Virgile's Vineyard (7 page)

‘You know where to find truffles?' I asked rather obviously.

‘I know where to find a man who knows where to find them,' Luc answered, with the crafty wink of a middleman who had no intention of being cut out.

‘Finding a truffle would be much too much like hard work for Luc,' laughed Virgile.

‘We're nearing the end of the season,' the young entrepreneur continued, ignoring Virgile's jibe. ‘I can probably get you one for the end of the month but it'll be around two hundred francs, for a reasonable size,' he added, making a tight little circle with his forefinger and thumb to forewarn me of his disappointing notion of reasonableness.

‘So, you think I should invest in a truffle pig?' I ask Babette, when she comes to monitor my appreciation of the precious particle adorning my starter. It was meant to be a joke but she draws up a chair to advise me in earnest.

‘Pigs are all very well but a dog would be more companionable,' she counsels solemnly. ‘Although actually, you could manage perfectly well with a fly. You'll always see them round the foot of a truffle oak. Just as good at sniffing them out and no overheads.'

‘If somewhat less easily led on a lead,' I can't help thinking. But the arrival of the village postman with his family of five to occupy the last available table denies me any more practical explanation of the low-cost option. Anyway, where would I start in my twelve overgrown acres? I can hardly trail from oak to oak with my tracker insect in a matchbox, waiting for a crescendo of buzzing to home me in on my gourmet target. Unless Manu could be persuaded to spill the beans … Perhaps when even less than usually sober? … But no, there are some prices that should never be paid, even for truffled self-sufficiency.

*

‘How did those trees get there?' I ask Manu, as the little red van rattles down towards Narbonne. I am certain they were not there yesterday but this afternoon all the dark winter hillsides are suddenly bright with yellow blossom.

‘Mimosas,' says Manu, with exaggerated patience. ‘In flower.'

‘But all since yesterday,' I answer lamely, wondering how a species can achieve such spectacular unanimity of timing.

The ubiquitous splashes of yellow are all the more exhilarating in the clear winter sunlight but most exhilarating of all, when we finally reach the sea, are the colours in the sky. I have only ever seen such blues in the work of the painters who used to flock to this coast for the intensity of its light. The deepest are high above us, the palest nearer the horizon, with every brilliantly reflected variation pulled in different directions across the water by the breezes and currents. It feels as if all my life until this moment has been lived behind sunglasses.

‘Sorry, no time to stop,' says Manu, his wife's insistence on the repair of a wind-damaged shutter having already delayed our departure until after lunch.

He has an unusually specific mission to accomplish this afternoon, an important point to prove in the light of researches he has been conducting in the tiny village library. He is not a regular reader and his first appearance there at this late stage in his life probably caused some surprise. It has, however, enabled him to identify a
vigneron
of incontrovertible distinction who nonetheless makes wine from his much-maligned Aramon.

‘You'll see,' he swaggers. ‘You should read more yourself. Then you'd know these things.'

He swings off on to a sinuous, snake-like lane leading up the side of a small mountain – the Massif de La Clape, he tells me – separating Narbonne from the sea.

‘This used to be an island,' he is able to boast from his researches. ‘Until the river and harbour silted up in what, if you studied history, you'd know as the Middle Ages. Look,' he says, pointing back down the hill to the city's distant, half-finished cathedral. ‘You can see how the money dried up when the sea trade evaporated.'

Despite the little red van's modest gear ratios, we soon catch up with a battered old lorry, grinding even more slowly up the road ahead of us, laden with dozens of large, wooden, box-like contraptions. They are beehives, Manu tells me, about to be set up for the spring, and it is easy to imagine the pine- and thyme- and rosemary-scented honeys that this landscape will perfume in the summer. Gradually, however, it is vineyards that start appearing amongst the spectacular white limestone rocks.

‘Great favourites with your Romans, the wines of La Clape,' continues the fount of village-library knowledge. ‘Sent all the way to Rome, they were, leaving the plonk they made over there on the plain for the locals. There's even the remains of a Roman villa up here, where we're going. Château Pech Redon, it's called, meaning “Round Hill” in Occitan.'

As we reach the highest point of the former island, a roundish rocky outcrop does indeed loom into view behind a huddle of unpretentious buildings, from which a handsome young man in sweatshirt and jeans emerges to greet us.

I have no idea what story Manu can have spun when making this appointment but Christophe Bousquet is very welcoming. He explains how his father and he moved here in 1988, having first sold all the vines that they used to harvest for a co-operative – the one back in Virgile's village, as it happens. Pech Redon's reputation was already rising. Its forty-two hectares had been extensively replanted by one of the region's pioneers in the 1970s and '80s. But what really attracted Christophe, he says, was the isolation: no neighbours to cope with, like Virgile's in Saint Saturnin, for ever treating their vines in ways that conflicted with his own methods.

‘But it's not an area without its difficulties,' he explains, as we pass from the brightness of the sun to the shade of the little forge, which is now his tasting room. ‘It's one of the driest parts of France. Less than fifty centimetres of rain a year and virtually all of it in November and March. We get temperatures of fifty-two degrees out there in July. Our well's often dry by September and we have to do a bit of “Jean de Florette”, just to have water for the house. Not that it's always warm like today. Well, you know the Mediterranean weather – up and down, like the mood of the people. But anyway …' He takes a bottle of white wine from the fridge. ‘This is a mixture of Grenache Blanc …'

‘Grenache
Blanc
?' I check, remembering Virgile's black variety.

‘Exactly … and Bourboulenc.'

‘Bourbou …?' I query. (This surely beats all previous obscurities.)

‘… lenc,' he confirms. ‘Grown here since Roman times. The ultimate Mediterranean grape, I always think, thriving only if it's right by the sea. Often called Malvoisie, in other regions. You know, I only really feel at home in the Mediterranean, so even my holidays are always in places like Corsica and Malta – which gives me plenty of opportunities to see what others get up to with their Malvoisie!'

Fanciful as it sounds, the scent of the wine is unmistakably reminiscent of the Mediterranean herbs that lure those beekeepers to the surrounding scrubland. Indeed, the same impression is confirmed in the mouth, I decide, as the fridge yields a couple of rosés – in contrasting styles, so Christophe explains, for summer and winter drinking. But Manu is quite uncharacteristically distracted, continually craning over the tasting counter to check the labels on the cluster of reds awaiting their turn and, even as each is poured for us, curiously impatient to move on.

‘Ah, saved the best till last, you see,' Manu nudges me smugly, when Christophe pours the final wine.

‘The Alicante?' asks our host in surprise.

‘The Aramon, surely,' says Manu, casting an eye around for a possible extra bottle.

‘Oh, now I know which book you found me in,' laughs Christophe. ‘The authors made a mistake. I don't grow Aramon. I mean, I may be eccentric but there are limits.'

Manu listens crestfallen, as we hear how the Alicante is a crossbreed created in Montpellier. In the 1820s, it seems, a certain Louis Bouschet de Bernard crossed the notoriously high-yielding but colourless Aramon with the intensely deep-coloured Cher to create what he called the Petit Bouschet. Sixty years later, his son crossed the Petit Bouschet with the Grenache Noir and called it Alicante.

‘So it's the only truly Languedoc
cépage
,' says Christophe, holding one of the darkest, inkiest reds I have ever seen up to the light. ‘Yet it's one of the few that's actually outlawed – even for a
vin de pays
!' (The label, I see, reads simply
vin de table
.) ‘I'd like to see a small percentage permitted for La Clape,' he continues animatedly, ‘giving a bit of extra complexity. But even with my father being President of the Coteaux du Languedoc, I can't see much hope. So I make it on its own, using very low yields. It's my little amusement … My chance to show that there are no bad grape varieties – only bad wine-makers.'

I do not think I have ever seen Manu look so downcast. I have certainly never seen him show so little interest in a glass of wine. Suddenly, all he can think about is how long it will take us to drive home, as if every moment spent away from Mme Gros were torture.

It is already dark by the time we round the last of the bends to see the welcoming sight of our respective post boxes, perched on their poles at the bottom of the shared drive. It is not, however, too dark to notice an unfamiliar dark-coloured Deux Chevaux parked in the shadows beside them, or the glow of a cigarette from the driver's seat. It is a couple of days since I checked inside my box and I really ought to do so now but Manu is strangely unwilling to stop the van. He hurries twice as fast as usual, up over the pits and bumps of the rough ascent, as far as Uncle Milo's parking area. He would normally drop me at the point where my part of the drive forks away from his, but tonight he seems to want to usher me all the way to my door and see it safely closed behind me. However, he underestimates my stubborn desire to audit my mail. Having counted to a number high enough to allow the van to speed back down to the fork and up to Manu's ramshackle garage, I steal outside again.

The moon is fuller and brighter than I realized when we were returning in the van. From the corner of high land overlooking the stream that divides our properties, I am rewarded with the intriguing sight of Manu tiptoeing delicately down his garden path, with many a nervous glance in the direction of my house. Instinctively I conceal myself in the shadow of the big Mediterranean pine near the
maset
, as my neighbour scuttles furtively out of his gate and down the main drive towards the post boxes and the mystery car. Every so often he stops and listens and casts a secretive look over his shoulder but he fails to see me following him.

‘In other words, you've been had,' laughed Babette on the evening following Manu's mysterious meeting.

She had seen that I was in a bad mood as soon as I arrived. After all, I didn't usually complain about the awkwardness of the billiard table filling the centre of the room or the fact that the
plat du jour
was always
coq aux olives
whenever I called in for a meal. But with the café nearly empty tonight, she had time enough to spare to puff her way through half a packet of Gitanes at my table and uncover the underlying cause of my grumpiness.

‘But now I want the whole story,' she insisted, so I started reluctantly with the unexplained car.

I told her how it had still been down there in the shadows beside the post boxes and how its driver had emerged as soon as Manu came close enough to be identified. I was too far away, I explained, to hear much of their exchange, except when the driver unwrapped the tiny parcel that Manu extracted from the pocket of his overalls.

‘
Et
alors?
' pressed Babette, serving me one of her less ambitious desserts in the shape of a banana. ‘
Qu'est-ce qu'il a dit?
'

‘ “A beauty!” was his exact response,' I told her bitterly and she laughed some more. Then I related how the driver had started counting notes into Manu's outstretched hand.

‘
Et combien?
' she urged.

‘I couldn't see. But it wasn't as much as Manu seemed to expect, so the driver reluctantly added another and that seemed to satisfy him. Then they said a quick goodnight and I just had time to beat a retreat before Manu started panting up the gradient behind me. He made a last check that no one was watching and vanished inside his own front door. Then almost immediately there were car lights bumping up the drive. A dark grey Deux Chevaux was paying me a visit and it was driven by Virgile's friend – Luc, the truffle-man.'

‘
Oh, j'adore!
' giggled Babette.

‘He said he'd “just made it”. The end of the month, that is. Like he'd promised. And no extra charge for delivery to the door.'

I winced at the memory, as I told Babette how Luc had produced a little loosely screwed-up ball of newspaper and immediately started justifying his pricing policy. The small black lump nestling inside was much bigger, he emphasized, and therefore (he knew I'd understand) much more expensive than his estimate – at this end of the season, an absolute bargain for 400 francs.

‘Exactly twice the sum I'd budgeted,' I lamented.

‘But twice as good for being home-grown,' chuckled Babette.

*

‘I'll say one good thing for the Church,' said Manu, as the single village bell swung into a faltering summons to the faithful. ‘They did at least keep the vineyards going after the Romans gave up on us.'

A fairer man in his situation might have conceded a second good thing because, unfortunately for me and my liver, the call to Sunday morning Mass had given Manu an effective dispensation to pour us each an unprecedentedly large tumblerful of the dreaded house red. It's only on rare occasions that the diocese rustles up a priest for a parish as small as ours but, whenever it does, Mme Gros can be relied upon to add her formidable contralto to the shaky descants of the sparse and predominantly aged congregation. Moreover, she makes a point of walking all the way there and back, whatever the weather, like some medieval penitent, which gives her less religiously-minded husband nearly two hours of unsupervised drinking time.

The morning was supposed to be dedicated to the mending of Manu's roof, which suffered even worse than mine in last month's winds. I could scarcely afford the time with so much work needed on my own house, but the quantity of terracotta he talked me into buying for my own repairs turned out to be substantially more than I needed.

‘
Je suis désolé!
' he apologized, in his most convincingly desolated manner. ‘I must have miscounted. But if it helps at all, I think the extra tiles might just be enough to plug some gaps over at my place. That is, unless you had other plans for them.'

We had, however, hardly replaced the first of Manu's breakages when the tolling of the church bell occasioned the most abrupt reordering of priorities. No sooner had Mme Gros's Sunday headscarf disappeared around the bend towards the village than Manu was down the ladder with the speed of an athlete half his weight and a quarter of his age.

As he pours me a second glass, my survival instincts tell me my only hope is to keep him focused on ecclesiastical history. The only trouble is, I suspect I know even less about the subject than he does.

‘You mean, the Church took the lead in wine-making when the Roman Empire declined?' I offer feebly, to keep the conversation on track.

‘Had to, didn't they?' says Manu, emptying the last of the bottle. ‘Needed it for the Mass... Blood of Christ and all that. But not as much as you might think, because for centuries the priests used to drink the wine on behalf of everyone else…'

For a few moments, it seems that Manu might have been successfully sidetracked but the pulling of a second cork soon disabuses me of that happy thought.

‘It was the monks who really saved the day,' he resumes with glass recharged. ‘Part of their daily rations, you see. Only a bottle a head, it's true. But they gave you more if you were sick …'

A charming vision of a tonsured Manu, permanently laid up in the monastic sickbay, is interrupted by the baleful crunch of Mme Gros's sensible lace-ups coming back up the gravel drive. I have just enough time to make both my excuses and my escape but, as I tiptoe away by the back door, the late morning air is already ringing with the wrath of the returning righteous.

‘Manu's quite right,' concedes Krystina, from behind her enormous sunglasses. ‘Every monastery had its vineyard. And I don't mean just a few little vines in the back yard. We're talking whole wine districts here. Like most of the Coteaux du Languedoc belonging to this place,' she explains with a toss of her copious curls (surely even redder than the last time I saw her) towards the pair of abbatial doors behind us.

As the day had dawned unexpectedly sunnily, I was summoned to lunch in Saint Guilhem-le-Désert, a brazenly picturesque little village, huddled round a diminutive Romanesque monastery in a narrow, rocky river gorge. ‘Too popular to visit after Easter,' Krystina announced when she telephoned. ‘But we'll be all right today. The only thing is, do you mind if we meet there? I have to stop at my manicurist's.'

For once I arrived with my nerves intact. Krystina was already sunning herself in front of the eleventh-century abbey church, her fingernails newly filed to unnerving glossy red points.

The medieval-looking square was filled with brightly colour-coded tables, in four separate groups belonging to four different cafés, but like everyone else, we ordered in ‘yellow' because that was the only way we could sit in the sun. However, by the time the food arrived, the shadows had moved, so Krystina insisted on eating her first course in ‘blue' and her main course in ‘red'. Initial reluctance to accommodate our peripatetic meal soon warmed into a series of enthusiastic welcomes as portions of Krystina's divorce settlement were discreetly disgorged from her handbag.

‘Benedictine,' she says, resuming her monastic theme, as we shuffle across the flagstones to ‘green' for coffee. ‘Founded in 804 by Guilhem – that's Occitan for William – Count of Toulouse, friend of Emperor Charlemagne and star of umpteen troubadour epics. Spent most of his life driving Arabs back into Spain.'

‘The Arabs had invaded the Languedoc?'

‘Absolutely. Captured Agde, Narbonne and most of the major coastal towns. Totally opposed to alcohol, of course. Biggest threat to wine-making the region ever knew. No wonder everyone considered William such a hero. Such a saint indeed, when he took to the cloister … Anyway, dozens of abbeys were springing up all over the place, thanks largely to a childhood friend of William, the great Benedictine reformer, Saint Benedict of Aniane – so-called to cause maximum confusion with Saint Benedict of Nursia, the founder of the Order, a couple of centuries earlier.
Our
Benedict didn't really approve of wine but he more or less bowed to the inevitable because, quite apart from any alcoholic expectations on the part of the monks, their abbeys were important resting places for travellers, especially those on the Compostela pilgrimage route to Spain. Talking of which, it's time we walked off our lunch on a bit of the pilgrim path.'

She thrusts more cash than lunch can possibly have cost under her saucer to avoid the tedium of waiting for a bill and strides purposefully off up a narrow lane.

It is definitely time to be leaving the village square. All the colours-of-the-rainbow tables are now in the shade and the sunlit rocks above us look much more inviting – or they did, until I saw what a punishing pace Krystina's designer sandals were going to set. I think she must have doubled as a gym teacher. She is certainly a lot fitter than I am, and the steep, almost blinding white path up the hillside does nothing to stem the information flow.

‘Pure self-flagellation,' she calls, as I scurry to catch her up, ‘pilgrims choosing this route to Spain, when they could have taken the Via Domitia by the coast. But a gift of a chunk of the True Cross from Charlemagne had turned this into a three-star stopover.'

We are climbing high above the irregular red roofs of the village, past a ruined keep where everyone would have sheltered, if the abbey was under attack, to a rough, arid landscape, dotted with fragrant tufts of thyme, straggly flowering rosemary bushes, stark wind-warped pines and stunted, scrubby evergreen holm oaks.

‘They call this the
garrigue
,' continues Krystina, with never a hint of breathlessness, ‘
garric
meaning holm oak in Occitan, apparently. It gives you an idea of what the monks were up against when they wanted to plant a vineyard.'

‘I know just how they felt,' I wheeze, remembering my own terrace-clearing, scheduled for the late afternoon. However, Krystina insists that we can squeeze in a second monastic case study, if we are even less than usually scrupulous about the prevailing speed limits.

‘Cistercian, this one,' she announces in the Abbaye de Valmagne car park, before I have a moment to marvel at any of our luckier escapes
en route
. ‘Founded in 1155 – a time when wine was becoming an important source of wealth and power. It was also a time when monasteries were doing remarkably well from the Crusades. Knights departing for the Holy Land made endless gifts of vineyards to ensure that prayers were said for their souls. The Cistercians probably did best of all. They were more rigorous than the Benedictines generally and they were more serious about wine-making – part of their commitment to perfection in all things. You name it, they researched it: pruning, training, grafting, soil types …'

Her list tails off. She has noticed that it is almost six o'clock. By the time we have sprinted to the ticket desk, the entry deadline has passed, but happily there is a significant shortfall in the abbey's restoration budget and Krystina has remembered her chequebook, so we are favoured after all with an unhurried private view.

‘Much better than trudging round with a French-speaking guide,' she says, as she snaps her handbag closed. ‘But I wanted you to see the Languedoc's only monastic building which still functions as a wine estate.'

‘But not as a monastery?' I ask, as we enter the abbey church.

She gives me one of her more withering looks.

‘There was this little thing they called the Revolution.' She points to some enormous oak barrels squeezed between the arches of the nave. ‘Most of the abbeys were simply treated as stone quarries but the relative cool and darkness here made it excellent for wine storage.'

‘Are the barrels still in use?' I ask and receive a second withering look.

The modern wines, it seems, are made in rather more modern conditions and Krystina's benefaction proves also to have been sufficient to secure us a leisurely private tasting in one of the adjoining château-like wings of the abbey. We start with a curiosity made from Morrastel – allegedly a medieval grape variety, much beloved of the monks – and we work our way quietly through a dozen or so wines to the finest of their reds, named after the Counts of Turenne, the owners of the property since 1838.

Even allowing for the ‘anything Manu can do, she can do better' factor, I am amazed at Krystina's unaccustomed patience this evening. I can only imagine it is the challenge of establishing her own stately-home-owning credentials within limited French vocabulary which lengthens her normally short fuse. Unfortunately, however, this gives the clouds that were gathering and blackening as we arrived ample time to fulfil their promise.

We emerge to find my rain-soaked Renault refuses to start. This is not at all how Krystina had planned the climax of our day – another attempt at a cosy, candlelit supper at the château was more what she had in mind. She is accordingly all for abandoning my modest motor, as if there were simply ‘plenty more where the likes of that came from'. Indeed, I think she would willingly have bought me another, rather than waste a wet evening drying spark plugs. But impecunious pride prevails.

*

It was barely light but I could see that the rain had stopped. And yet there was an alarming roar coming from the direction of the stream. I had heard it from my bedroom as soon as I woke up. I dressed quickly and hurried down through the long grass of the still dripping orchard to find a noisy, racing torrent in place of the normally gentle brook.

‘Your first Mediterranean storm!' shouted Manu cheerfully from the opposite bank where he had been enjoying a furtive cigarette, while Mme Gros prepared some of her famous breakfast coffee. (I could hardly believe it, the first time I saw her throwing random quantities of ‘instant' into water drawn straight from the hot tap.)