Virgile's Vineyard (25 page)

In a moment of madness, I had invited her to a birthday dinner in
her
favourite restaurant. (Well, all right, there was a modicum of method as well: given my extended absences next year, it was clearly in my interest to leave her feeling loved.) But Le Mimosa was not, of course, her ‘favourite' restaurant. She had never been there either. However, she had, I suspect, heard sufficient to know that it would be prudent to save it for an occasion when the bill would not be paid by Manu. (Perhaps, on reflection, the extended
fermeture
is not such a bad thing after all.) Anyway, so determined was Mme Gros to allow my generosity free rein that she allowed us to order the six-course ‘
menu capricieux'
, invented daily by Bridget Pugh according to the inspirations of the market place. She even sanctioned the ‘
dégustation'
of six accompanying wines, selected by David according to the inspirations of his wife's dishes.

‘I don't believe that woman eats her own food,' whispered Mme Gros suspiciously, as soon as Bridget took our order. Her advance intelligence had not encompassed the proprietors' overseas origins and she was suddenly doubtful of the wisdom of her choice. ‘In fact, I don't believe she eats at all,' she persisted, watching Bridget's slim and graceful form return to an open-plan kitchen, which was surely smaller than my own. ‘Hardly what you expect in a cook,' she snorted.

However, by the time our delicately presented first course arrived, we had learned that cooking was only the second of Bridget's career accomplishments. Her first – unmistakable in her rigidly straight-backed poise, as soon as we knew – was that of a ballerina, the two of them having met when David was pursuing his own first profession as a violinist with the Royal Ballet in England.

‘
Mon dieu
,' whispered Mme Gros, as if foreign restaurateurs were bad enough, without them being
artistic
.

‘I'm doing something special tonight,' said David with infectious enthusiasm, as he brought us the first of our wines. ‘All six will be from one of the best of our neighbours, Mas Jullien in Jonquières.'

‘Only a little for my wife,' cautioned Manu, no doubt hopeful that his own six pourings might be correspondingly enhanced.

The name of Olivier Jullien evidently meant nothing to either of my guests but hardly a week has passed this year without some express or implied acknowledgement from Virgile of Olivier's importance as friend and mentor. So a tasting of two different whites, a
rosé
, two reds and a late-harvested dessert wine, all of his making, was a treat that felt long overdue.

It also helped to distract me from the evening's embarrassments – like Mme Gros diluting her wines with mineral water. (‘Very nineteenth century,' said David, with scarcely a flinch. ‘Disinfecting the water with wine.') Or Manu greeting the biggest selection of cheeses that I have ever seen with a confession that he was ‘
très, très amateur du fromage'
and wanted to sample them all. (‘Two plates would have been more honest,' said David dryly.)

More importantly, the tasting left little doubt about where the Renault should be pointed this morning.

Unusually there is no sign of either Manu or Mme Gros. Maybe they are both the worse for wear or maybe they are writing their thank-you letters. Either way, I am able to get away alone. However, in my haste to do so, I forget to telephone to see whether a visit would be convenient, and although Olivier's greeting is as warm as I could wish, it is clear from the level of activity in his
cave
that my timing could have been better. I fumble an explanation about the Mimosa and my consequent resolution to effect a significant depletion of his stocks but he shakes his head and smiles, as if at my innocence.

‘Nothing left at this time of year,' he apologizes. ‘You'd need to come back after Easter. But you've come all this way and I need some coffee, so why don't you join me?'

Olivier looks to me like restless energy personified and the notion that he is accustomed to coffee breaks seems profoundly unlikely but it would be churlish to refuse.

‘Once organic, always organic,' he says with a grin, as he empties the dregs from his breakfast cafetière into a kitchen pot plant.

I ask whether I could at least reserve some of each of the wines that I enjoyed last night.

‘Out of the question,' he replies but then smiles and explains that he no longer makes the majority of them. ‘Take the reds,' he continues, as he passes me a mug. ‘The two you tasted were deliberately different, from contrasting soils. “Depierre” and “Cailloutis”, I used to call them. But then I got so sick of customers saying, “Oh, you've only got Depierre when I so wanted Cailloutis” or the other way round. So now I'm blending it all into one, called simply Coteaux du Languedoc.'

He tells much the same story for his whites. ‘Les Vignes Oubliées' (The Forgotten Vines), which David served us, used to be made from some of the older grape varieties of the Languedoc, like Carignan Blanc, which had almost disappeared. It represented a balance between tradition and experiment and it summed up a lot of what Olivier stood for. But his customers started caring less about the contents of the glass than the romance of the concept. It had become a straitjacket. He felt typecast. So now he is trying to recover some autonomy by slimming down to one ‘basic' red and one ‘basic' white – each free to blend different grape varieties from different soils and each free to seek its own version of perfection from vintage to vintage.

Olivier says that he will, however, continue with one additional red wine. He calls it ‘Les États d'Âme' (literally, states of mind or, more precisely, soul) and, as the name suggests, it is an improvisation. It reflects his mood of the moment and defies description precisely because it explores a different direction every year: an emblem, it strikes me, of the modern Languedoc's restless spirit.

Like Virgile, Olivier is interested in the biodynamic approach but last year he learned the hard way the dangers of embracing it too literally. He allowed the frosts to kill some newly planted vines, instead of taking avoiding action earlier. He now believes that, if there are eight factors to be taken into account, the biodynamic calendar should always be the eighth. Otherwise it simply paralyses.

‘You can wait for ever for the ideal moment that never comes,' he says ruefully.

It is easy to see why he has been such a source of inspiration to Virgile and yet I am sure he does not see himself as any kind of leader. He is much too individualistic and mercurial for disciples. But he does have a strong sense of his ‘role'. If he were in Burgundy, he explains, he would have a totally different responsibility: to follow time-honoured traditions and bring out the best from a particular patch of land in a single, traditional grape variety. But what is the function of Mas Jullien in the Languedoc?

He pauses thoughtfully.

‘Not to meet people's expectations,' he says emphatically. ‘Rather to surprise. Sometimes even to disappoint. But always to stimulate.'

He pauses again, as if in search of another way of defining his aims.

‘You know, in my grandfather's day, the Languedoc was a simple, self-sufficient paradise,' he says wistfully. ‘Still substantially a land of “polyculture”, with olives, fruits and cereals grown alongside the grapes. A bit cut off by the mountains but able to grow almost everything its people needed – nearly all the wine for local consumption and nearly all consumed within the year … Well, my responsibility is to transfer something of that lost quality of life back into the quality of my wine.'

*

‘Can you believe this weather?' says Virgile, rolling up his shirtsleeves in the courtyard garden behind Le Pressoir.

We have just completed a hot and sticky visit to his local tax office. Every month, it seems, he has to make a tediously complicated declaration of any comings and goings of alcohol in his
cave
: on this occasion, for instance, the arrival of the pure alcohol that he has been adding to the Carthagène. Even more tediously, he then has to pay the related duties.

However, at least he does not have to go far for these periodic brushes with bureaucracy. The tax office doubles as the reception desk at Saint Saturnin's co-operative – or vice versa, depending on your perspective. The customs clerk leads a parallel life as the co-op's receptionist and telephonist, in return for free accommodation. Even more bizarrely, she also runs the village
tabac
through the same small, sliding glass window. Most of her filing cabinets are incongruously filled with stamps and cigarettes instead of tax returns and it was largely the volume of the morning's tobacco sales that made the taxation formalities so prolonged – well, that and the fact that the clerk had to keep on telephoning the co-operative's chief accountant to pick his brains on the correct completion of her forms.

‘A whole hour inside the enemy camp!' I reflect, as we wait for our aperitifs.

‘That's honestly not how I see the co-op,' says Virgile.

‘After all the grief they've given you?' I ask, in genuine surprise.

‘We're not in competition; we're
complementary
,' he insists. ‘I just wish they'd see it that way themselves. Different products, different roles. You see, for me, a healthy market means a lot of people drinking wine on a regular basis. And that means a lot of decent quality, affordable wine for everyday consumption, rubbing shoulders with the best. Which is not to say that the co-op doesn't make some very good wines …' The arrival of our glasses of Carthagène relieves him of any further struggle to be fair.

‘Anyway, the weather's done wonders for the wine –
tous entrés dans le
malo!
' He notices that this means nothing to me. ‘The malolactic fermentation,' he elaborates. (Still nothing.) ‘A separate, second stage in the fermentation process,' he explains. ‘Activated by bacteria, about two weeks after the alcoholic fermentation. It converts the sharper “malic” acid that you find in apples into softer, rounder “lactic” acid – like in milk. Makes the wine less grapey, more … “winey”, for want of a better word. You'll see for yourself soon.'

Virgile takes another sip of Carthagène. It comes from Mas Jullien and I notice a frown replacing the smile. ‘Have I told you about Olivier?' he asks. ‘How we've stopped discussing wine-making? He saw my signing up with Puech as a betrayal. We're still friends. We'll still go hunting together, I'm sure. But no more exchanging of ideas and experiences,' he sighs with a powerful sense of his loss. ‘Olivier has very high ideals.'

‘Did you have many snakes this summer?' asked Mme Gros casually a couple of weeks ago.

‘Snakes?' I queried.

‘In your spare bedroom,' she clarified. ‘Always their favourite in your uncle's day. Never could work out how they got there.'

‘Well, no …' I was happy to confirm. I had never noticed so much as a distant rustling in the grass.

‘You do look under the beds, don't you?' she pressed. ‘Not that they're poisonous, of course. Just a bit big to trip over if you're getting up in the dark.'

Uncle Milo's trusty nature book was a little more detailed on the subject of the region's indigenous serpent, if not entirely reassuring. The
Couleuvre de Montpellier
did not, apparently, ‘normally' attack humans. It just had this off-putting tendency to rear up like a cobra when irritated. But the principal consolation, given the time of year, seemed to be that sightings were generally confined to the months of March to September – a time-frame endorsed by Mme Gros, as she made gratuitously clear on Sarah's long-deferred return, a couple of days ago.

‘Just as well you didn't come back in the summer,' she said with unconvincing solicitude. ‘You wouldn't want to be woken up like Milo was once, by a snake tapping its head on the window.'

The reason for Mme Gros's coolness towards Sarah is not entirely obvious – unless it could be her reluctance to share the substantial kiwi crop, which is coming up to ripeness against one of my terrace walls, with more of us than is strictly necessary, especially with someone who has now come twice in a year to get more than her fair entitlement.

Sarah has, however, been lucky to coincide with some unseasonably mild, almost summery weather to make up for any lack of warmth from across the stream.

Even Monsieur Mas, the tractorman, was wearing a vest and shorts when he came up yesterday to plough the gently sloping rectangle where I am planning to put my vines. He seemed to be saying that it was too hot for planting. But then again, he might have been saying it was the heat that was making his hearing aid whistle. Until the French dental profession comes up with a set of false teeth to make his accent more penetrable, I shall never know.

At Virgile's suggestion, I am planning to experiment with some newly developed hybrid vines that will not need constant spraying during next year's absences. In an ideal world, I would have been out acquiring them during these last few days but my conscience made me take advantage of the sunshine to see whether a coat or two of paint on my window frames might increase their chances of surviving another winter.

I have not seen Virgile since our lunch but the fact that most of Sarah's excursions have deviated through Saint Saturnin has enabled me to shadow him by proxy. I feel I am up to date with every gurgle of his malolactic fermentations, without ever putting down my paintbrush. Yesterday evening, however, just a few minutes after the return of Sarah's Range Rover – loaded surely with Jean-Marc's entire stock of Virgile's Coteaux du Languedoc – I dropped my brush with a start at the sound of a scream from Sarah's bedroom.

I ran in from the courtyard and up the stairs to find her standing on a chair. It was the only time I had ever seen her looking less than composed. She was pointing at the ground in terror.

‘It's a snake!' she whispered, as if further screaming might provoke it.

‘Where?' I asked from the safety of the corridor. I couldn't see anything.

‘It was a snake,' insisted Sarah, still balancing on her chair, but she could no longer see anything either.

We searched cautiously but thoroughly, not just in Sarah's room but everywhere, yet we found nothing snake-like. She knew that I thought she had imagined it, no doubt prompted by Mme Gros's welcome speech. It was, after all, much too late in the year. So we said nothing more about it.

Until this morning.

Sarah wanted to make an early start for her great drive north to the Channel and she offered me a lift to the village, so that I could take advantage of the fine weather to walk home again with my bread. And we are just at the bottom of the drive, turning the Range Rover past the post boxes, when a sizeable bird of prey – a buzzard, I shall assume until I can check with the nature book – swoops low across the track, no more than twenty metres ahead of us. Evidently, something in the hedgerow has aroused too much interest for it to worry about the approaching engine noise. And then we see precisely what.

Wings beating vigorously, the buzzard rises vertically to hover for a moment in our direct line of vision and there, in glorious, sunlit close-up, clamped firmly in the predator's claws, is a fiercely wriggling, metre-and-a-half-long snake.

‘I win!' says Sarah, as she waves goodbye.

*

Virgile's
cave
was locked and deserted and so, I soon established, were both the flat and the nearby garage. The doors of the sheep-shed on the edge of the village, however, proved to be open. A radical clearout was in progress. The grassy area outside looked like a scrap dealer's forecourt and sounds of strenuous physical activity were coming from within. All I could see in the darkness inside was the shadowy outline of the tractor and its trailer. The latter was piled perilously high with what I judged from the smell to be the sheep-droppings of earlier centuries and every few seconds I heard a grunt, as an invisible Virgile hacked another shovelful from the dung-mountain behind the tractor.

It was, however, Arnaud, not Virgile, who answered my call of greeting and emerged to get his breath back in the cleaner air outside. Everything had to be cleared before Virgile could move his barrels in, he explained, but Virgile had disappeared to check something with the sheep-shed's owners – the Poujols, he thought Virgile had said. Then the two of them were going muck-spreading in Virgile's vineyards. He should have been back long ago. Half an hour, at the most, he had said. It would be dark, if he didn't hurry … But Arnaud's explanations were interrupted by the sound of footsteps running up the alley.

‘STOP!' shouted Virgile, as he took a shortcut up a grassy bank to join us amongst the piles of rusting metal.

‘Too late,' said Arnaud with a nod towards the overspilling trailer.

‘
Zut!
' said Virgile, more moderately than the occasion merited. ‘They've changed their minds, would you believe! Or at least, they can't make up their minds. Two hours I've spent with the four of them and still they can't decide! The eighty-year-old brothers are bad enough but the sons are even worse. “We might want the manure for our own vines,” they say. “No problem,” I say, “as long as I can get rid of it.” “But we've nothing to transport it in,” they say. “Don't worry, I'll sort it,” I say. “But it'd need a second person,” they say. “Don't worry, I'll find one,” I say. “But we'd have to decide which vines to put it on,” they say. And two hours later, they're still deliberating. They'll let me know tomorrow.'

But tomorrow has come and there is still no news, no decision from the house of Poujols. The family committee is still
in camera
.

‘There I was, hoping for a formal tenancy,' sighed Virgile despondently, when I dropped by. ‘Then I could organize some electricity and water. But if they can't agree about a heap of sheep-shit, how are they ever going to reach an agreement on a lease?'

Virgile has had a second, almost equally frustrating day. He has been trailing round the local bars, drinking more beer than he cares to, in a search for six stainless steel beer barrels for storing his
eau de vie
.

‘I can't afford new ones,' he explains, on the drive across to Matthieu's. ‘But if I offer the bar-keepers the equivalent of their lost deposits – and down enough beer to empty the barrels – they can sometimes be persuaded to let go of them. But what do I find when I get home? Only three will open. The others – the ones that cost me the most – are factory-sealed. I'll have to find a wholesaler who'll exchange them. But goodness knows how much more beer that'll cost me!'

He shudders, as the first of the usable three rattles across the stone floor to join the rest of Matthieu's chaos.

‘This'll cheer you up!' promises the master distiller, laying down his guitar to hand us each a glass. ‘Can you guess?' He sniffs a third appreciatively himself. ‘I made it last week. From fruit.'

Before I can hazard anything foolish, the familiar, well-filled stomach of the
atelier
's owner enters from the darkness of the back garden, followed closely by the man himself. Matthieu swiftly pours him a fourth glass of the mystery spirit.

‘Is it our special?' asks Virgile cautiously.

‘Just so,' confirms Matthieu. ‘Fig and grape,' he adds for the benefit of me and M. Bascou. ‘Using Virgile's Grenache Blanc for the grapes – picked just before the co-op moved in.'

‘And for the figs?' I ask.

‘Just figs,' he shrugs and I realize too late that here, all along, was the solution for my surplus plums. Then, suddenly, Matthieu's normally easy-going countenance looks aghast.

His landlord enjoys a cigarette with his
eau de vie
and ordinarily no one would wish to mar the man's enjoyment less than his tenant. But just at M. Bascou's ankles – entirely obscured from view by the protuberant stomach – is a substantial funnel, through which Matthieu is carefully filtering the precious Marc de Merlot of one of Montpeyroux's most perfectionist growers, still at its undiluted eighty per cent strength. Fearing that the funnel is about to be confused with an ashtray and faced with the twin disasters of pollution and conflagration, Matthieu reluctantly decides to intervene.

The expression of contentment on M. Bascou's rosy cheeks as he sampled Matthieu's latest experiment suggested a man who relished nothing more than a new experience. This impression is, however, swiftly dispelled as he learns how quickly a smouldering
Gauloise
can be extinguished in a bucket of water.

In the circumstances, it seems tactful for Virgile and me to withdraw, leaving Matthieu to see whether a few more glasses of his excellent fig and grape can stave off an impromptu rent review.

*

‘Looks sleepy enough, doesn't it?' says Krystina, as we watch the last of the plane leaves falling on the Place du Vendangeur in the village of Argeliers in the Minervois wine district. But she steers me towards a rough expanse of wall between numbers 13 and 15, where a plaque records that it was here (perhaps at the ostensibly vanished number 14) that the so-called Wine War of 1907 began.

It was led, so the plaque attests, by a winegrower called Marcelin Albert and it started, so Krystina informs me, with a local village protest, a refusal to pay taxes. But it rapidly escalated into a whole summer season of wine-related rallies and riots across the region, until five men were killed and fifteen seriously injured in a demonstration of 700,000 in Narbonne. The Government sent in 10,000 troops but many were sons of local
vignerons
, who promptly deserted, while half the region's mayors resigned in sympathy.

‘So, what was all the fuss about?' asks Krystina rhetorically, as we stroll outside the village through the vineyards, where the leaves, having finished changing colour, are already starting to fall. ‘Fraud,' she answers immediately. ‘Artificial wines made with imported raisins and sugar – initially to make up post-phylloxera shortages but continuing long after supplies of the genuine article returned to normal at the end of the century. Wine prices plummeted, hitting smaller growers hardest. To listen to the protests, you'd have thought this concocted competition was the only cause. “Down with poisoners; long live natural wine”, went the slogan. But in reality, there were two other fundamental problems – hugely expanded imports from Algeria and massive overproduction here in the Languedoc. The region was making forty-four per cent of the country's wine from only twenty-three per cent of its vineyard area. It was selling on price not quality. But nobody in 1907 seemed to focus much on any of this. Adulteration was the big issue. The government tried tackling it with increased sugar taxes and anti-fraud inspectors. But you'll never guess their master weapon. An official definition of “wine”. The first ever … Well, you have to remember how much phoney stuff was abusing the name,' she adds defensively, as she finds the quote in her filofax.

‘Astound me,' I challenge her.

‘ “The product of the alcoholic fermentation of fresh grapes or of the juice of fresh grapes”,' she reads lamely.

I am not astounded.

*

‘Some of our customers will only deal with my husband,' says Patricia Boyer, half-heartedly tidying her wind-tangled hair, as she closes the
cave
door against another gust. With Daniel Domergue, the absent spouse, she co-owns Virgile's recommended Minervois wine estate – the Clos Centeilles, about twenty kilometres west of Argeliers – and, although I think the look behind her somewhat fierce-looking spectacles is more amused than affronted by her clients' sexism, I am happy that Mme Gros's chiropody appointment has prevented Manu from putting this to the test.

‘
Tant pis
for them,' shrugs Madame Boyer, as we survey her exceptionally large stocks maturing in bottle – unusually, it seems that they are never released until ready for drinking. ‘Daniel's hardly ever here. Not during the week.' (I remember Virgile mentioning his viticulture professorship at Béziers.) ‘He adores the practical side of wine-making but he'd go mad if he were here all the time,' she laughs, still pondering the precise whereabouts of her intended selection. ‘That or burst a blood vessel. Like this morning when Jérome, our tractor man, put hydraulic oil in the tractor! A few neurones missing, I'm afraid. I mean, you don't need many neurones as a
tractoriste
but you do need some! … Here, I've got a bad back – can you climb up to that one?'