Virgile's Vineyard (27 page)

‘You see, they were promised a good return in the eighties,' he explains. ‘They were told that all they had to do was rip up their Carignans and replant with Syrahs and Cabernets. So they can't understand that it's not that simple any more. The trouble is, a lot of them take no interest at all in the way a wine is made . . . You think I'm joking but some of them are barely interested in drinking it. Grapes are just a crop to them. They might almost as well be growing potatoes! We have to change all that – get them to understand why we're telling them to thin the bunches, not just blindly follow instructions. And all the time, all I really want to do is go home and prune my own vines.' He sighs regretfully. ‘I only ever see them at weekends and even then my wife complains, so I delegate most of the work.'

‘So why do you do it?' I ask.

‘Well, someone has to,' he answers with a smile. ‘And I guess I've persuaded myself I'm less of an idiot than some of the others. But we can't afford to get this wrong.' The smile fades. ‘Amidst all these jolly centenary celebrations, we've got serious problems. The whole region, I mean. Not just us. This is the worst crisis in Languedoc wine for twenty, maybe forty years – with only two years at the most to crack it!'

I can hardly believe what I'm hearing. To go from Virgile – apparently capable of selling his wines several times over, at prices he hardly dreamed of – to Michel Bataille in Maraussan, convinced that the region's production needs to be reduced by four million hectolitres, maybe even double that if there's no public subsidy: it just doesn't seem possible.

Then I remember a vague impression of gathering protest throughout the summer, an undercurrent of simmering violence, reported in the local papers. There was a story in July, for instance, of a hundred and fifty
vignerons
forcibly clearing foreign wines from hypermarket shelves; an editorial recalling the notorious 1976 riots at Montredon, near Carcassonne, in which both a grower and a policeman died; another co-operative president insisting, ‘It's a choice between being well regarded and dead or badly regarded and alive.'

‘It's the same old story,' says M. Bataille, ‘falling consumption and overproduction – some say, even fraud. But now there's the extra factor of competition from the southern hemisphere. A third of the area's vines may have to be destroyed. We can only hope it's the quality hillside sites that are spared this time. When subsidies for ripping out were last on offer in the eighties, it was mostly the lower-quality, easy options in the plains that survived.

‘But we don't help ourselves with our ridiculous over-regulation,' he complains. ‘The Australians grow German Riesling, Californian Zinfandel, whatever they like, but here they're illegal. And while the rest of the world slims down to simpler product branding for international markets, what do we do in France, with our four hundred and fifty
Appellations Contrôlées
and goodness knows how many
vins de pays
– only a handful of which anybody can remember? … We create more!'

*

As I drew back my bathroom curtains a pair of partridges scuttled self-protectively away through the gaunt, black, dead-looking silhouettes of the almond trees: the first of the trees to lose their leaves, just as they were the first to unfold them in February. There used to be four of them – the partridges, that is – paying regular group visits to the house, but the hunting season started a couple of months ago and I fear the other two were early casualties.

On every Saturday and Sunday since early September, the nearby lanes have been dotted with huddles of hunters, dressed like sinister mercenaries in khaki, planning their next assault on whatever wildlife has hitherto escaped them. This morning, however, I am sweeping fallen leaves from the courtyard at the front of the house when I spot a small but aggressively gun-toting battalion striding confidently up the drive. Their yapping dogs look set to race ahead and savage the first living flesh – almost certainly mine – that they can lay their fangs on, but at the very last minute the contingent turns sharply away and saunters nonchalantly through my neighbours' habitually open front gates.

I know that both of them are out – away indeed, paying another of their six-monthly visits to the teetotal sister-in-law – because I happened to hear Manu's heart-rending protests falling on deaf ears yesterday morning. And maybe the invaders know this too. Certainly, their swaggering progress up through Manu's little vegetable patch appears to be free of any scruple that their trampling of his onion sets might be unwelcome. But then I see that the entire platoon is heading unmistakably for the bramble-tangled fence that marks the boundary between Manu's festering compost heap and the point where my own upper terraces loop round behind his.

Fortunately, the expected incursion is sufficiently inhibited by the combination of compost and brambles for the last of them still to be straddling the fence when I have crossed the stream and run up to confront them. The steepness of the climb, however, ensures that little of my indignation successfully bypasses my breathlessness.

‘
Propriété privée
,' I pant almost unintelligibly.

‘There's no sign,' they chorus in what is clearly their standard defence.

I have, of course, carelessly overlooked the necessity for signs to keep my neighbours inside their private property and outside my own and, were it not for the painful heaving of my lungs, some pithy riposte to this effect would already have stunned them. But as it is, I am forced to content myself with the fact that only modest additional carnage is inflicted between here and their exit by the back gate.

*

At the foot of the village memorial, devoted to the dead of both World Wars, were a few bedraggled floral wreaths that had been decaying there since Armistice Day.

It was the first time I had studied the roll of villagers
morts pour la France
but anyone who did so was bound to notice the extraordinary number of Vargases carved in the granite – considerably more than any other family. There was a smattering of other familiar names as well but not a single Gros.

‘Funny that,' said Krystina. ‘Obviously the ancestors were as war-shy as Manu is work-shy.'

‘Maybe the Groses were just “survivors”,' I protested, wondering why I felt obliged to defend my neighbour's forebears.

Before she could argue further, a chill gust of wind convinced Krystina that a table in front of the café's wood-burning stove would be a more congenial setting for the rest of the morning's tutorial. To her great indignation, however, the table that she had in mind has proved to be occupied.

‘What's he doing there?' she protests, when she sees that Monsieur Privat has abandoned his habitual place in the corner for this warmer alternative. ‘He shouldn't be here at all yet. It's not even lunchtime!'

M. Privat's smile, as he catches my eye, suggests that he has followed rather more of Krystina's English than she assumed.

‘You saw how that first war decimated the labour force,' Krystina resumes, having reorganized the remaining café furniture to sit as close to the stove as the competition permits. ‘A million and a quarter soldiers killed out of eight million mobilized. Twenty per cent of the male population between twenty and forty-five wiped out in four years. Not to mention the other three-quarters of a million permanently injured.'

Babette appears with a small carafe of
rosé
for M. Privat. Krystina unilaterally orders hot chocolate for both of us and returns to August 1914.

‘The amazing thing was the incredibly positive mood …'

‘Even the village priest joined up,' M. Privat contributes unexpectedly in impeccable English. ‘He fought alongside my father. But of course, he was not expecting to miss so many services. The same with the wine-workers. They were all expecting to be home for the harvest …'

‘Certainly everyone on both sides expected a short decisive campaign,' Krystina reasserts herself primly. ‘But they were wrong. The whole thing turned into a long war of attrition.'

‘The
vendange
was left to the women and children and the old men,' M. Privat joins in again, more animatedly. ‘So my mother used to tell me. Well, obviously, the shortage of labour was a problem everywhere. Just the fact that the …
comment dit?
… breadwinner was away – or dead – that was a big problem. But lack of man-power was especially difficult for making the wine. It was still so labour-intensive, you see. And horses – they were still the main form of transportation but most of them had disappeared to the front as well. And as for important supplies like copper sulphate …'

Krystina opens her mouth to reaffirm her usual ascendancy but no sound emerges, so M. Privat fills the vacuum.

‘The 1914 vintage was I think you say … a “bumper”, no? But the Languedoc growers had a clever idea to get rid of it. They gave two hundred thousand hectolitres to the military hospitals.
Rouge
, of course – more masculine!' He chuckles as he glances at his quarter litre of
rosé
.

‘Anyone can give their wine away,' Krystina quibbles, unaccustomed to this supporting role.

‘Anyone but Manu,' I add and M. Privat laughs as if he too has known the Cuvée Emmanuel Gros.

‘No, the medicine was so popular,' he explains, ‘the government was soon buying huge quantities for regular distribution. The soldiers' daily rations started at a quarter of a litre, if I remember correctly, increasing to half as the going got rougher.'

Krystina, unable to get a word in, contents herself with adding extra logs to the stove to heat our more distant table.

‘By the end, officers were authorized to raise this to three-quarters and then the men themselves were allowed to purchase a further quarter at special rates. I don't know the English word but my father's job was organizing the supplies, you see. He told my mother in his letters how he was commandeering wine from all over France but still he couldn't keep up with demand. So he'd have to … what's the word … “fob” them off with Spanish and Italian imports.'

Krystina has had enough. With Babette busy serving M. Privat his chicken liver salad, she pushes a large denomination banknote under her cup and prepares to leave. M. Privat, too carried away to notice even the arrival of his food, continues innocently unaware.

‘By the end of the war, the returning soldiers had acquired a taste for their daily litre. Marvellous for continuing demand but the problem was, so many
didn't
return. The loss of all those young men created a glut …'

Krystina exits without even a goodbye and M. Privat pulls a face, as if to ask: ‘Was it something I said?'

We sit in silence for a moment.

‘What happened to your father?' I ask eventually.

‘I never knew him,' says M. Privat, turning his attention to his chicken livers. ‘He's out there on the monument, amongst the Ps.'

‘You weren't joking were you?'

Virgile winked as Babette brought us each a plate of
coq aux olives
. (It had seemed only fair to warn him about her limited repertoire before he made the journey up from Saint Saturnin.)

‘It usually tastes better than it looks,' I encouraged him, as he pushed aside the chaos of paper spread around us.

‘It does,' he confirmed. ‘But we haven't made much progress, have we?'

The hastily tidied piles of papers were why we were there: Virgile had offered to buy me lunch if I spared a couple of hours to help him with the paperwork that he had to sort out for the
Appellation Contrôlée
authorities. More information than anyone would have thought they could possibly find interesting had to be collated into some sort of intelligible order. He should have done it months ago but he hadn't been able to decide how best to organize the material. It was all there somewhere, he assured me, but scattered across whatever scraps of stationery had come most quickly to hand at earlier stages of the year.

I knew that I ought to be back at Les Sources, making a final land-reclaiming push before the end of the year. With almost every autumn leaf now fallen, the extent of the challenges remaining had become depressingly unambiguous. Yet the postman's news of early-morning ice on the plateau behind the village somehow sapped my motivation for outdoor activity before I had even finished sharpening the chainsaw.

‘I'm sure they meant well,' said Virgile.

‘Who?' I asked, preoccupied with thoughts of secateurs and strimmers.

‘The
Appellation Contrôlée
authorities – when they first dreamed up all this bureaucracy in 1935. Sometimes I think it was a good thing that they took nearly fifty years before they bothered very much with the wines down here. I mean, nobody sympathizes more with focusing people on quality instead of quantity. But look where we've ended up!'

He scowled at the heap of papers and poured us each some more of the best he had been able to find on the undistinguished café wine list. (Babette had not taken kindly to his request to ‘bring his own' next time.)

‘The
vignerons
suffered badly between the wars,' he continued. ‘My grandfather never stops telling me. Both internal and external markets were severely damaged – especially Germany and Russia, surprise, surprise. The general economic depression made things even worse. No wonder village after village embraced the relative financial security of the co-operative movement. I read somewhere, there were about four hundred co-ops in the Languedoc-Roussillon by 1940 – nearly all producing cheap, indifferent plonk.'

‘The dreaded three-starred litres of my youth,' I reminisced.

‘But after all the efforts of the last twenty years, she still comes up with this!' Virgile whispered, as he peered disbelievingly at the label on Babette's ‘top of the range'. ‘Mind you, for all the EC subsidies on offer in the eighties – both for ripping out vines and distilling surpluses into industrial alcohol – we still had the winelakes. But then again, consumption was falling. People were drinking less but better. And drinking more mineral water, even tap water as the quality of that improved. One way or another, the traditional glass of
rouge
was dying. Hundreds of thousands of corner cafés were closing. My grandfather never stops complaining.'

‘I know,' I said, as I toyed with the last of my cockerel bones. ‘Manu says there used to be five in this little village. But this is the sole survivor … Isn't that right, Babette?'

‘
C'est exacte
,' confirmed a husky voice behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘Your young friend there doesn't know how lucky he is!'

*

‘People forget,' says Samuel Guibert, checking the last of his e-mails and spinning his swivel chair to give me his full attention. ‘When my parents bought this place in 1970, it was quite an achievement just to sell a Languedoc wine in a bottle, let alone make a “Daumas Gassac”. But then, when they came here, there were no thoughts of making wine at all.'

‘It wasn't a wine estate?'

‘No, you see, my father was a leather-goods manufacturer up in Millau – the family company had supplied gloves to the British Royal Family for three hundred years – and my mother was studying Irish Celtic ethnology in Montpellier, where she teaches now. They'd recently married, in my father's case for the second time – he was already in his mid-forties. They needed somewhere halfway between the two towns … Well, maybe not halfway,' he laughs. ‘My mother did well there!'

The Mas de Daumas Gassac, on the outskirts of the village of Aniane, must be about thirty kilometres west of Montpellier and at least three times that distance from Millau.

‘They both fell in love with the place. Well, who wouldn't?' He gestures towards the mellow stone farmhouse and unspoilt landscape, visible through the window of his crisply modern, predominantly white office. ‘That's why we'll never expand our vines beyond the present forty hectares. We want to preserve its charm as a place to live and also maintain a healthy balance with the surrounding
garrigue
. Respect for nature, you see.'

It is easy to believe that Samuel, aged somewhere in his late twenties, has recently returned from six years in New Zealand. It is not just his faultless English. It is something less tangible in his well-travelled confidence. He has been working mainly, he explains, for the giant Montana winery but concentrating on imports and exports rather than the more obvious learning curve of New World wine-making technology. And although he is quick to emphasize that there are no such narrowly defined roles here at home, it is marketing which continues, for the time being, to be his principal focus within Daumas Gassac.

‘Gassac's the name of the local stream,' he explains. ‘And Daumas is the name of the family that was farming here. Old-style, struggling polyculture.'

‘A bit of everything?'

‘Yes. A few vines but mostly abandoned. My parents wanted to bring the land back to life with something but they'd probably have settled for sweetcorn – even olives – if they hadn't come across this guy from my father's native Aveyron.

‘Henri Enjalbert, the geography professor at Bordeaux University, convinced them that this was an exceptional
terroir
for wine-making. All the conditions were right. The soil was well drained, rich in minerals – especially copper, iron and gold – and very poor in organic matter, to push the vines to their limits. And there's a cooler microclimate in this narrow part of the valley. Ten degrees at night in summer when Aniane, just over there, is registering twenty. It gives us longer growing seasons and later, richer harvests. Enjalbert was very excited. “You could make a
grand cru
to rival Lafite and Latour,” he said. “If you're mad enough to try.” '

‘So, tell me,
monsieur
, do I look like a madman?' says an older voice from behind me.

Guibert
père
invites me to join him in his own rather cosier, lamp-lit office, while Samuel, more at home behind his streamlined workstation, loses no time in reconnecting to the Internet.

Still strikingly handsome, Aimé Guibert must, I calculate, have reached his late seventies but I can see at a glance that he has lost little, if any, of the energy, determination and fastidious perfectionism that first made Daumas Gassac great. It was, he modestly acknowledges, an ambitious project by any standards but especially so for a couple with absolutely no wine-making experience. He read exceptionally widely (the broad, wooden antique table that serves as his desk is piled with books today) but, more crucially and very much against the odds, he persuaded a second distinguished Bordeaux professor to take an interest.

Emile Peynaud, who held the chair of oenology, was no stranger to extra-curricular hand-holding but it was usually confined to the starriest of the claret châteaux. On this occasion, however, something – maybe the novel challenge of a ‘virgin' start – enticed him to step outside his norm. He made it clear that actual visits to the Languedoc would be once a year at most but he volunteered an invaluable telephonic ‘helpline', provided all calls were made at 9 p.m.

‘Is it thanks to him that you're so opposed to cloning?' I ask, having heard from Samuel how virtually all the vines here derive from different, individually selected cuttings.

‘That's more the result of my experience in the leather trade,' he answers. ‘Seeing the damage done when science interferes with nature – crossbreeding and inbreeding destroying some of the world's finest species. But I'm convinced it's our single most important quality factor. Complexity from diversity. As well as naturally lower yields – we never need a
vendange en vert
. Respect for nature, you see.'

‘And the choice of Cabernet Sauvignon?' I ask, having also learned from Samuel that this classic Bordeaux variety has always dominated their production. ‘Was that Professor Peynaud's influence?'

‘Not at all. It was simply what I knew,' he explains. ‘My father had a cellar full of fine Bordeaux. But remember, it's only eighty per cent Cabernet. Fifteen other
cépages
– some of them pretty obscure – make up the balance. It's the same story with the white. Mainly Chardonnay from Burgundy, Viognier from the Rhône and Petit Manseng from Jurançon but mixed with tiny quantities of a dozen different oddments.'

‘For complexity again?' I ask.

‘It's like the chef's tiny pinch of spice,' confirms Monsieur Guibert. ‘The pepper on a strawberry. The exact balance of the recipe changes every year. It depends on what nature gives us. So does the precise approach to the wine-making. A different response to the challenges and opportunities of each vintage. No hard and fast rules. Respect for nature again. A bastion against the savourless, “technical” homogeneity of the modern world. A museum of Old Europe!'

‘But not exactly traditional Languedoc wines either?' I suggest.

‘No. And in the early days, that certainly didn't make them easy to sell,' he remembers wryly. ‘Henri Enjalbert had warned us that it might take two hundred years to get recognition and it's true that nobody took us seriously at first. Well, you could see their point. A total novice's unknown “country wine” from a joke wine region …' (Samuel has already explained that, even after the arrival of the Coteaux du Languedoc
appellation
in 1985, anything made with Cabernet could only be labelled as
vin de pays
.) ‘A serious price and not even made for easy, early drinking – needing up to a decade in bottle to show its best. In 1978, our first vintage, we found ourselves with eighteen thousand bottles, which nobody wanted to touch. Only when we finally got it into a couple of Paris restaurants did word start spreading.'

‘And now?' I prompt.

‘We get three thousand visitors a year and sell ninety-five per cent of our sixteen thousand cases before it's even bottled.'

‘Could I make that ninety-five point nought one for next year?' I ask and resign myself to leaving empty-handed.

*

‘I'm not trying to catch you out,' I explained, as I took the foil-wrapped bottle from the fridge and poured Virgile a glass. ‘I just want to know what you think.' I poured myself a glass and tasted it myself. I already knew what I thought. I thought it was wonderful. But I wanted to see what Virgile thought. I wanted to see whether I could change his mind.

‘Languedoc, I assume?' he asked.

‘Close,' I said. ‘It's Roussillon.'

‘A bit remote for you, isn't it? Have you been exploring farther afield? It seems so long since I last saw you.'

‘I found it in a restaurant in Narbonne and managed to buy a bottle in the wine shop next door. You don't have to guess. It's just that I thought of you when they told me about this. It reminded me of something you said … But anyway, what have you been up to? How did the
Salon
go?'

The
Salon
had been a mammoth Montpellier trade fair, dominating the whole of Virgile's last week. It was not an event for wine-marketing – that would dominate another week in the spring. It was an occasion for all the ancillary businesses, the barrel-makers and bottle-blowers, to market themselves to the
vignerons
, and Virgile had suddenly found himself in urgent need of label-printers. After all the agonizing over his serigraphic labelling back in March, Puech had ruled it out as a style that belonged in the supermarket. It would have to be replaced with something more conventional before the second half of the 2000 Coteaux du Languedoc was bottled in the spring.

‘Didn't I tell you?' he beamed, with surely more excitement than mere label-choosing could inspire. ‘It was right at the end, on the last day. I bumped into Jean-Pierre, Olivier Jullien's father. He told me he was selling a couple of hectares of Grenache Noir. The advert was going to appear in the paper the next day.'

‘You don't mean you were tempted?' I asked, deferring all discussion of the mystery wine.

‘I hardly slept all night. Then I got up early and went to have a look at the vines the next morning. They were just amazing. They'd been lent to Olivier for a number of years, so they'd been really immaculately tended as part of Mas Jullien. The most beautiful wooden supports for the
palissage
, you wouldn't believe it! And for some reason, Olivier no longer needs them. Maybe he's bought something better. Or changed his blend. As you know, we no longer have that kind of conversation. But anyway, Jean-Pierre doesn't need them either. So I made an offer. There and then, before anyone could read the paper. And just as well, because there were loads of other offers.'

‘So you actually
own
some vines now?' I congratulated him, as he turned his attention to the puzzle in his glass.