Virgile's Vineyard (17 page)

‘Consequently, most of the exports went by sea – from Louis's new port of Sète, at the other end of the canal, on the Bassin de Thau. In fact, maybe we could go there on our way back . . .'

‘Krystina, look at that sky!'

Reluctantly, she agrees to head directly for home. Equally reluctantly, she concedes that this might be one of the rare occasions that justifies the erection of the convertible's roof – or rather, might have been, had it not become jammed from lack of use in the sunshine position.

‘Don't worry, I'll race the storm home,' she promises, which strikes me as a greater cause for worry than the storm itself.

However, almost true to her word, Krystina gets the BMW to within ten kilometres of the village before the rain catches up with us. Those are, however, ten kilometres too many, and by the time we reach the house, the whole of the courtyard is at least a couple of centimetres deep in water that cannot find anywhere dry enough to run away to. Waterfalls of rain are overflowing all along the normally ample gutters and the splashes bounce so far that even Uncle Milo's deep arcades are inadequate to keep a would-be storm spectator dry today. Not that it matters, as those last ten kilometres have left us about as wet as we could ever be.

We might almost as well join the tree frogs in the pool. When the swimming season first disrupted their routine, they took their stentorian croakings off to the stream, but tonight's climatic conditions appear to have prompted a resoundingly jubilant return.

Almost nothing is visible beyond the roses in the immediate foreground, their huge heads bowed almost to the ground. The valley and the hills on the other side have completely disappeared in the prevailing blackness. Only the romantic pile of rocks, that looks so like a ruined castle on the opposite skyline, stands silhouetted against a single patch of bright, white sky.

‘Glass of red wine, I think,' says Krystina buoyantly, emerging from the house with an already opened bottle. ‘Warm you up!'

The bottle that she has chanced upon happens, however, to be not just any old bottle. It is one of the tiny run of twelve that Virgile bottled by hand in advance of all the hiccups with last month's mechanical
mise en bouteille
. I have had it for a couple of weeks but was letting it rest a bit before tasting it – something that Krystina's spirited pourings may now be rendering futile.

With glass in hand, I feel like a parent waiting for his child's examination results: I so much want it to be good.

‘But this is amazing!' comes Krystina's speedy judgement, before I have more than sniffed the wine. ‘Where on earth did you get it?'

I prevaricate a little but Krystina's classroom days gave her plenty of practice at extracting truthful confessions from reluctant lips.

‘So that's where you keep disappearing,' she laughs, when the whole story is out. ‘I thought it was another woman!'

I have an uneasy sense that life with Virgile will never be quite the same again, but for the moment I'm much more interested in his wine. Because it does indeed seem remarkable: all the complexity and elegance that might be hoped for in a much more lengthily matured wine, yet totally open and accessible poured straight from the bottle, just ten months after the vintage.

‘I shall be buying a lot of this,' announces Krystina decisively.

‘It may not be quite so simple,' I venture.

‘Nonsense,' says Krystina. ‘You know me better than that!'

*

‘She wants me out of the house,' complained Manu. ‘It's a golden opportunity. You can't just stay here hoovering. Especially in these temperatures.'

‘But my house is just as deep in confetti as yours,' I grumbled.

‘I know. She says I'm dropping it everywhere I go, even this morning. That's why I've been ordered out. It doesn't happen every day, you know!'

‘Only the morning after the Lodève carnival,' I granted him, having paused to prevent Uncle Milo's antiquated vacuum cleaner from overheating. ‘I bet they don't have this much confetti in Rio de Janeiro!'

I doubted in fact whether many of the elements of the previous night's parade would have been familiar to the average Brazilian carnival-goer – the ‘float' contributed by our village being no exception. Perhaps, if the committee had been willing to accept Krystina's offer to underwrite a more ambitious budget, the crudely constructed château scenery might have wobbled on, intact, to the end of the circuit. Or maybe, if the podgy little daughter of the committee chairman had been lighter, her flimsy castle balcony might have supported her all the way to the finish. It would certainly have helped if Manu had put some more fuel in his tractor, before attempting to tow this rapidly disintegrating
tableau vivant
round the town. As it was, our carnival princess found herself mortifyingly immobilized in front of the very revellers who had just witnessed her undignified crash into the puny arms of her infant troubadour.

The ones I really pitied were the majorettes who were next in the cavalcade behind us. They must have been sweltering in their red and silver toy-soldier jackets. But they still had to twirl their batons through every routine in their high-kicking, fishnet-stockinged repertoire, on one of the steepest hills in the Languedoc, while someone fitter than Manu sprinted off to fill a jerry can. Hence the prodigious quantities of confetti, dispensed at this juncture to distract the crowd from an embarrassing hiatus in the evening's proceedings.

‘Is any of this really happening?' a bewildered M. Vargas had asked – only recently recovered from his concussion and understandably suspecting a relapse.

Mme Gros had watched the pageant from the comparative safety of one of the café terraces farther down the route – her place secured an hour or two before the spectacle began and a single Noilly Prat made to last the whole evening. This spared her the worst of both the paper snowstorm and her husband's humiliation but word travelled fast and she has been slow to forgive, which only added to Manu's desperation to escape.

Almost anywhere, it seemed, would do, even my own unfinished ‘historical business' down on the quays in Sète. Indeed, he was so relieved to have lured me out that he submitted uncomplainingly to my reiteration of the basics hammered home by Krystina on our storm-swept return from the canal.

The most docile of pupils, he heard how the opening of the port in 1670 created important new export routes to England and the Netherlands, even sometimes to Paris, via Gibraltar and the Seine; how the early exports were mainly spirits and liqueurs – travelling better than table wines and commanding higher prices per volume; and how an explosion of planting in the immediate hinterland created a major new market in the sweet Muscat wines to which the location was particularly suited.

‘That'll be Muscat de Frontignan – only a stone's throw from Sète,' my passenger hinted hopefully.

‘I thought you didn't like sweet wines,' I answered, still obstinately determined to see what survived of the seventeenth-century merchants' offices on the waterfront.

‘Bawf,' said Manu as a shorthand for ‘beggars can't be choosers' and we continued towards Sète.

But then a signpost offered an alternative source of salvation.

‘There's always Muscat de Mireval,' he wheedled. ‘Smaller, more exclusive really than Frontignan. It's hardly off route. More of a short cut really. We could still be in Sète for lunch. And Muscat would be something new for you …'

He was right. I hadn't even begun to explore the region's dessert wines. So I capitulated and followed the signpost.

There is, however, a price to be paid for spontaneity: we have arrived in Mireval with neither appointment nor address, on a morning far too hot for aimless exploration.

‘Don't worry, I'll take you to
the
place,' Manu insists. ‘Just as soon as the name comes back to me …'

We are, I believe, on our third circuit round the village when he notices a placard outside the Domaine de la Capelle, attributing ownership to ‘Mme Maraval et Fils'.

‘
Eh, voilà finalement!
The Maravals of Mireval,' he chuckles. ‘How could I forget?'

Exhausted, I turn into the narrow drive beside the
cave
.

‘And look, we're in good company!' He flourishes a leaflet from a pile near the doorbell. ‘Supplier to the Elysée Palace, it says. The Ritz as well.' He basks in the glow of his own discernment.

‘How did you get to hear of us?' enquires the spry-looking, middle-aged woman who arrives to unlock the
cave
.

‘
Ah, par réputation, Madame
.' Manu taps a knowing finger to the side of his nose (presumably persuaded that Maraval
fils
makes the Muscats, while mother minds the shop). ‘If a wine is good enough for the President …'

‘We like to think our limey soil makes the Muscats here more elegant than those of Frontignan next door,' says Madame Maraval, oblivious to flattery, as she unloads an armful of bottles from the fridge at the back of her spacious, efficient-looking cellar. ‘More “vivid” maybe. But the truth is, it's only politics that kept us out of the Frontignan
appellation
in 1936, making us wait another twenty-three years for our own! Not that this is a Muscat de Mireval,' she cautions, as she pours our first wine. ‘It's a Muscat Sec – a Vin de Pays d'Oc that we started in 1998.'

Manu seizes his glass as if it were the last dry white of his drinking career, not just the last of the morning.

‘Perfect for aperitifs or asparagus, many would say. But I'd drink this with anything,' Mme Maraval enthuses. ‘So much fresher than those other
cépages
.'

No doubt a second glass would have helped Manu weigh the proposition further but Mme Maraval is already introducing us to the classic Vin Doux Naturel.

‘Naturally sweet,' she says. ‘Or some would argue, unnaturally sweet, thanks to the
mutage
– the adding of alcohol to arrest the fermentation.'

‘Like Carthagène?' I ask.

‘Similar,' she acknowledges. ‘In a Vin Doux Naturel, the juice is fermented slightly more. So you add less alcohol to get to your required total of fifteen degrees. But the wine still retains a high level of “residual sugar” – a minimum of a hundred and twenty-five grams per litre, in fact, to satisfy the regulations. This one here we make in a light, fresh style, using relatively high acidity grapes and bottling early. Whereas this', she pours another, labelled ‘
Parcelle 8'
, ‘is quite different – from our oldest vines, with eighteen months in wood: 1999, only the second year we made it. Much richer but still fresh enough for an aperitif, don't you think? Although I can't say we've quite made up our minds about the use of wood. The Muscat grape's so delicate.'

Each of these Muscats – whether sweet or dry – seems quite simply ‘grapier' than anything I have encountered from other varieties. And a very long way from the oxidized wines that must have been shipped from Sète to London.

‘Is this the same as the table variety?' I ask.

Manu assumes a collusive ‘I ask you!' look to disassociate himself from my ignorance. But this is important. I am thinking now of my own intended plantings.

‘No, this is Muscat à Petits Grains,' she explains. ‘Much better suited to wine-making, with its smaller grapes and lower yields. You'd normally grow the Alexandria Muscat for the table. Or the black Hamburg variety …'

I could usefully hear more but Mme Maraval is already picking up their 1997 experiment, labelled ‘Gelée d'Automne'. ‘Something completely different,' she emphasizes.

Manu perks up. A blockbuster red perhaps? A crisp, astringent
rosé
even? But no, the deep, straw-like colour in the clear glass bottle tells him this will not be his idea of ‘completely different'. However, stoical as ever, he proffers his glass.

‘We wanted to make something sweet but without
mutage
,' Mme Maraval elaborates. ‘Using late-harvested grapes. And I do mean late – not like most of the so-called
Vendanges Tardives
that you'll find in the Languedoc. The end of November, compared with the first week of October for the Muscat Sec. Only possible in the best autumn weather conditions, when the grapes can dry on the vine, giving super-concentrated juice and potential alcohols around nineteen.'

‘Nineteen!' I look warily at my glass.

‘I did say potential alcohols. In practice the fermentation stops around fifteen …'

‘You'll understand better at vintage time,' says Manu condescendingly.

‘Again the stopping of the fermentation leaves unfermented residual sugar,' continues Mme Maraval, not noticeably awed by Manu's mastery of these matters. ‘But only about fifty-five grams per litre – less than half the amount in a Vin Doux Naturel.'

Manu's nostalgic glance at the Muscat Sec tells me this is still more than ample for him.

‘Oh, but maybe you'd like to try this as well.' She takes a last bottle from the fridge with less than her usual enthusiasm. ‘Last year's experiment. Another late harvest but this time Chardonnay. “Grains d'Automne”, we call it. What do you think? I'm not so sure myself. All right if you like these other
cépages
. But, if you ask me …'

‘… you can't beat a good Muscat.' An affable young man in, I imagine, his early thirties completes her sentence, as he offers us a forearm to shake in lieu of the hand that a hasty wipe on his work-soiled overalls has failed to clean.

‘My son, Alexandre.' Mme Maraval smiles and – our tasting completed – she hands us over to the younger generation.

‘We really ought to be going,' says Manu, his priority now being lunch.

I was already thinking we had left it too late for Sète – better to make that visit alone some other day. But Manu has never willingly missed a meal and he is anxious to investigate the more limited Mireval options before there is any risk of last orders being taken. Monsieur Maraval, however, seems determined to give us a tour of the
cave
.