Virgile's Vineyard Read online

  ‘But that’s outrageous! I’m amazed you seem so relaxed about it.’

  ‘Well, what’s the worst they can they do to me?’

  All sorts of possibilities for agricultural sabotage spring to mind but I keep them to myself.

  ‘Don’t look so anxious,’ he laughs. ‘I can manage without the Grenache. And I’ll find another bank – I’ve got a meeting this afternoon and another next week. I’ll be all right. But I ought to be on my way. As soon as I’ve smartened myself up a bit.’

  I wish him luck and head back home, wondering what I can find in the fridge for a late lunch. But no sooner have I opened the door to consider my limited options than Manu is there on my doorstep with a glistening fresh trout in a plastic bag.

  ‘A little treat for you – from your wood,’ he explains. ‘I think you’ll be impressed. The two we had for lunch were excellent. Formidable! Even the wife’s cooking couldn’t spoil them … No really, there’s no need to thank me,’ he adds. ‘What else are neighbours for?’

  Before I have time to ponder this nicety of etiquette, a furious female voice thunders from the other side of the stream.

  ‘MANU! Come back here! I want to know how I’m supposed to put my shopping in the deep freeze when you’ve filled it up with fish!’

  *

  ‘You didn’t tell me you were off to Saint Chinian,’ said Krystina, as soon as I answered the telephone. ‘Escorted by your neighbour, I gather.’

  ‘Well, you see, it’s more of a wine day,’ I faltered, as I realized that I must have mentioned the excursion to Babette who must have felt it her duty to give the event some wider publicity.

  ‘I’m not your keeper, of course,’ she bristled. ‘But I can’t send you off in a state of historical ignorance. I’ll pop up at once.’

  ‘I was just locking up,’ I explained, as Manu’s horn reminded me that we were already late.

  ‘Then we’d better do the crammer’s course right now,’ she decided, as I performed an elaborate mime in the doorway entitled ‘person reluctantly taking telephone call’, in the hope that Manu would go easy on the horn. ‘You remember our friends Saint Guilhem and Saint Benedict of Aniane?’ (Loud horn blast.) ‘Well, the Languedoc in those days was a very small world. They had this other friend called – confusingly enough – Saint Anian.’ (Louder, more insistent horn blast.) ‘And it was Anian who left Aniane and founded Saint Chinian in 782. Hence the name.’

  ‘You’re losing me.’

  ‘Saint was pronounced “Santch” in those days,’ she explained, in the special, exaggerated tones perfected long ago for her slow learners. ‘Santch Anian … Saint Chinian.’ (Even louder, syncopated rhythmic horn blast.)

  ‘Krystina, I’ve really got to go …’

  I had no time to feel guilty. I was too busy feeling car-sick, as Manu did everything within the little red van’s power to make up for lost time. The village of Saint Chinian lies only about fifty kilometres to the south-west but it is separated by winding river valleys and tortuous mountain passes that double that distance. And for much of the cliff-edge mountainous stretch, the hairpin bends were made hairier still by a programme of roadworks which had recklessly removed every last metre of safety wall before starting to renew even the most vital parts of it. Not that such trifles inhibited Manu from using both hands to point out distant beauty spots at the bottom of precipitous drops; or from accelerating down the middle of the only straight descent to make sure that none of the high-performance vehicles trapped behind us could overtake. Indeed, as we arrived in Saint Chinian, I was half wondering whether Krystina’s driving might have been more soothing.

  Manu has already briefed me on Saint Chinian’s key facts as he sees them: ‘Twenty villages … Separate appellation since ’82 … Mostly red, bit of rosé … What more did I want to know?’ He is therefore straining at the leash to sniff out a grower or two before lunch, but I somehow feel that I owe it to Krystina to track down the abbey first. There is nothing obvious on the skyline, so we ask at the elegant seventeenth-century Mairie, where every member of staff pulls the blankest of faces until one of their number remembers Mme Guibert.

  ‘You’re standing in it,’ says this small, serious-looking lady, having sped to our rescue on her bicycle. ‘What’s left of it anyway. It used to be the abbot’s lodgings, before the Revolution. Just as our Salle des Fêtes was part of the church’s gothic nave. There was also a second, smaller abbey on the other side of the river but they flattened all that was left of that to build the rugby stadium in about 1900. No, there’s really more monastic legacy in our wines than in our buildings nowadays.’

  Manu’s thirst-riven features could hardly spell ‘I told you so’ more clearly. Returning to the village square, he would happily knock at the door of any vigneron possessed of a bottle and a corkscrew, but Virgile has advised me to look out for the Moulinier family.

  ‘We’ll have to ask,’ says Manu, hurrying into an impressively comprehensive-looking wine emporium, where he accosts the energetic young man restocking the shelves. ‘Moulinier,’ he barks. ‘Can’t find the blighters anywhere. Just like all the rest – too damn full of themselves to put up a sign! Been looking for hours!’

  ‘Then look no further, monsieur.’ The young man politely offers a business card. ‘Pascal Moulinier. Welcome to our shop.’

  Manu’s discomfiture is only momentary: if a tasting is to be organized before lunchtime, there is no time for apologies. But to his dismay, the youngest of the Moulinier line proposes a preliminary visit to his vineyards.

  ‘Everyone thought my father was crazy,’ he chuckles, as we head for the countryside. ‘Giving up a solid job with the Customs to try his luck at wine-making. No experience. No money. No vines. Just some long-abandoned hectares of garrigue, picked up cheaply because no one else would touch them. In the early eighties, this was. Then a couple of years, just clearing and planting.’

  ‘Like the medieval monasteries,’ I suggest, with the fellow feeling of a man who really ought to be strimming his own wilderness.

  ‘Exactly. And just like them, we spent a good few years experimenting to find out what worked where. Did you know the monks would often wait a whole generation to see if land was good enough for wine, before committing themselves to building? Well, here’s our own belated gesture of commitment.’ We are now in the middle of a very muddy building site. ‘By this year’s harvest, we’ll finally have somewhere big enough to house both the family and the wines – and right at the heart of our vineyards.’

  His excited confidence is surely belied by the surrounding half-built chaos. Manu taps an impatient foot in the builders’ rubble; he has correctly deduced that there can be little prospect of a tasting here amongst the scaffolding and concrete mixers. But Pascal has mysteries to unfold for us first.

  ‘How’s your geology?’ he asks unexpectedly.

  ‘Non-existent,’ I admit.

  ‘It’s very important in Saint Chinian,’ he enthuses. ‘Well, we think so, anyway. We’ve got perfect examples of the area’s three soils on these slopes here.’ A sweeping gesture encompasses the carefully tended patches of vines alternating with substantial tracts of untamed garrigue all around us.

  ‘Oh, please don’t make him tell us about them!’ reads the thought bubble above Manu’s head, but his prayer is unanswered.

  ‘Those steep, grey, gravelly slopes behind us are called schiste. Slate, I think you say in English. Marvellous, heat-retaining soil, giving vivid, high-definition wines. Over here, a mixture of clay and limestone. More pebbly, producing fuller, softer wines. Wonderful soil again, except when you’re breaking it up for planting. Then finally down here, we’ve got sandstone. Quite rare in St Chinian but fantastic for Grenache …’

  Manu cannot believe that so many vital ‘tasting minutes’ are being sacrificed to this pointless classification of the earth’s crust. ‘Is your old cave anywhere near?’ is the closest he gets to subtlety.

  ‘Just a bit far before lunch,
’ comes Pascal’s hammerblow, as Manu’s face crumples so fast I fear I may be about to see a grown Frenchman cry. ‘That’s really why we started our shop. But I tell you what, join me for lunch in the village and we’ll see how our “Terrasses Grillées” ’96 is getting on.’

  Manu’s face brightens as rapidly as it fell. He even turns politely conversational in the back seat of Pascal’s car, asking who does what in the family business.

  ‘I concentrate on the cave and shop and my father and brother look after the vines,’ Pascal explains. ‘They’re the important guys. It’s the work in the vineyard that makes the difference. Much more than anything I might do in the cellar.’ He stops outside the shop and dashes in for the wine. ‘I thought maybe two bottles,’ he says as he returns, having clearly got my companion’s measure.

  Pascal’s exaggerated pantomime of wiping the mud from his shoes at the door succeeds in extracting laughter from the theatrically pursed lips of what must surely be the region’s most formidable-looking restaurant proprietress – her broad, powerful shoulders undoubtedly the envy of the village rugby team.

  ‘My father had no training at all,’ Pascal continues, as soon as the prop-forward has taken our order and offered to decant the wine. ‘But travelling round the country for the Customs gave him an open mind, especially for grape varieties. I mean, everyone thought he was completely mad – planting Grenache, Mourvèdre and Syrah and refusing to touch Carignan. I suppose two years of study in Burgundy had much the same effect on me. Took the famous regions off their pedestals.’

  The first course arrives, and with it the decanter, but Pascal makes no move to pour. Manu is so transfixed by the sight of it that he can hardly focus on his salad but it is clearly unthinkable to sample the top Moulinier cuvée before it has breathed a little. Pascal offers water but Manu signals with a shudder that this would be one mortification of the flesh too far.

  ‘For a couple of years, we took our grapes to the co-operative,’ continues Pascal. ‘But all they seemed to care about was weight. There was no real incentive for low yields or high quality. So although we were signed up for twenty-five years, we broke away. We’re still getting the writs but we just couldn’t work that way. We wanted yields as low as fifteen for the wine we’re drinking now.’

  The use of the present tense is almost too much for Manu. He half chokes on his lettuce and mops a fevered brow. However, finally, with the arrival of our steaks, the glasses are filled. And in Manu’s case, rapidly emptied again. As Pascal worries that his pride and joy is still not showing its best, Manu can restrain himself no longer and helps himself to a second generous pouring.

  ‘People ask how long this should be kept,’ says Pascal. ‘But it’s the one question I can’t answer. We’ve nothing older than ’94. It’s too early to say. We’ll just have to wait and see.’

  One of our number, of course, has no intention of waiting another moment. He is already wondering whatever can have happened to the second bottle.

  *

  Virgile’s remotest vineyard, down at Nébian, must surely be his most beautiful. It lies high on a hillside to the south of Clermont l’Hérault, overlooking picturesquely patchworked vines and fruit trees. Its sheltered situation has encouraged a few of the buds to burst already, washing just the palest hint of green across the vines, while the edges of the field are exuberantly carpeted in deep purple and pale lemon by hundreds of heavy-headed, stumpy-stalked irises.

  There is, however, nothing very picturesque about the afternoon’s activity. As always, Virgile the fastidious pruner has made neat piles of his cuttings but these, he has decided, will have to be gathered up and burnt. Too many of the vines were diseased to mince them up as fertilizer.

  ‘Only a tiny vineyard,’ he assured me on the drive from Saint Saturnin, but it feels quite big enough to me as I trudge up and down the gradient, gathering armfuls of severed vine shoots to stoke the fire that he has lit at the bottom.

  ‘A new variety for you,’ says Virgile, as we work. ‘Cinsault – mostly planted as a table grape, which is why I could rent the land so cheaply. You don’t need slopes like this for table grapes. And if you don’t need them, why make the extra effort? On the other hand, it’s outside the Coteaux du Languedoc boundaries, so wine-makers weren’t exactly falling over themselves either. Indeed, the fact that I’m using these grapes for wine obliges me to declassify a proportion as vin de pays. But then, I’d have to do that anyway, simply because I’ve got a higher percentage of Carignan than the fifty permitted for a Coteaux du Languedoc.’

  All this reminds me that I wanted to pick his brains. I need to know whether April will be too late for planting vines on my own land. ‘Only for the table,’ I hasten to emphasize. ‘I’m not setting up in competition.’

  ‘But I thought you said your uncle had some vines.’

  ‘He did until he diversified into sheep. He decided it was the easiest way of keeping the grass under control. But from what I’ve cleared so far, it looks as if his four-legged lawnmowers did a lot of damage to the vines while they were at it.’

  ‘You never know,’ he says. ‘Vines are tough old creatures.’

  ‘Well, come for lunch next Sunday,’ I suggest as we watch the last of the cuttings burning. ‘Then you can tell me the worst.’

  *

  My first breakfast in the sunshine.

  I’ve decided to stick to the alternative bedroom in which I sought refuge from last month’s storm. It opens on to a little balcony terrace and I found I loved being able to wander straight out there from my bed to enjoy the flowers on the fruit trees in the morning light. The almonds were the first, followed quickly by the apricots and plums and now the dazzling creamy white of two magnificent old cherry trees.

  ‘All right for some,’ grumbled Mme Gros last week. A rash expression of delight from my side of the stream had undammed a bitter tide of self-reproach from hers. ‘Here we are with about a tenth of the land that you’ve got and I was foolish enough to let Manu cover it with vines.’

  ‘But everything’s flowering too soon,’ warned Mme Vargas yesterday, when I found her struggling with her weeding on her own, having passed the flu to her absent Albert. ‘There’ll be no fruit in the whole département if things carry on like this.’

  But early or late, who would not have been glad of the blossom this morning? The balcony is always the first part of the house to be warmed by the sun as it pushes over the wooded hills behind and this morning I installed a little breakfast table at the sunniest end.

  Sitting there contentedly, asking myself why I would ever want to be anywhere else, I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to be down in Clermont l’Hérault, collecting my hard-earned olive oil from the co-operative. I quickly hung out some washing to take advantage of the weather and set off excitedly, my thoughts full of mouth-watering, dark green extra vierge. To everyone else, of course, my three precious litres would be indistinguishable from all the thousands of bottles and plastic jerrycans filled from exactly the same vat. But not to me.

  The sense of anticipation survived the long-winded bureaucracy of the collection process. It even survived the prosaic realization that, by the time I’d paid the co-operative’s handling charges, my long hours of picking in the freezing January rain would have saved me little more than fifteen pounds on the ordinary purchase price. It has, however, been slightly undermined by the discovery that the oil to which my documentation entitles me is not the highly prized, single-variety product to which my cherished Lucques will have contributed but the co-operative’s rather humbler diverses variétés.

  ‘It does include some Lucques,’ the co-operative’s director, Mme Pagès, tries to reassure me. ‘And it is the genuine local article. Not the cheaper one we make from bought-in Spanish olives. You see, there simply aren’t enough in the Hérault to satisfy demand,’ she continues, as she senses my surprise. ‘Not since 1956.’

  ‘What happened?’ I ask, sufficiently intrigued to forget my disappointm
ent.

  ‘February temperatures were exceptionally high,’ she elaborates. ‘The sap was rising exceptionally early. Then suddenly the thermometer plunged from plus twenty to minus twenty in just twenty-four hours, wiping out nearly every olive tree in the département. Most had to be cut back down to ground level. They sprouted again but it was five or six years before the new shoots bore fruit. We were the only mill that managed to stay open. Recovery was very slow, especially as so many decided to replant with vines, which were paying much better. Small wonder, I suppose, when doctors were telling people that oil was unhealthy. It was only in the early eighties that they decided it discouraged heart disease and the pendulum swung back.’

  Mme Pagès speeds ahead down a spiral staircase to show me the surprisingly modest processing-room, with its mills and presses, centrifuges and conveyor belts, below the shop. Most of her 3,500 members operate on a rather different scale from mine, she is quick to emphasize, and when she tells me she has handled seven hundred tonnes this season, it’s hard to imagine how the tightly packed chain of machines surrounding us ever manages to cope.

  She tells me she is married to the grandson of the man who founded the co-operative in 1920, but hers is clearly no nepotistic appointment. She is passionately committed to her product, particularly the range of single-variety oils that she makes from Lucques and other exotic-sounding olives that I’ve never heard of.

  ‘I’m specially keen to develop the Ménudal,’ she enthuses. ‘It would do very well up where you are and, of course, with a government grant for planting …’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I shake my head and back away defensively towards the car, cradling my priceless oil in my arms. ‘I’ve got enough problems already.’

  These turn out to include a dramatic change in the weather. My car is barely visible on the other side of the road, obscured by the kind of rain that I’ve only ever seen in films. There, of course, you know perfectly well that some supercharged fireman’s hose has been invoked to drench the few square metres in front of the camera, but here it is universal and sensationally real. The road is many centimetres deep in water and I have to drive away at something slower than walking speed. Yet within a quarter of an hour, the deluge has given way to brilliant sunshine and a perfect double rainbow.