Grape Expectations (11 page)

  Christophe the electrician, based in Gardonne five minutes away and available 24/7 to his winemaker clients, arrived in a beautiful new Mercedes van.

  
'Ce n'est pas aux normes,'
said Christophe, looking around the winery. 'We must take it out and redo it.'

  'It's not within regulatory norms' was a phrase I was becoming familiar with. In France everything is regulated down to exactly how bread must be made to be called 'traditional'.

  Christophe pointed to uncovered neon lights. 'With liquids being pumped at high pressure winery lights must have waterproof covers. And all this wiring must go.'

  Even to my untrained eye the old cables snaking round the roof looked in need of replacement.

  Christophe took measurements and disappeared with a desultory wave. The next day the fax spewed out a
devis
for ten thousand euro. I was staggered. The work didn't even include digging up half the courtyard to lay the new electricity cables in the ground, which he said had to be done by someone else.

  At that price there was no way we could afford to redo the electricity but we didn't want to wind up another winemaker fatality. Bernard Barse, our old friend with the B&B and a qualified electrician as well as a vigneron, whistled when I mentioned the amount, but when he came round later and had a close look he confirmed the price was right.

  Meanwhile, despite the lack of funds I went ahead and asked a local roofer for an estimate for the renovation of the tasting room. He estimated that a quick repair of the roof would be a couple of thousand. Ignoring completely how little money we had to put towards the project he recommended a total replacement of the entire outbuilding roof, as a 'quick' repair would not be guaranteed since it would be attached to structural parts of the old roof that would not be replaced. Soon I was perched in front of his boss looking at a quote for twenty thousand. The tasting room renovation was looking as likely as the electricity. I felt desperate. Our operating budget was disappearing way faster than planned and the renovation budget had been eaten up by the house. There was no way we could afford to do these critical renovations.

  A few days later, just after I had resigned myself to potential electrocution and no tasting room, we got a letter from the taxman saying he owed us several thousand from the previous tax year. God clearly wanted us alive. I called Christophe, the electrician, in jubilation and asked him to find a way to halve his quote. He pared it back to the most crucial parts and the electricity work was soon underway.

  Through our first heatwave Sean lifted then relaid several tons of concrete for the cable and a drainage course alongside the house. Sweat pouring off his face and ears ringing with the noise of cutting cement, he struggled through blistering 40-degree heat, wishing he was back in an air-conditioned office.

  With the underground cable safely installed, Christophe's two electricians appeared in another new Mercedes van, ready to rewire the winery in cool, peace and calm. In the process of doing the winery work they disconnected the lights of the upstairs section of our house. Convinced that they were going to leave the house in darkness, Sean demanded that I verify that the house lights were going to be reconnected before they left.

  'Don't worry. We leave a gift of candles when we go. It's all part of the service,' said Manu.

  'Oh, and matches too,' said Serge, his partner.

  They were both doubled over with laughter by the time my lamentable French caught up with the joke. By late afternoon everything was reconnected. We would have to do the tasting room roof repairs ourselves as there was no way to stretch our tax refund to include that. While the renovation work was coming together, the work in the vineyard was getting away from us. Spring was powering ahead and leaving us behind.

On supermarket shelves back home almost all baby food was organic. In France, in our area at least, there appeared to be no organic baby food. Bio, short for
biologique
, the term for organic, was far from accepted. Despite this, since coming to France we were even more convinced of the benefits of organic.

  The more we read about the toxic chemicals used in conventional farming, the less we liked them. They were bad for the land, the people applying them, the wildlife and the consumers of the result. Labels that stated 'do not enter the vineyard for 48 hours after you have sprayed this product' could not be good. Why would we want to put them onto grapes that were going into the food chain?

  On the opposite side of our valley, a couple of kilometres away, was a vineyard that looked like a desert. Sean nicknamed the incumbent 'Napalm Nic'. He sprayed herbicide over the entire vineyard, leaving not a blade of grass standing.

  'He does it to save doing the work of mowing the grass and ploughing,' said Cécile. 'It encourages erosion and is bad for the soil. Eventually it will be as lifeless as a desert.'

  Up close, the soil looked sick. Later in the season we saw Napalm Nic using a chemical spray for vine shoot removal. He was doing it to cut costs so he could supply cheap wine but also ensuring carcinogenic chemical residues for the consumer.

  With spring underway we needed an alternative to herbicide fast if we were to stick to our organic principles. Sean was up to his eyes with work in the vineyard – mowing, ploughing and raising the wires of the trellising – so it was up to me to find a weeding solution. We mow and plough alternating rows to prevent the competition, from plants like grass and weeds that grow between the rows, hampering the vines' growth. The new weeding solution needed to remove these plants from under the trellising and around the vine trunks.

  Cécile, my secret weapon, appeared with a yellow book of equipment and supplies for vineyards that included descriptions and price ranges for all available mechanical weeders. At first Cécile had been sceptical about us going organic but now she fully supported our conviction. At the start she was worried we wouldn't cope, even farming conventionally. She had seen how committed we were to learning but also to our organic philosophy.

  We liked the look of a relatively simple, hydraulically operated mechanical hoe that attached to the tractor and worked the soil between the vines where a regular plough could not reach. The salesman invited Sean to a demonstration at a nearby farm owned by Thierry Daulhiac. We had never met Thierry but we knew he was the president of the Saussignac appellation union. He probably had a reliable view on machinery. We also heard that he farmed organically. Sean still struggled with French – being an independent winegrower in France was a lonely job – and Thierry's English being little better, they communicated as only fellow farmers can. Sean was desperate for male company. He spent his days farming alone and his nights with his wife and very young daughters. Even his weekends were completely consumed by the vineyard. We had bitten off a lot more change and risk than we expected back in the heady days of planning our move.

  Sean saw the machine in operation at Thierry's farm and was impressed. We ordered the hoe and waited. The weeds were growing with more vigour than the vines. Even Cécile was ruffled. The weeds grew. We waited some more. The weeds grew faster.

  'Perhaps we should do one pass of a chemical herbicide to keep control of the vineyard,' said Cécile, struggling to see anything but weeds. We hadn't started organic certification yet as we had missed the annual cut-off, but we could not stomach using herbicide. I harassed the supplier again.

  In the intervening four weeks since we ordered the hoe Sean had more trips to Monsieur Bonny. The vine sprayer we had bought with the property was broken. Monsieur Bonny estimated that to fix it would cost almost the same as getting a more modern second-hand one. The second-hand one he proposed cost more than Sean had budgeted in equipment costs for the entire year but we needed a working sprayer
tout de suite
. In our region mildew poses a potentially lethal risk to the grape crop and preventative sprays are obligatory. The cash budgeted for our first year's expenses was diminishing much faster than planned. We were way outstripping the costs expected even after the vineyard accountant's judicious adjustments.

  We collected the bulbous spraying beast with eight arms from Monsieur Bonny. He was his usual bouncy self, showing Sean how it worked with me listening in for the odd bit of translation while trying to control the girls. I was almost unnecessary; although Sean's everyday French was pitiful, he already knew far more French agricultural machine terms than I did.

  'Be very, very careful to keep the power-take-off shaft in position otherwise it will break because of the height of the connector,' said Monsieur Bonny as we prepared to leave. It meant little to me, but Sean reassured him he'd be fine; all was clear.

  I waved goodbye and set off for home. Sean followed with the beautiful sprayer behind the tractor. As he drove into the courtyard at Haut Garrigue I knew something was wrong. I rushed out to find Sean almost in tears.

  'I was concentrating so hard, Carolinus. It was a split second of inattention as I drove through Saussignac village and hit a bump.'

  The power-take-off shaft was broken.

  That evening Sean read the entire tractor manual from cover to cover, discovering in the process that a simple twist of a button would have saved the breakage. Thereafter Monsieur Bonny always checked we had understood by asking the same thing in different ways, but that didn't help the broken shaft. We had so much to learn: I felt inadequate. It was yet another expense we didn't need. We were drowning financially but also in the work in the vineyard.

  Our neighbour, Sonia, agreed to look after Ellie for a few days so I could help Sean with shoot removal. Like roses, vines send out sucker shoots at the base of the vine that need to be removed. This can be done by hand, by machine or with chemicals. We didn't have a machine, so hand-work it was. It was tough work but it felt good. We were alone together for the first time in weeks, laughing and making better time than we would have working alone. There was something deeply satisfying about physically demanding work outside in a beautiful place with someone who you love. It wasn't easy but I glimpsed how fulfilling it could be, following this, our passion.

  The weeds were so high they were growing into the trellising. At last the hoe arrived but it didn't work. After checking the connection several times the sales guy explained that they needed a hydraulic system different to the one on our tractor. They would have to manufacture a hydraulic oil reservoir to attach to the back of the tractor. It would cost €800 and would take a few days. My face went red with fury.

  'We're going to do it for free,' he said stepping back nervously. 'We'll have it ready in two days.'

  When the working hoe arrived Sean toiled from dawn to dusk to remove the jungle that had leapt up around our vines. Cécile was delighted to see what he had achieved. At last the vineyard was unencumbered by weeds. As we walked up the third row of Garrigue she turned to me.

  '
Je suis impressionnée
. You are doing so well.
C'est vrai
, when you arrived, I didn't think you would make it. Your French has improved so much. You have both adapted so well to the life here. The work Sean is doing in the vineyard is
impeccable
.'

  I thought back to our first meeting, me stuffing myself with grapes while Sean looked at Cécile mouthing incomprehensible French at him. Cécile was our lifesaver. Each week she went well beyond advising us on what dose of copper and sulphur to use to beat the mildew and odium. She would check the work Sean was doing, help to plan the week ahead and show us how to do new tasks that were coming up in the vineyard cycle.

  'I got the results of the count of the
typhlodromes
and your vineyard has three times the average of the group,' she said. 'It's a good sign and proof of the benefits of organic farming.'

  Typhlodromus are tiny mites that eat vine pests, thus helping avoid the use of cancer-causing pesticides. They are a way for nature to keep the balance but are killed by treatments used in chemical farming. To thrive they need a balanced herbal environment, not a monoculture, therefore some weeds are indispensable. At least there was an upside to our award-winning weeds.

  'Perhaps we should have the group meeting here next week so we can show the others what is possible with organic,' said Cécile. 'It's good to show people there are alternatives.' Every week there was an hour-long meeting of the group of farmers that she and her colleagues advised. We had been to a few of them and at least twenty farmers would typically attend. Before Sean had a chance to protest, the next group meeting was booked to take place at Château Haut Garrigue.