Virgile's Vineyard (6 page)

‘I'll say goodnight here then,' she says tartly, as we approach the village gateway, leaving me to cover the last couple of kilometres on foot.

When I finally reach Les Sources, all does at least seem reasonably well, despite the furious winds which have scarcely abated at any point in the day. Around bedtime, however, the merely dramatic turns positively apocalyptic. I have closed all the shutters but they continue rattling alarmingly, as if still unanchored. And the clatter from the rounded terracotta roof tiles sounds as if they are reducing themselves to shards. The bedroom which I selected for its view seems to be bearing the brunt of the storm so, in desperation, I tip my bed on to its side and drag it to another room at the more sheltered end of the house. But sleep is still impossible and I grope my way back across the landing to the telephone.

‘
Est-ce normal, Manu?
' I blurt out anxiously, as soon as my neighbour's receiver is lifted. ‘Will the house stand up to it?'

‘I doubt it,' answers a sepulchral female voice at the other end. ‘As a man sows, so shall he reap.'

*

For hours I drifted fitfully in and out of sleep, wondering paranoically which of my unspecified wrongdoings were judged to blame for the hurricane. Even in the calm and clarity of the morning light, I still felt oddly vulnerable, as if some dark art might indeed have been practised on the other side of the stream. An empty fridge, however, soon obliged me to immerse myself in the bustling normality of a Saturday morning market, where I could at last begin to rationalize those sinister-sounding words. Surely just an eccentric gloss on the effects of global warming, I told myself amidst the reassuring benignity of the foodstalls.

The weekly market in Lodève requires a twelve-kilometre drive from the village but there is no substantial town any nearer, and anyway, I like Lodève. It is a no-nonsense, few-frills town, once extremely prosperous from textile wealth but now just shabby enough at the edges to give it an enjoyably gritty authenticity. The market is blessed with a more than usually souk-like atmosphere, thanks largely to a substantial Algerian population. The majority of this community works in the principal surviving remnant of that former textile glory, the Gobelin tapestry factory. This is a name that I have always associated with France's historic châteaux but apparently the factory still supplies the nation's more modern public buildings.

To reach the foodstalls, I have to jostle my way round the swarming loop of the main street and it is here that I spot Babette buying metre after metre of bright, floral-patterned Provençal cotton.

‘I thought I might make some tablecloths for the summer,' she explains, as I push on past mountains of inconceivably inexpensive clothing to find M. Vargas self-consciously trying on a new and better-fitting pair of corduroys behind a makeshift curtain, strung between the trouser stall and a lamp-post.

‘We're neither of us getting any plumper,' calls Mme Vargas shakily, from my side of the improvised arras.

I wave to her husband and battle onwards, successfully resisting all the various bargain bed and radiator promotions that are competing loudly for my attention. My goal is the crowded square surrounding an old market hall at the end because it is there that the fresh food is sold.

Food can scarcely be fresher than the produce offered this morning and I find it hard not to buy vastly more than I need. The bright-eyed fish on the fishmongers' stalls must surely still have been swimming at dawn, while a poultry-seller's chickens are actually alive and noisily protesting their innocence from overcrowded cages. Where vegetables in England might advertise their country of origin, here I find baskets that cite specific villages, even farms, in their pedigrees. Only the oranges come from as far afield as Spain. My naïve request for basil is simply laughed at. If it isn't seasonal, it isn't here.

My purchases are putting a serious strain on Uncle Milo's pair of semi-derelict straw shopping bags by the time that I notice the familiar, monumental figure of Mme Gros dominating the herb and spice stall on the opposite side of the street. Surprisingly for one whose cooking is so plain, she appears to be assembling a particularly complicated set of ingredients from a shopping list.

‘For one of her spells,' whispers Manu, appearing at my elbow with a wink.

*

‘I think you ought to try some proper pruning,' said Virgile when he telephoned last night.

I was surprised. After all he had told me about the strategic importance of the pruning work, I never thought he would dare to delegate it. Maybe he decided there was only so much horticultural (and therefore economic) damage that I could inflict in a couple of hours. But I still felt apprehensive when I first confronted this morning's Grenache Noir in the windy plain below Saint Saturnin.

‘Look, I've bought myself this pair of electric secateurs,' he announced, as he offered me his latest, daunting-looking asset. ‘Give it a try. You'll find it much easier.'

I gingerly donned the harness incorporating the battery pack and gently released the safety catch. The lightest touch on the start button sent the twin blades snapping together with a convulsive force that made the whole thing buck violently in my hand, which accidentally activated the start button again . . . and then again … until I finally got a grip.

‘It takes a bit of practice but once you get the hang of it, it's very quick. I decided it was the only way I'd ever get the pruning finished. But you have to be a bit careful,' he warned me, as the cutters embarked on another of their involuntary spasms. ‘Make sure the vines are all you cut!' And here he flourished a heavily bandaged hand, which added nothing to my confidence.

‘Remember, we're aiming for high quality, low yield,' Virgile stressed. (So far so good. I'd remembered that much.) ‘So we'll be pruning back to a maximum of five or six healthy, well-spaced shoots per vine.' (Seemed clear enough.) ‘Where you've got several possible shoots more or less together, always choose the lowest.' (Getting more complicated but I'd manage.) ‘Unless the bottom one is unhealthy. Or if it's growing in towards the stock. Or growing too much out at right angles to the row …'

By now I was paralysed by agonies of indecision. There were so many conflicting priorities. Any cut that might be justified according to one of Virgile's guiding principles seemed to be automatically proscribed by another. And even when I'd groped my way through this tortuous decision path, I still had to decide precisely
where
to cut.

‘Always cut back to the third bud on your shoot,' he emphasized. ‘No, that's the fourth. Look, here's the first.' He pointed to a microscopically insignificant protuberance at the base of my selected shoot. ‘And always cut directly across the bud …'

After a few more apparently irreconcilable stipulations in the same vein, Virgile left me to psych myself up for my first solo snip. He moved rapidly on up the row, while I stood transfixed by the fear that my lethal weapon might be about to decimate his precious vineyard. At least these vines were the ones that had been tended by him last year and were therefore not nearly as wildly out of control as last month's newly rented vines. But even so, they never seemed to stay still for long enough in the wind for me to decide where best to risk a cut. And the smoke from a neighbour's bonfire made it even more difficult to focus. Then just as I was stiffening my resolve for some fearlessly uninhibited, confidently radical action, Virgile threw me straight back into anxious confusion with a casual ‘If in doubt, remember it's always safest to prune too little.'

*

‘Can't understand all this fuss about pruning,' snorts Manu the next morning.

He knows nothing about Virgile or my labours down in Saint Saturnin but, as a thinly disguised pretext for the liquid hospitality that is threatened in a few minutes, he has invited me over to the terraces directly behind his cottage to admire his own vines. If that is indeed what they are. Manu's terraces may not be quite as spectacularly out of control as mine but the so-called vines look more like giant thornbushes. A few are even growing up the occasional tree.

According to Krystina, Languedoc vines have been pruned since the Romans but not, it seems, those of Manu.

‘A lot of it's a waste of energy,' he announces. ‘All a vine needs is minimal pruning.' (Leaving plenty of leisure for ‘maximum drinking', I reflect.) ‘You see these vines?' he continues, getting more dogmatic with every minute that he has to wait for his first glass of the day. ‘They may look as if they've got thousands of buds right now, but if you just leave them alone, only a fraction of them are ever going to burst. And when they do, it's only those on the outside, where the fruit can get some sunlight, that will flourish. Those fancy fellows down the hill just don't seem to realize that if they didn't interfere all the time, the vine would simply find its own balance.'

But as we descend towards the bottles awaiting us in Manu's kitchen, I remain strangely unconvinced by this Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest'. As I said before, I've tasted the wine.

*

The original two rooms that I knew when I visited Uncle Milo as an adolescent are now a sort of self-contained studio apartment that will be useful for guests, if I ever find time to invite anyone. The rest of Les Sources, according to Manu, evolved organically but rather haphazardly, as my uncle earned the occasional fee from a local resident for some domestic architectural design project.

‘What do you think he built first?' asked Manu when he told me all this. ‘After the studio, that is?'

‘The kitchen?' I offered prosaically.

‘No, the central staircase!' he laughed delightedly. ‘And what did he do next? Installed the loo at the top of the stairs. Not the walls. Just the loo! The view was wonderful, he used to say. Shocked the wife though, the first time she saw him sat up there. Oh dear, yes. A very original man, your uncle.'

The house's gradual evolution is partly why it's so clever. For instance, Uncle Milo had time to get used to the angles of the sun and the wind directions before he decided where he wanted his shade and shelter. However, the problem with this kind of organic growth is that every new idea, every fresh injection of cash seems to have brought some additional level of complexity. The water system is bad enough. Every time I clear a new patch of land I uncover yet more plastic pipes taking the spring water to undiscovered parts of the property for unknown purposes. I hardly dare touch any of the half-buried taps that link them all together for fear of the flood that might burst unobserved in some far-flung corner of the land. But even inside the house, things are rarely straightforward.

‘You know you've got four different ways of heating your water, don't you,' said Manu helpfully. ‘Electricity, obviously. And the oil-fired boiler that powers the radiators. But I bet you didn't know you had a set of solar panels on top of that little conservatory – not much use today, admittedly … Then, the
pièce de résistance
, have you noticed the pipes under your log fire in the sitting room? Milo always boasted they'd heat all his water and a couple of radiators into the bargain. You just have to open the right valves,' he explained as I followed him into a dark, windowless room behind the kitchen.

The wall was completely covered with pipes, taps, valves, thermostats, dials and switches, all looking more complicated than the average submarine control room.

‘I remember, you have to open one valve and close another, if you're using the open fire,' said Manu. ‘And turn off the solar system, before you run the boiler. Various things like that. Your uncle did explain it all to me once. But I forget now which knob is which. Trial and error, I suppose.'

Fortunately, a few of the controls were blessed with faded paper luggage labels giving barely legible clues to their functions and gradually the system and I seem to have sorted out a mutually acceptable
modus vivendi
. I have been scalded almost as often as I have been chilled and the plumbing sometimes gurgles for days at a time, but I think I may finally understand enough to get by.

*

‘You know you're supposed to have truffles on your land, don't you?' says Babette, as she dumps my first course of
terrine aux truffes
unceremoniously on to the plain paper tablecloth in front of me.

There is no sign yet of the colourful Provençal cotton from the market but, looking round, I see numerous fellow lunchers composing shopping lists and other doodles on the current alternative. Nathalie from the shop, for instance, seems to be sketching out some kind of business plan for a man in a suit who looks as if he could be her accountant. So I wonder whether Babette's intended upgrade will ever find favour.

The truffle news, however, could hardly be more welcome, as I scrutinize the microscopically small speck of black set into the middle of my slice of paté and compare it to the size of the supplement that this luxury commanded on the café's lunchtime menu. (Babette and I have graduated to hand-shaking terms by now but, sadly, the rising warmth of welcome still stops short of greater munificence on the truffle-shaving front.)

‘Trouble is,' she explains, as she leans against the billiard table for a cigarette, ‘when Manu's brother, Ignace, sold your uncle the land, he promised to tell him where to find the truffles before he died. But then he was up cutting branches off a cherry tree – Ignace, that is – and he made the mistake of cutting the one he was sitting on. Lost his memory in the fall, poor chap.'

‘So Uncle Milo never knew?' I ask.

‘I've always suspected Manu knows but you'll never get him to admit it.' She returns to the bar, leaving me to speculate about the untold riches that may lie buried beneath my oak trees.

As it happens, I'm already considerably the poorer for knowing the street value of a truffle. I was having some tea at Virgile's after our pruning session when a small, shifty-looking young man called Luc turned up to confirm that he was on the track of a truffle. Apparently Virgile had ordered one for the weekend – proving, not for the first time, the high priority given to gastronomy in his domestic economy – and I heard myself recklessly surrendering to temptation when Luc offered to add me to his client base.