grape variety, much beloved of the monks – and we work our way quietly through a dozen or so wines to the finest of their reds, named after the Counts of Turenne, the owners of the property since 1838.

  Even allowing for the ‘anything Manu can do, she can do better’ factor, I am amazed at Krystina’s unaccustomed patience this evening. I can only imagine it is the challenge of establishing her own stately-home-owning credentials within limited French vocabulary which lengthens her normally short fuse. Unfortunately, however, this gives the clouds that were gathering and blackening as we arrived ample time to fulfil their promise.

  We emerge to find my rain-soaked Renault refuses to start. This is not at all how Krystina had planned the climax of our day – another attempt at a cosy, candlelit supper at the château was more what she had in mind. She is accordingly all for abandoning my modest motor, as if there were simply ‘plenty more where the likes of that came from’. Indeed, I think she would willingly have bought me another, rather than waste a wet evening drying spark plugs. But impecunious pride prevails.

  *

  It was barely light but I could see that the rain had stopped. And yet there was an alarming roar coming from the direction of the stream. I had heard it from my bedroom as soon as I woke up. I dressed quickly and hurried down through the long grass of the still dripping orchard to find a noisy, racing torrent in place of the normally gentle brook.

  ‘Your first Mediterranean storm!’ shouted Manu cheerfully from the opposite bank where he had been enjoying a furtive cigarette, while Mme Gros prepared some of her famous breakfast coffee. (I could hardly believe it, the first time I saw her throwing random quantities of ‘instant’ into water drawn straight from the hot tap.)

  ‘I must have slept through something pretty spectacular!’ I called back above the din.

  ‘Incroyable!’ he yelled, as we watched some dead branches tumbling rapidly over a little waterfall. ‘Another few centimetres and it would have taken the bridge! Wonderful exercise for the fish though!’

  ‘Fish?’ I hollered hoarsely.

  ‘Trout,’ shouted Manu. ‘Délicieuses! Especially upstream a bit, in that pool in your wood. You ought to try them. When things are calmer.’

  My drive to meet Virgile for another round of pruning told much the same story after the storm. The rivers had turned a dark muddy brown and the track leading down to the village road was half washed away.

  ‘Quelle nuit!’ called M. Vargas, from the foot of his dramatically eroded terraces. He looked as if he had aged four or five years in the last few hours but I was surprised to see him alone. ‘Of course, it would be the morning that Agnès goes down with flu,’ he lamented, more despondent than I had known him. ‘C’est une catastrophe!’

  I felt that I should have offered to help but I was already late and I knew that Virgile liked punctuality.

  As I drew into Saint Saturnin, I found him opposite his cave, killing time with the owners of Le Pressoir. Neither of them had been in evidence when I had eaten there in January, so Virgile introduced me.

  ‘Marie-Anne …’

  ‘Enchanté.’

  ‘Pius …’

  ‘Enchanté.’

  ‘My English “apprentice” …’

  ‘Ah, c’est vous, donc. It’s you who’s brought us this English weather!’

  Marie-Anne pointed accusingly at the blackboard from which the long night of rain had washed every trace of yesterday’s ‘suggestions du jour’. She looked tired before the working day had even begun – a condition no doubt explained by the two toddler daughters who came running out of the restaurant to tug at the calf-length hem of her chic linen skirt.

  ‘Enchanté, quand-même,’ said Pius warmly.

  He looked equally stylish in well-cut trousers and narrow-striped shirt but noticeably less ruffled by the vicissitudes inherent in attempting to run both a restaurant and a family on the same morning. He insisted we go inside to see the new exhibition of abstract paintings he had just been hanging.

  ‘This isn’t really a restaurant,’ laughed Virgile. ‘More of a picture gallery with food.’

  ‘Nonsense, it’s a jazz club with food and pictures.’

  Pius is clearly passionate about all three and it is some time before he has finished detailing the coming season’s concerts.

  ‘I hope you brought your boots,’ says Virgile, when we finally set off. ‘It’ll be wet.’

  The Carignan we are going to work on is another of his newly rented parcelles but the fact that he has already carried out the kind of pre-pruning that was left to me in January should have made our task easy. Our boots, however, are soon so caked with mud that we are lumbering down our respective rows like a pair of lead-weighted astronauts, ponderously tending some boggy lunar vineyard.

  Yet somehow Virgile remains immaculate. For a moment, I thought a small smudge of mud had besmirched his forehead but then I realized it was only the distinctive little birthmark above his left eyebrow. His denim creases are, of course, impeccable and his dark, neatly trimmed hair as unruffled as if it had just left the barber’s shop. He could pass for a city professional on a ‘dress down’ day, were it not for one small detail. As he stoops to show me the first sign of life in the vineyard – the rising sap ‘weeping’ gently from one of my cuts – I catch sight of a single, narrow, tightly knotted plait of hair, star
ting just at the nape of his neck and disappearing subversively down the back of his collar. A discreet but significant glimpse of a less conformist spirit.

  ‘Will you still be bottling your early wine this month?’ I ask, as I ponder how best to make sense of a particularly lop-sided old vine.

  ‘I can’t. You see, I still can’t decide between paper labels and something printed directly on to the glass,’ he calls from a distance, making much faster progress down his own row than I am managing on mine. ‘Sérigraphie, the process is called.’

  ‘Are labels more expensive?’ I ask, having only ever seen the alternative on a mass-market supermarket wine.

  ‘No, it’s the serigraphic method that costs more. But labels mean an extra process, sticking them on. An extra machine to organize. It all depends whether I can achieve something smart enough. But bottling and labelling are the least of my problems right now. I’m much more concerned about the bank.’

  ‘Why, what’s happened?’

  ‘They’ve rejected my business plan. Refused to finance it. Everyone else that I’ve shown it to thought it was fine. But this is politics.’

  ‘I don’t follow …’

  ‘I’m the only private grower in Saint Saturnin. At least, I’m the only particulier who sells his wine in bottles. There’s the Poujols family, round the corner – two geriatric brothers who have always made their own wine – but they sell it all in bulk to a négociant, a middleman. So they don’t really count. Everyone else in the village takes his grapes to the co-operative. So there are those who’d rather I didn’t succeed.’

  ‘You’re joking …’ I bought some wines there only last week and although the premises on the edge of the village were utterly factory-like and charm-free, I have certainly been enjoying the best of their bottles.

  ‘No, believe me. It’s the same with some extra Grenache I was hoping to rent. The owner’s been leant on. He’s says he’ll either let the land to some youngsters in the village who work with the co-operative or he’ll take an EC subsidy to rip out the vines – even though they’re perfectly healthy. In other words, anything except rent it to me.’