Virgile's Vineyard (24 page)

‘A bit different from Matthieu's place, eh?' laughs Virgile, as I blink incredulously at the purple mountains of grape-pressings awaiting treatment, and the three towering cranes rotating above them to shift huge mechanical grab-loads into the massive processing pits in the courtyard. ‘I have to surrender ten per cent of all the alcohol I make to the state,' he explains.

‘Like a tithe?' I ask, amazed at the existence of such a medieval-sounding imposition.

‘Exactly,' he confirms, as he registers his
marc
with the office and puts a small sample into a numbered plastic sandwich box which is issued to him. ‘I'm hoping I'll get enough from this to cover my obligations. I certainly don't want to give them any of my wine. Nor do I want to lose any of the serious stuff that Matthieu is making for me.'

‘But what do they do with the sample?' I ask, as the contents of Virgile's trailer start their undignified slide into one of the pits. ‘Surely it's too late for testing, now that it's mixed in with everybody else's?'

‘The sample tells them how much alcohol they'll get from a kilo,' explains Virgile. ‘Did you notice? That was a giant weighing machine that I was parked on. All we have to do now is stop there again, so they can compare the before and after weights and calculate my entitlement. Then I'll get Matthieu to show you some “real distilling”,' he adds, as he shakes his head at the sight of a workman dousing the skins with water to make an unappetizing pseudo-wine for distillation.

‘Virgile's right,' says Matthieu, when we arrive in Montpeyroux. ‘There's absolutely no need to add water, except maybe a tiny bit at the bottom to stop it sticking. All you have to do is “cook” the
marc
as it is.'

The rusty stills that I last saw resting in the August sunshine are all now belching smoke into the autumnal garden and Matthieu is busy stoking the fires underneath them with wood.

‘How's your chemistry?' he asks, as he lifts the lid of the nearest dustbin-like heating compartment to check its contents.

‘Assume total ignorance,' I reply, having only the haziest idea how the odd-looking contraption in front of me is proposing to turn the mound of steaming
marc
inside it into
eau de vie
.

‘All you really need to understand is that alcohol and water evaporate at different temperatures,' he says. ‘Seventy-eight degrees for alcohol and a hundred for water – so the vaporized alcohol is drawn off first. It recondenses in the form of alcohol as it passes through here.' He points to an arching pipe that rises from the ‘dustbin-lid' and descends to a smaller receptacle on the other side. ‘In fact, it goes through twice to achieve sufficient purity and strength but that's basically all there is to it.'

‘Is this mine?' calls Virgile from the garage, where he is lifting the lid of an immaculately gleaming stainless steel container.

Matthieu nods affirmatively and, scooping a little out in a glass, Virgile explains that it's a blend of Syrah and Grenache. It was made from the best of his
marcs
, delivered last week and already finished.

‘Except that it's eighty per cent alcohol,' he warns, and he laughs at my sharp intake of breath as I taste it. ‘It has to be watered down for normal consumption.'

‘And aged for about three years to round it out,' adds Matthieu. ‘But fortunately for his cash flow, he only pays the tax when he takes it away.'

‘Otherwise I'd be broke,' says Virgile. ‘With two hundred litres in here and another fifty from last year!'

Matthieu is just proposing a modest diminution of the fifty for comparison, when the telephone interrupts him.

‘A couple of minutes,' he assures the caller. ‘Promise,' he adds and replaces the receiver. ‘That's why I told you in August that I'm not going to get too big,' he says, as he reaches for his coat and his keys. ‘If my son says he's home from school early, I want to be there.'

*

‘I don't believe this,' fumes Krystina in front of the third pair of firmly locked gates since our morning espresso.

It all began at a sunlit café on Béziers's broadest boulevard. She was explaining how the city had changed beyond all recognition on the back of its early nineteenth-century brandy wealth, with a hundred and fifty distillers and a weekly
eau de vie
market which was one of the most important in France. Then, it seems, around the middle of the century, the brandy wealth had adroitly turned itself into wine wealth as demand for wine and competition from other spirits, especially Cognac, both increased. Finally, the resulting fortunes had been channelled into château-building: a remarkable hundred or more springing up within fifty kilometres of Béziers.

Unfortunately, however, they are proving rather less accessible to the public than Krystina confidently assumed when she insisted on a day's deferral of my apple-tree pruning. They encompass, she assures me, just about every style you can think of – even an oddly English Neo-Gothic – but their gates (and we have now failed to get past a fourth pair) are tending to look very much the same.

‘The Languedoc nobility built very few grand houses under the
Ancien Régime
,' says Krystina, putting on her bravest face, as we drive on to number five. ‘Not just because they were relatively hard up but because they were far enough from Court to avoid the ruinous royal progresses that forced so many of their northern colleagues into expensive building programmes. These are all “new money”,' she explains, as she rings fruitlessly at another bell. ‘Either directly from brandy and wine or indirectly from ancillary trades like barrel-making.'

With a last despairing tug on the bell chain, even Krystina knows she is beaten, but the sun is shining, the leaves of the autumn vines are glowing red and gold and, most important of all, we have a picnic in the boot of the BMW.

A break for lunch, however, implies no break in the history lesson.

‘They weren't just investing in bricks and mortar,' she continues seamlessly, whilst I unpack an elaborate suite of picnic furniture. ‘They were also spending money on experimental crossbreeds and improved technology. Not what you'd think of as modern, of course. More a matter of horse-drawn ploughs replacing mattocks, that kind of thing. But quality and keeping potentials were genuinely improving.'

‘A golden age?' I ask, wondering whether we really need the second parasol.

‘Until disaster struck,' she confirms, with a peremptory signal that we do. ‘Ironically, it was all a result of that international crossbreeding activity. First came powdery mildew, from North America – oïdium, as your friend Virgile would call it.' Her tone implies the abandonment of all ambition to make him
her
friend, as does the savagery with which she stabs the parasol spike into the ground. ‘The wretched fungus reduced the Hérault crop by sixty per cent within three years of its arrival in 1851.'

‘But surely oïdium was treatable with sulphur?'

‘So they discovered after three or four years of crisis,' she grants me. ‘But almost as soon as they'd done so, a second calamity threatened to wipe out every vineyard in Europe.'

‘The phylloxera fungus?' I ask, determined to win what few points I can on botanical health hazards.

‘It wasn't a fungus,' snaps Krystina, impatiently watching me struggle with her absurdly heavy hamper. ‘It was a parasitic aphid, about a millimetre long, which fed on vine roots and eventually killed them. But it also came from North America.'

She pulls a luxurious-looking bottle of champagne from the hamper.

‘It arrived in the Hérault in 1867 and by 1881 the whole
département
was infected. At first, nobody understood why the vines were withering. Growers blamed the weather, the exhaustion of the soil, even divine retribution! By the time the real cause was recognized, it was out of control.'

She spoons a family-size jar of caviar between two plates.

‘The official response was hesitant and slow. They tried flooding the vines to kill the eggs but that was expensive, short-term and only possible in the plains. They also tried insecticide but that killed all the other insects and sometimes the vines themselves. The only solution that worked – the expensive grafting of European vines on to phylloxera-resistant US rootstocks – was long resisted. Understandably perhaps, when all these problems were seen as America's fault in the first place.'

Alternate mouthfuls of Krug and caviar are making the discourse less intelligible.

‘When they finally tried it, they found a lot of the imported rootstocks were infected with
downy
mildew.'

‘But surely that was treatable with lime and copper sulphate?' I try to reassert my expertise in these matters.

‘So they discovered – eventually. But by then, a lot of smaller growers had been driven out of business. The vineyard area more than halved in ten years and many of the better vineyards on the hillsides were never replanted. That's why you find so many abandoned “ghost villages” up near us. Yet the region over here, around Béziers, got off relatively lightly. Phylloxera didn't arrive until 1878, enabling the rich local growers to get richer, while prices quadrupled. So they were much better placed than most to reconstitute their vineyards …

‘Not to mention building their châteaux,' she adds, with the ominous emphasis of a woman determined to penetrate at least one of them before allowing me to go home.

*

The horses will have to go. It's a pity because I've grown fond of them. But they have started damaging the supporting terrace walls, as their success in devouring the more accessible expanses of hay has forced them into less obvious corners of the land. And now that the autumn rains have made the soil so much softer, the scope for more widespread destruction decisively outweighs any potential benefits from continuing hospitality.

More agreeably, the wet weather has brought a permanent return to the pool of the syncopated croaking of the tree frogs, without yet achieving the Wagnerian volume of the early summer broadcasts.

It has also encouraged the sprouting of a perplexing assortment of unidentifiable wild mushrooms. There are some luridly bright and, to my untutored eye, unashamedly toxic-looking orange ones around the roots of some of the olive trees, while those in the orchard look innocuous enough for the table. Yet how can I be sure that nature isn't tricking me with false clues?

The book that guided me so authoritatively through the world of
fouine
droppings covers only a handful of examples, and Manu uncharacteristically disclaims any expert knowledge in this territory. ‘The wife's department,' he informed me. Yet something in Mme Gros's poisonous look when she last lamented the state of the drive told me it might be tempting fate to ask her advice. So, rather unadventurously, I am resorting to a purchase in the drizzly Clermont l'Hérault market.

‘Why not try the
trompettes de mort
?' suggests the wizened, elf-like mushroom salesman, half-hidden by the rainshield that he is improvising with the local newspaper. ‘
Délicieuses avec un peu de persil et de l'ail
.'

But somehow that look from Mme Gros has diminished the appeal of these sinister-looking, jet-black delicacies and I opt for some dependably innocent
cèpes
.

‘
Vendange
still going strong?' asks the stallholder, having noticed my dark-purple-stained hands, which uncountable scrubbings have failed to whiten.

‘All over,' I assure him, adding, ‘I was doing a
décuvage
on a
macération carbonique
', then instantly feel ashamed of my slide into cellarspeak obscurities.

‘Well,
bonne continuation!
' is my salesman's baffled valediction.

I do, however, feel strangely proprietorial about the
macération
– perhaps because Virgile and I dealt with it on our own, without the aid of Arnaud, who had disobligingly gone to an interview for an electrician's post.

It was clear as soon as the tap was turned that this was going to be quite unlike the traditional fermentations. So little juice emerged that I assumed there must be a blockage but Virgile explained that most of the wine was locked inside the grapes. Indeed, when he opened the porthole, it was clear that the grapes on most of the bunches piled high inside the cuve were more or less intact, looking almost perfect enough to eat. We tried them. They were little explodable capsules of rich, slightly effervescent winey juice. Every bunch had to be dragged out by hand, hence my arms being purple up past the elbows. We put four or five loads into the winepress and took it in turns to give each an exhausting double pressing. Then finally we tasted the results: immensely drinkable, intensely fruity, ‘red-fruity' to be specific, but smaller in quantity, Virgile tells me, than if the grapes had been conventionally fermented.

‘Oh well,
tant pis!
' say my aching arms. ‘You can have too much of a good thing.'

*

I have learned something important very late.

I now know that Uncle Milo's house is only twenty minutes' drive from what has ever since last night been my favourite restaurant.

But as I said, this life-changing discovery has come painfully late, for today Le Mimosa will be callously closing its menus for a five-month
fermeture annuelle
. The New Zealand cook and her Welsh wine-waiting husband will be paying monstrously self-centred visits to distant families and otherwise indulging unreasonable winter wanderlust, leaving me bereft. To make matters worse, the belated discovery was made in Saint Guiraud of all places – a village that I must have driven through two or three times every week since January, on my way to Virgile's. And most sickening of all, I owe my introduction not to Virgile but to Mme Gros.