Virgile's Vineyard

Maybe I just need more than twenty-four hours of southern sunlight to melt my northern restraint, but ten o'clock in the morning did seem marginally early for aperitifs.

What do you do though, when the man whose new neighbour you have just become is there on your doorstep, agitatedly shifting his portly frame from one short leg to another, as if all his future wellbeing depended on your acceptance? How can I not say yes? I am, after all, in the land of the langue d'oc â the ancient Occitan language, in which everyone said oc instead of oui. So I meekly cross the wobbly wooden footbridge and follow his eager but elderly steps to the small stone cottage on the opposite side of the stream, bracing myself for a glass of his homemade rouge.

For Monsieur Gros there appears to be no time to lose. Before he has even puffed his way to the top of his garden path, he has produced a corkscrew from his dirty blue overalls. And before I have fought my way through the curtain of plastic ribbons defending his kitchen doorway, he is already tugging breathlessly at a cork.

âYour uncle Milo always enjoyed his wines,' he chuckles, tapping a conspiratorial finger on a bloodshot nose that bears eloquent witness to more than half a century of equally high enjoyment. âUntil his illness, that is â¦'

He ushers me quickly to a bare wooden table and is urgently scanning the austere, low-ceilinged room for some drinking vessels, when a tall, forbidding figure of similar vintage emerges from the gloom of an alcove.

âAh, voici, ma femme,' he says with a start.

I mumble a hesitant âEnchantÃ©, madame' and am rewarded with an almost imperceptible, silent nod.

âOh yes,' resumes M. Gros, with unnaturally hearty laughter. âWe always knew Milo would leave the house to a wine-lover. N'est-ce pas, ma chÃ¨re?'

The object of this endearment tightens her lips. Madame Gros could hardly look less pleased to see her husband so swiftly replacing my benefactor with a new drinking companion. She produces two glasses of notable smallness and stands with arms firmly folded across her ample bosom, defying us to overfill them.

I begin to suspect a method in my neighbour's madly early invitation. If social drinking is so reluctantly tolerated, solitary consumption must be even more deeply disapproved of. So accomplices have to be rounded up whenever he is thirsty.

Given these onerous social obligations, it amazes me that Uncle Milo ever found time to build the house that is now, unexpectedly, mine. He once told me it took him fifteen years to summon up the energy to drop out. So, even for a lapsed architect, his achievement here in the next twenty-five was pretty remarkable. It did, however, leave him no time for the acquisition of wives, children or any heirs more worthy than his nephew â a nephew who hasn't even visited since his student days and therefore feels exceptionally undeserving this morning.

My uncle had only got as far as building two simple rooms when I was last here and younger visitors like me used to sleep in a tiny shepherd's maset in the garden. Now the house looks a bit like a miniature Romanesque monastery, with its vast, stone-vaulted dining room and the generously rounded arches of the shady cloister lining all but the south-facing side of its spectacular front courtyard. I can hardly imagine how it kept itself out of the design magazines.

Not that there would be much chance of a photo-call today. The paint on the window shutters has started to peel and a number of the terracotta roof tiles lie broken on the ground. The ancient agricultural terraces stretching up the hill behind the house are crumbling and the once immaculately cultivated vines and olive and fruit trees all look almost impenetrably overgrown with the neglect of my uncle's declining health: uncomfortable reminders of my own less excusable neglect.

âYou'll be coming down for the summer holidays, I imagine,' says Mme Gros, anxious to ascertain the limits of the domestic damage that I might do.

As compassionately as possible, I break the news that I've let my English house for the whole of next year. I stumble over the French for sabbatical but I can see from her look of dismay that she has grasped the essential gist.

And this is all before I have braved even my first sip of M. Gros's worryingly thin-looking wine.

âYou make a lot of this?' I ask, playing for time.

âOh very little. Very, very little. Just three thousand litres a year. Just for me and the family,' he says.

Time may, of course, yet reveal the precise extent of this happy group of enthusiasts but I am already trying to calculate how many relatives M. Gros would need before he could divide his annual production into an average daily intake that would be less than life-threatening â especially as the only family member in evidence seems to be so resolutely abstemious. I raise my glass nervously in Mme Gros's direction.

The wine is, as I feared, thin, sharp and characterless. More surprisingly, given the maker's inclination towards intoxication, it also tastes unexpectedly low in alcohol. Which is probably why it is barely eleven o'clock when he proposes that we adjourn to the sitting room for some of his âsecret' home-distilled brandy.

âDon't tell a soul,' he whispers, as he pours me a brimming measure.

Even drinking only one glass to his three, I am beginning to feel the room rotate â a sensation that isn't helped by the walls being covered with the swirliest of brown and orange, carpet-like wallpapers. On closer inspection, so is the ceiling. In fact, the only side of the cube not so decorated is the floor. Perversely, this appears to be hewn directly out of the underlying rock. My glass has been replenished once too often for me to be certain.

As the morning wears on, I become ever more pessimistic that I shall finish my unpacking before the spring. My host meanwhile becomes ever more determined in his health-toasting, back-slapping matiness. By 11.30, Monsieur E. Gros will tolerate no other epithet but Emmanuel; by noon, only the diminutive âManu' is ever to cross my lips. Above all, I must, without failure or excuse, accompany him and his lady wife to this evening's Saint Sylvester Night feast.

But Mme Gros is having none of this. With evident satisfaction, she reminds him that the deadline for reservations expired two days ago. (However bad my influence on her spouse in the privacy of her home, I shall not be leading him astray in the Salle des FÃªtes.) And speaking of which, isn't it time he was down there setting up the trestle tables?

I am secretly relieved. A preview of the dinner menu, with its opening highlight of âstuffed neck' (the unfortunate bird or animal undisclosed) inspired little confidence. But with my own simpler New Year's dinner now finished, I feel unable to resist going down to snoop discreetly on the revels.

Uncle Milo's house is well outside the village so I drive as far as the medieval-looking gateway at the bottom of the narrow main street. I have had no opportunity to explore until now and there are very few street lights, but the couples zigzagging unsteadily down the gradient towards me must surely be coming from the direction of the Salle des FÃªtes.

My instincts are soon confirmed by the sound of some long-forgotten hits of the seventies drifting tinnily from the far side of the fountain in the little square at the top of the hill. I am not sure whether it is kitchen or disco exertions that have steamed up the windows but I can more or less make out Mme Gros and another equally intimidating matron waging a terrifying war on the washing up. Manu is nowhere to be seen. (Perhaps sent home in disgrace? Perhaps collapsed under one of his trestle tables?) Fractious children are playing football with an empty drink can. A weary young mother dances listlessly round her pushchair on the post-prandial dance-floor. My instinct was right: tonight was not the night for my social dÃ©but.

My time was better spent making discoveries and resolutions.

I decided this morning that I ought to drink my solitary toast to the coming year with something fitting. So I asked a local wineshop to recommend one of the best of the local wines. I knew that things had changed since the plastic-stoppered, three-starred litres of my adolescent summers but I had not guessed how radically. I had certainly not been prepared for so much diversity, sparking such contagious enthusiasm from my wine-merchant. Nor imagined that he would persuade me to pay ten times as much for an obscure and rustic-sounding vin de pays as I might have given for something with a famous name. Yet, even allowing for a touch of house-moving hysteria, there is no avoiding the conclusion that tonight's so-called âcountry wine' was really one of the great experiences of my life.

So, with twelve whole months at my disposal, it seems as good a New Year Resolution as any to try to get to grips with the remarkable wine-making revolution that appears to be going on here. (I can't spend the entire year battling with the brambles.) I shall see if I can understand that subtle something which separates the Domaine de la Grange des PÃ¨res from the âDomaine d'Emmanuel Gros'. And while I am about it, I shall have a go at filling my uncle's cellar with some of the region's finest. It feels like the least that I can do to thank him for letting me come here.

January

I have made a big mistake. I have told Manu about my resolutions and, deaf to all protest, he has decided I cannot possibly fulfil them on my own. Imagining a year of joyously uninhibited tastings, far from the censorious supervision of his wife, he has appointed himself my indispensable tutor, protector and guide. Indeed, no sooner was the public holiday over than his battered red van was revving impatiently at the bottom of my drive.

âYou're forgetting the size of the Languedoc,' he fretted, as if our only hope of covering the ground in the time available would be 364 unremittingly early starts. âIt spans three dÃ©partements, you know.'

I had not even thought about where I wanted to start but I knew that, if I surrendered the initiative, I might never again recover it. So, with Manu already releasing the handbrake, I frantically tried to remember one of the bottles that impressed me when I was down here to see the notaire in the autumn.

âAre we anywhere near Montpeyroux?' I asked, as a possible name came hazily to mind.

âNear enough to take the scenic route,' answered Manu, swinging cheerfully off on to a narrow road winding up into the hills on the other side of the village.

I had thought that few views could match the one from the arcaded courtyard at the front of Uncle Milo's house. Indeed, every front window looks down the hillside, through olives, oaks and cypresses, past vineyards and occasional shepherds' huts, to the river valley far below and then way beyond to the distant, interlocking diagonals of a succession of hills, stretching down towards an invisible coastal plain. But this morning we were climbing higher still â not quite as high as the bleak Larzac moorlands behind us, which I knew from my arrival a couple of days before, but high enough to see as far as the coast, some forty kilometres away, where the January sunshine was gleaming golden on the sea.

Having spotted a sufficiently chilly-looking, windswept crest, Manu swerved to a sudden halt for a cigarette and a geography lesson. âMontpeyroux,' he began, with an ostentatious clearing of his throat, âis of course a village in the Coteaux du Languedoc â¦'

âThe what du Languedoc?'

âCoteaux,' he repeated, impatient that I had interrupted his oratory. âMeaning much the same as CÃ´tes. As in du RhÃ´ne. Hillside slopes. Only with the longer word, you get shorter slopes. Anyway, it's a very large wine-making region. Huge, in fact. Stretching all the way from NÃ®mes to Narbonne, like a . . .' Manu's arms drew frantic circles in the air until at last an appropriate simile hove into view ââ¦ giant amphitheatre. VoilÃ . And Montpeyroux is, of course â¦'

âAround the middle of the back row?' I suggested.

âOne of its best villages,' Manu continued, ignoring my attempt to hi-jack his metaphor. âAnd as such, entitled to put its own name on the label as well.'

I was not in fact quite as ignorant about the French wine-naming system as Manu imagined. I knew that the powers that be had comprehensively divided and sub-divided the French vineyards in a codification of positively Napoleonic thoroughness. It was all supposed to give the customer a sense of what he was entitled to expect from his bottle, by imposing controls on the way in which a wine had to be made if it wanted to be labelled with the name of a designated area. Hence, the expression Appellation ContrÃ´lÃ©e.

âAll nonsense, of course,' said Manu. âYou get good and bad wines, whatever the name.' But it soon became clear that the real reason why he had so little time for the appellation is that it had inconsiderately outlawed his principal grape variety, once the Midi's dominant vine, the Aramon.

âWonderfully productive,' he enthused, as we drove on. âUp to four hundred hectolitres per hectare! When the most you get in a Coteaux du Languedoc is a miserable fifty.' I had little understanding of hectolitres and hectares but I got Manu's general drift. âIt's ridiculous, discriminating against Aramon!' he continued. âI mean, it even does well where it's too flat and fertile for the swanky new varieties â¦' He simply couldn't understand why everyone else had been ripping it up and replanting.

But I could. I'd tasted his wine.

Our third drive up and down Montpeyroux's frustratingly long main street is, however, slightly discrediting Manu's assertion that he knew exactly how to find the Domaine d'Aupilhac. The tall and timeless-looking buildings, squeezed tightly together on either side, all look equally anonymous. I tentatively suggest that an elaborately painted âA' on the wall beside one of the ancient panelled doors might be a clue. (I have the advantage: I saw the logo on their label in October.) A confident young-looking man, in confidently expensive casual clothes, responds to Manu's rap on his iron knocker with a welcoming, wine-stained hand.

My companion really ought to approve of Sylvain Fadat because he has founded much of his considerable renown on another unfashionable grape: the Carignan â not as deeply disdained as Manu's Aramon but another, it seems, that a lot of people have been accepting European Community subsidies to rip out.

âFor a long time, it replaced the Aramon as the dominant local variety,' Sylvain explains, as we follow him through a series of small, low-ceilinged rooms to an office dominated by an enormous modern desk. âIt was a major contributor to the region's bad name, because of its dreadfully high yield.'

âI don't see why that's so dreadful,' grunts Manu, as his plump denimed weight slumps into one of Sylvain's plump leather armchairs.

âIt depends whether or not you like bland bulk,' Sylvain answers civilly.

âYou decided the Carignan could be rehabilitated?' I ask, remembering my autumn wine, which was anything but bland.

âI didn't have any crusading mission.' He smiles as he pours us a dark, purple-tinged sample of the latest vintage. âI simply didn't have the money to replant. It was 1989. I'd just finished my oenology studies at Montpellier â¦' (I was right: he is indeed still young, despite his receding hairline.) âThe vines that my father used to cultivate for the co-operative were about fifty years old, and I pruned them hard and harvested late. All of which helped to give me low, concentrated yields.'

Manu drains his glass with an expression of exaggerated concentration, apparently weighing up the wisdom of giving this young upstart the benefit of the doubt.

âBut I had far more Carignan than anything else,' Sylvain continues. âSo I had to sell it on its own. Which meant it couldn't be Coteaux du Languedoc.'

âC'est pas vrai! You mean, they've criminalized Carignan as well as Aramon?' asks Manu, sensing a fellow-feeling with this young man after all and magnanimously extending a reconciliatory glass for a refill.

âIt can't be more than fifty per cent of the blend, monsieur. So most of mine ended up as humble vin de pays.'

âEven though it's grown on Coteaux du Languedoc land?' I ask.

âPrecisely. You see, the bureaucrats didn't think the wine-buying public would get sufficient mental stimulus from just the one complicated system. So they carved up the map a second time, into hundreds of different vins de pays. A completely different set of names, running parallel with the first. The same land but different names and different conditions. Less restrictive but less prestigious.'

âSome of them seem to command pretty prestigious prices,' I say, remembering the New Year extravagance that started all this.

âNowadays, maybe. But in 1990 I could hardly give my Carignan away. Except to passing tourists who were too ignorant about names and grape varieties to be prejudiced.'

I take this as my cue to enquire whether there is any to spare for a passing local today. The telephone has hardly stopped ringing while we have been with him and I am not particularly optimistic but he says he could manage a case. And then we leave him to take a call from yet another hopeful, wanting to reserve an allocation of something he probably once spurned.

The village appears to be farther from the house than I thought and I suspect this morning's expedition may well be the first and last time that I walk down in search of breakfast croissants. With most of my belongings at last unpacked and sufficient fallen branches cut into fire-sized pieces to keep me warm for the next few days, I felt it was time for a proper exploration on foot. But I soon realized that what is probably less than a kilometre as the crow flies must be much more than two by the dilapidated tarmac lane that follows the contours round the hill between the vines and the olive trees.

The vines were, of course, completely bare at this time of year â some neatly pruned, others still a ragged tangle â but the delicate, silvery grey foliage of the olive trees gently counterpointed the starkness of the rugged, fir-clad hills immediately behind me to the north. And somehow, the thought that this must be about the highest altitude that vines and olives can tolerate made these defining features of the Mediterranean seem all the more precious.

Halfway to the village and far from any home, an elderly couple were working in a tiny, terraced olive grove rising steeply beside the lane. Each appeared equally impervious to the cold. The woman's dress was covered only by a thin nylon overall wrapped tightly round her frail-looking figure. The husband was jacketless in a woollen shirt, with braces supporting well-worn corduroy trousers which hung loosely off his waist, as though they once belonged to some plumper younger brother. They paused as soon as they saw me, apparently grateful for an excuse to massage the stiffness in their backs.

âBonjour, monsieur!' they called out together, as if one voice alone might not have been strong enough to carry on the wind. âThe English nephew, we suppose.'

I was startled to think that my well-worn overcoat and jeans had so quickly betrayed both my Englishness and nephewness but then I remembered that the lane really leads nowhere but to me and the Groses. So it didn't need Chief Inspector Clouseau to crack my identity.

âDid you get a good crop?' they asked in their characteristic, tremulous unison.

âI've no idea,' I confessed. âI've only just moved in and I can hardly see the olive trees for the brambles and whatever else is climbing over them.'

âDon't leave it much later,' they counselled, as they waved me on my way with a quavery âbon courage!'

Rounding the corner, I had the postcard view of the village, perfectly positioned on an oval hillock between two river valleys and surrounded by darker, more dramatic hills climbing up to the sheer white cliffs that support the Larzac plateau high above. As many ancient houses as the ingenuity of successive centuries could contrive clung tenaciously to even the most vertical of the hillock's edges, with a picturesquely fortified chÃ¢teau crowning the summit.

The main street was long, narrow, straight and steep. There was no pavement but rather a pair of deep stone ditches filled with fast-running water, making each side narrower still. Most of the houses rose as high as a fourth storey, the ground floor remaining invariably windowless, with a small door for people and a larger one for animals or machinery. Many of them had wrought iron balconies, with enough washing hanging on them to satisfy me that I was genuinely in the South of France but few enough geraniums to reassure me that I was still in one of its less discovered parts. Every twenty metres or so, an even narrower alleyway offered a miniature view of the countryside beyond, often no more than a tiny glimpse beneath one of the curious, arching, stone bridges that the residents seem to favour to link the upper levels of the buildings on either side, facilitating who knows what degrees of neighbourly intimacy.

There was, however, no sign of the master baker whose trading presence I had so rashly assumed. I did pass one shop professing to butchery but its faded red and white blind looked as if it had not been raised in fifteen years. The only indication of commercial life was a tiny general store up in the Place de la Fontaine, near the Salle des FÃªtes. It had three small rooms, strung together in an awkward âZ' shape and filled, remarkably, with almost everything that the villagers might need, from handmade cheeses to photocopying services. But no croissants. The pretty young woman who appeared to be the owner explained that it operates as a âdÃ©pÃ´t de pain' but only ten croissants are deposited each day and six of those are reserved for the chÃ¢teau. You have to be up early for the leftovers.

I settled for a baguette and crossed the square to investigate what appeared to be the village's only cafÃ©. An outside terrace was shrouded in a zipped-up wall of transparent plastic sheeting. The whole establishment looked closed for the season but encouragingly convivial sounds from within suggested otherwise. I was searching in vain for an alternative entrance when the harassed-looking patronne came out to take pity on me and show me the secret panel in the plastic.

About a dozen customers nodded civilly but silently in my direction. They were all male and all perched at the bar on an assortment of stools. The bar itself had started life as a traditional zinc, before suffering its more recent mock-wood extension. The centre of the room was completely dominated by a billiard table, swaddled in a protective plastic sheet, which in turn was half-covered by menus, bread-baskets and sauce bottles. Squashed between this and the bare stone walls, a line of small imitation-marble tables, already laid with cruets and cutlery, completed the impression that eating might be the cafÃ©'s secondary sport.

The twelve pairs of muddy boots at the bar testified to several hours already spent in the fields and most of the group were enjoying a mid-morning, restorative, aniseed-flavoured pastis or, failing that, a glass of red wine or beer. However, remembering my breakfast baguette, I confined myself to a coffee.

The bustling, chain-smoking patronne gave no sign that she considered my order effeminate. She simply darted about, as petite as most of her clientÃ¨le were burly, her outfit as curiously matched as her dÃ©cor. The formal, slightly prim cashmere top contrasted oddly with a loose, almost slovenly skirt, and the neat patent shoes belonged to a different woman altogether from the untidy ponytail. Maybe she was simply trying to be all things to all customers.

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