House of Peine

When curmudgeonly Clementine’s miserable papa meets his end one frosty French night, she assumes the family Champagne house will finally be hers.
Salut!
But her celebration is short-lived. Suddenly the broken-down Peine chateau is heaving with unwanted visitors, unpaid debts and secrets perhaps best left buried.

This is not the inheritance of which Clementine has so long dreamed. But as her precious grapes battle the elements in the hope of ripening and sweetening and one day becoming something truly magnificent, so must she.

Tender, funny and bubbling with charm, this is the latest delicious drop from best-selling author Sarah-Kate Lynch.

By afternoon-tea time on the third Wednesday of spring, Clementine knew there’d be a frost.

It was her hair. Her long, faded, badly cut, madly curly red hair. When the weather gods sucked the warmth out of the air to prepare it for plummeting below zero, her hair was always the first to know.

She’d been directing a thick slice of
pain au levain
slathered with pickled pear and a wedge of ripe Meaux brie towards her mouth when she first heard a sharp crackle very near her left ear. It was the sound of a single curly strand further crinkling in the cold dry conditions. It was a loud crinkle too, giving her such a fright that she almost knocked over the glass of new-release Peine champagne she had been on the brink of enjoying.

In the seconds that followed, as she scrabbled to steady the wobbling flute lest a single drop be wasted, the rest of her hair crackled and snapped one wiry curl after the other, until her whole head was abuzz and her hair was at least two inches shorter.

It was not unlike being electrocuted and was an extremely rude awakening to the fact that the day, which had started with snapped knicker elastic and a stale croissant, was about to go steadily downhill, quite possibly taking the whole year with it.

In that instant Clementine’s hair, to which she paid almost no attention in the first place, officially became the very least of her problems.

A bad frost in Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne on the third Thursday of spring would spell disaster for the House of Peine. And the House of Peine had enough disasters as it was.

“Papa,” called out Clementine, the follicles on her scalp tingling as she licked a splodge of brie from her finger. “Papa!”

Her father, arguably one such disaster, would be angry with her for being the bearer of bad tidings but then she only half expected him to answer. She gave a hefty sigh as she stood up. It seemed he had gone from bad to worse in recent times. He’d always been something of a foul-mouthed cantankerous old bossyboots but where he’d once at least put in a full day’s work before sloping down to Le Bois, the local
tabac
and café, he was now vanishing earlier and earlier, leaving Clementine to shoulder the bulk of the winery work as well as look after their precious vines.

“Papa!” Clementine called once more, this time up the light-speckled stairs of the rambling Peine château. “Papa!” But the house felt empty, as it often did. As it had for some time. She would have to fight the frost without him.

A little hiccup of fear (and pickled pear) emerged from her throat as she trudged out of the house: this was one of the many crucial times in the vineyard, after all. The sap was rising in the canes after the dormancy of winter, the dead were about to spring from the grave. The last thing the Peines needed now was for that lifeblood of the future to freeze in the veins of the vines. Who could forget the terrible spring frost of two years
before? It had taken out a third of their crop. There had been no vintage wine made that year, not a drop. It was all they could manage to produce their normal tongue-tingling traditional house
brut
and that was only because of Olivier’s skill at the famous
champenoise
art of blending.

“La-a-a-a!” trilled Clementine in a sweet musical tone at this thought as she scurried across the courtyard. “La-a-a-a!” Her miniature horse Cochon bucked delightedly at her trilling, his tiny unshod feet falling on the cobblestones with a muffled scuff. He loved it when she panicked. But Clementine shook her head and bit her lip. She did not have time to panic now, she had to do what she could to protect her vines. First, she had to find the identical 20-year-old twins who were the Peines’ sole remaining workers — so useless they were barely worth what little they were paid. In her opinion they shared a single brain, a small one at that, but they had brawn to spare and that was precisely what she needed. They would all have to move quickly to get the
chaufferette
burners out among the vines in time to ward off the frost.

She found the twins out in the vegetable patch behind the winery, smoking cigarettes and drinking out of an unlabelled bottle. “There’s going to be a frost. We need to put out all the frost pots. Get off your fat bottoms, you lazy good-for-nothings!” Clementine exhorted the huge, blonde, bulky, ruddy-faced dimwits Jean-Claude and Jean-Luc.

As she spoke, her curls retreated even closer to her head like high-speed snails withdrawing into their shells. Other
vignerons
did not yet have a sniff of what was to come. They were probably planning a cosy night in front of the television or a game of cards with friends. But as well as wearing it on her head, Clementine could taste it on her tongue: the tang of pending catastrophe. It burned her cheeks and clogged her pores, agitating the deep reserves of irritation that sat
constantly beneath her surface.

“Come on, I’m not paying you to lie around getting emphysema!” she scolded the two unapologetic workers. “I’m paying you to work!”

Jean-Claude — or Jean-Luc, she never could tell the
difference
— looked at his twin, then her, his jowls heavy with scorn. “Oh no you’re not,” he drawled, loutishly taking another drag on his cigarette. “You’re not paying us at all. Two weeks now and your old man has yet to front up with our wages. So unless you have our money, you’re on your own with your stinking frost pots.”

Clementine tried not to show her dismay. She had known money was tight. René at the petrol station had whinged to her that their account was overdue and the phone had been cut off again. They’d had cash-flow problems before. Who hadn’t? But was it possible they were now so broke they couldn’t pay even these two lumbering incompetents their paltry dues? If this was indeed the case, she was up
merde
creek without a paddle because she had no one else to ask for help. Olivier had long ago burned any bridges on the friendly neighbour front.

She glanced briefly in the direction of the Geoffroy château next door, that old wound in her heart pulling like a torn muscle as she thought of Benoît Geoffroy, lost to her now for nearly half a lifetime. No, there would be no good Samaritan for the Peines: the only way they could get anyone to do anything for them these days was to pay. She looked at the dopey twins and considered pleading with them to stay and help her for free, but didn’t know how. Instead she stamped her foot and swore, which only made them laugh and guffaw.

“Well, if there’s no bud burst there’ll be no grapes and if there are no grapes, there’ll be no champagne and if there’s no champagne there’ll be no more work for you at all, had you thought of that?”

Jeans Claude and Luc got up and flicked their cigarette butts against the winery wall in unison. At this Cochon stamped his own tiny feet and flicked his tail with an angry swish. If he had been bigger than your average farm dog, this might have had more of an impact. As it was, it just made the oafs laugh harder.

“What difference does it make, anyway?” one of them asked wheezily when he stopped sniggering. “This time next year the whole place will probably be owned by Moët or Veuve Clicquot or Old Man Joliet. Why don’t you just relax? Go and join Olivier at Le Bois for a
pastis
or seven, heh? And take your little stallion of a boyfriend with you.”

The two of them roared their idiots’ laughs again and Clementine’s soon-to-be-frostbitten cheeks further reddened with rage. Cochon sensed this and skittered excitedly around behind her. He loved her anger even more than her panic.

“Get lost then, you lumpish dolts,” she bawled, shooing the twins away with a furious hand gesture. “At once! And I hope your balls freeze off overnight!”

“Same to you,” Jeans Luc and Claude called back to her as the two of them stumbled across the courtyard, clutching each other and hooting with mirth. “They’re more likely to. They’re bigger after all!”

A potpourri of anger fermenting inside her, Clementine stomped over to the barn and, sweating and huffing, started loading the trailer. The frost pots stood almost as high as she did and it was a struggle to manoeuvre them — but what choice did she have? She cursed the Jeans under her breath. There was only one thing worse than one great lump of lard, she thought, and that was two. Those useless, fat, ugly, horrid, ungrateful creatures! But her anger was tinged with something else, something that penetrated the marrow of her bones and chilled them even more than the oncoming frost.

The truth was, if Olivier could not pay them their paltry wages, the lumps were right: the House of Peine was
vulnerable
to takeover by either the bank or, worse in every way, Old Man Joliet. The oafs were talking rubbish regarding the big houses, the strict regulations of Champagne did not allow the Veuve Clicquots and Moëts of the world to swallow the smaller houses; But Old Man Joliet was a different matter. One small house could buy another and for decades that old crustacean, an inferior winemaker but superior money-maker, had been greedily eyeing up the valuable Champagne land that the Peines had spent generations acquiring.

“Over my dead body,” Clementine swore to herself as she hauled the trailer full of chaufferettes over to the cranky tractor. She would truly rather die than see a single centimetre of chalky Peine soil handed over to Old Man Joliet. What about Olivier, though? The acrid remains of her afternoon tea made another unscheduled visit to her throat. She was no longer sure she could trust her father with the necessary resolve to fight such an invasion. Once, maybe, when he cared more about the contents of their own bottles than the ones down at the tabac. But now she could not trust him to leave the house with his trousers on, let alone battle for the reputation of their once legendary birthright. Now, it was up to her. She was the one with the weight of 300 years of Peine vignerons resting on rounded shoulders that sagged even further as she realised just how alone she was.

“I have nobody,” she whispered into the cooling air. “Nobody.”

At this Cochon let out a rather insulted neigh, a noise that in a miniature horse sounds quite a lot like the whistle of a kettle boiling four doors down. Clementine’s shoulders lifted a little. She appreciated the sentiment. Cochon was indeed her constant companion and she was more fond of him than any
other mammal in the world. But he was also a case in point when it came to Olivier’s unpredictability. Her father had won the miniature horse in a drunken card game during a heat wave a few years before. Clementine had woken up, hot and bothered, to find the tiny foal mewling in her bedroom and was only further bewildered when her father grunted at her later in the day: “Did you get the pig?”

“Pig?”

“The little pig I left you. I won it off that shit-head Marant.”

She had spent the rest of the day looking for a pig, the tiny pony following in her footsteps on dainty wobbly legs. In the end, though, she had to concede that her father did not know the difference between the two and that the horse and the pig were indeed one and the same. Instead of saying anything — well, it was so long since Olivier had given her anything that despite herself she was actually touched — she simply called the horse Cochon and got on with it.

And to be perfectly honest, Olivier was not the only person to be confused by what exactly Cochon was. White with big chestnut patches and a short fuzzy mane, he was not only a miniature horse but a dwarf of the species, destined to never stand taller than two-and-a-half feet and constantly be mistaken for a furry pillow or a cowhide holdall. As far as Clementine was concerned though, he’d been an excellent companion and apart from the initial challenge of
house-training
him, hardly any bother. Yet for all his good points he could not help her bottle champagne nor shuffle chaufferettes and on days like this, when loneliness combined with fear to produce a bitter cocktail of hopelessness and burps inside her, he was not much practical assistance at all.

Worse, this wasn’t just any old hard day, long night or bad week. This was the future. Clementine felt the sourness inside
her growing more and more vinegary. It would choke her, she feared, if she just stood there and let it. It would drown any fighting spirit she had left.

There was only one thing for it.

She looked at her battered watch and scurried back to the winery, slipping inside, passing the grape press, then lifting up the trap door that led down a narrow spiral staircase to the
cave
, or cellar, below. Previous Peines, like many other
Champenois
, had dug the cave out of the cool chalky ground hundreds of years before. The space resembled a four-digit hand, with a large open area in the middle where the barrels were stacked and four finger-like alcoves leading further into the chalk where the bottles rested.

Cochon shuddered to a halt at the lip of the hatch and peered down the hole after his mistress. Dwarf miniature horses and narrow spiral staircases were a near-deadly
combination
, as he had found out (twice) in his youth. At a constant 10 degrees it was too cold for him down there, anyway, but it was perfect for champagne. Clementine headed straight for the second-farthest finger, stopping at the end of a dusty rack and pulling out a bottle of the vintage ’88.

Returning to the palm of the cave, she plucked a crystal flute out of Olivier’s closet-sized office and wiped the grime off the glass with the tail of her loose shirt. (Champagne glasses should never be too clean anyway, it interferes with the bubbles: she had learned that when she was three.) Then, settling herself on the bottom step, she gently pulled the foil away from the top of the bottle and twisted off the wire muzzle. Holding the bottle at its base she twisted it, pressing down on the cork until she felt it pressing back. Then, ever so slowly, she let it emerge until it came away with the gentlest of sighs, as though the relief of having her remove it had been just what the bottle had been waiting for all these years.

With that, the fear and panic that had built up inside her just minutes before released itself with a similar hiss.