Virgile's Vineyard (11 page)

‘Bawaawaawaawff,' said M. Parrouty, still cogitating regardless.

His moustaches twitched ever more animatedly with every new aspect of the staircase project that he considered but with never a flicker of interest in the violent agitation above us. Either he enjoyed the society of similar visitors in his own rafters or some highly developed sense of
politesse
precluded him from passing comment. It was inconceivable that he could have failed to hear it.

However, as soon as M. Parrouty had uttered his last farewell ‘bawf', I rushed to the main house for the nature book. Heaven knows why I thought this was going to help when I had nothing visual to go on, but I turned to the page that covered a local selection of comfortingly harmless-seeming mice, only to encounter, at the bottom of the page, a painstakingly detailed drawing of a dark, glistening turd. It looked worryingly familiar.

I hurried back out to the courtyard and, sure enough, there in the corner near the studio were three perfect forty-millimetre specimens. I hadn't taken much notice when I had seen them in the morning but now I felt absolutely certain that the beast with which they had not long since parted company was a ‘
fouine'
. And yet I had no idea what a
fouine
might be.

Every other living thing in the entire book had been favoured with a graphically lifelike, full-frontal pose. So why not the
fouine
? Was the creature's physical reality so terrible that the sight of anything more than its excrement would have potential purchasers fainting throughout the bookshops of Southern France?

Several days and several freshly delivered, telltale traces later (at least there are none
inside
the studio) I am still hearing the same alarming scuffle in the roof whenever I enter the studio. And worse than that, this morning I heard the high-pitched squeaking of what I can only imagine are babies. But I am little the wiser about my adversary, except that my dictionary offers an Anglo-Saxon alias: ‘stone martin'. Otherwise, all that the nature book adds is that my
fouine
is (a) a notorious leaver of turds (which is hardly news) and (b) carnivorous (which is hardly reassuring).

Meanwhile, the need to prepare the studio for my friends' arrival grows ever more pressing, so I decide to assert a few proprietorial rights – nothing over-sophisticated, just a few judicious whacks of a heavy broom-handle on the wooden ceiling, at the epicentre of the commotion. This quickly teaches me something that the nature book could have mentioned: the female
fouine
has no qualms about abandoning her young within seconds of the going getting rough. Her exit from the roof is, however, so rapid that I have no time to catch sight of her.

I do, nonetheless, get several more chances, as the second thing I learn about the
fouine
is that it is exceptionally persistent about returning as soon as things quieten down again. At first, I get a glimpse of something brown and furry disappearing into the bushes. Then, in the afternoon, a sighting of a bushy-tailed rear view – much larger than a squirrel, I'd say, but a little smaller, I think (and hope), than a cat. And finally, towards evening, a flash of white on a fast-moving chest.

As usual I need advice, but Manu is away for the weekend, dragooned into visiting a sister-in-law whose fulminations against the demon drink apparently make his life with Mme Gros feel like a Bacchanalian orgy. And the Vargases, I know, are now both out of action. Madame sprained her wrists in a fall from a ladder while engaged in some over-ambitious work on their olive trees, and Monsieur has taken her for a rest-cure at a cousin's on the coast. So I am forced to resort to the collective wisdom of the village café.

I join the crush at the bar and initiate a ‘supposing a friend of mine had this animal in his roof' kind of conversation, expecting the usual hotly-debated range of views. But tonight the zoological consensus is both immediate and unanimous.

‘
Vous avez une fouine!
' they chorus.

Unfortunately, however, opinions as to how the animal's unhappy host should best proceed in these circumstances are less united.

‘
Elles sont protégées
,' calls M. Privat from the corner table where he is enjoying another of his twice-daily meals
chez
Babette. (The man's appetite for
coq aux olives
must be inexhaustible.) The
fouine
's protection, he insists, precludes even the civilest of invitations to consider alternative accommodation. ‘
Mais pourquoi les chasser, alors? … Je les aime, moi
,' he adds affectionately.

‘
Elles sont vicieuses
,' counters Monsieur Puylairol, the bee-keeper.

For a man of his profession he is surprisingly timid-looking but he speaks on this occasion with unaccustomed vehemence. Presumably, the life of an
apiculteur
exposes him to quite enough aggression without confronting a
fouine
.

‘Only my opinion, of course,' he continues, more characteristically diffident. ‘But I wouldn't go nearer than twenty metres, if I were you.'

‘Not without a full suit of body armour,' Babette supports him more emphatically, and I set off home wondering whether the studio will ever again be fit for human habitation.

I am too depressed to return to the battlefield until the morning; but when I do, the crack of the broom against the ceiling boards is greeted with unaccustomed silence. The
fouine
is clearly learning not to panic at the first hint of hostilities. Another more savage prod produces the same mute response. Perhaps it has gone in search of breakfast. But a few more batterings at intervals throughout the morning and still there is no hint of protest.

Cautiously, I face the improbable truth: I seem to have won. The
fouine
appears to have decided that there must be easier places to raise a family.

*

The vines are surely now at their most beautiful – vibrantly limey green, profusely, flutteringly leafy yet still distinctly independent shapes, set off by newly ploughed soil, in neat rows, all across the region. Even Virgile has ploughed the weeds into his soils, though perversely, he is now wondering whether he might even sow some replacement grasses in the spaces between his rows for better organic balance.

Everywhere the tiny round buds are starting to form, looking so much like miniature grapes that I thought I must have somehow missed the flowering. But the surprising thing is the sheer quantity of these buds. After all that winter pruning and April shoot-removal, Virgile's vines are still remarkably heavily laden.

‘Will we have to thin them yet again?' I ask faint-heartedly, remembering Virgile's masochistically modest three glasses per vine.

‘Nature will probably find a way of doing that bit for us,' he assures me. ‘Disease or hail or something usually helps us out.'

The vines that seem to be growing fastest are his Syrah, and the assignment for the day is to reorganize their
palissage
– the system of wires on which this variety in particular needs to be trained, before its exceptionally high-reaching shoots get snapped off by the wind. The wires are already there, a relic of the previous owner, stretching all along the length of each row. However, they are still where the last vintage left them and now need repositioning to support the delicate young growth. At roughly eight-metre intervals down the rows, there are metal posts with supporting hooks at different heights, and the object of the exercise is to lower the wires from one of these pegs to another without damaging the new shoots.

‘Hey, careful,' says Virgile, as I tug with excessive enthusiasm at a wire already tangled by tendrils. ‘I know I don't want a lot of grapes but I do want some!'

As we work down the vineyard together, on opposite sides of the row, I ask about progress on his much-deferred bottling. I know that he opted in the end for ‘serigraphic' labelling, printed directly on to the bottles, but the last time I enquired the initial designs had failed to please.

‘Next month,' he says. ‘Definitely. I must get some wine on the market to appease the bank. But goodness knows how. I mean, I know Pius will take some for Le Pressoir but as for the rest … There just aren't enough hours in the day.'

‘You'll have to get yourself a wife,' I suggest. ‘Someone with nothing better to do than hang around the
cave
all day, giving tastings …'

‘You're right,' he laughs. ‘When she isn't answering the telephone and paying the bills and doing the paperwork for the Customs … I knew there was something missing in my business plan!'

*

‘You must be mad,' said Babette, when I told her yesterday that her hearty
confit de canard
was going to have to fortify me for an afternoon of tree planting.

I didn't need her to tell me that it was far too late in the year but, back in March, when I ordered the trees from another of Manu's shooting cronies, I was naïve enough to assume that it might need fewer than twenty reminders to secure the promised ‘same day delivery'.

‘Madder still,' she said when I telephoned a couple of hours later to ask whether she knew of anyone with some dynamite.

Uncle Milo had left the level, paddock-like area immediately behind the house unplanted – simply fencing it off in his unavailing effort to separate sheep from vines. Having cleared away the canopy of brambles, I was now determined to plant this area but, as Babette was quick to point out, land is often left unplanted for a reason. In this case, the soil's unyielding resistance to my pick-axe suggested no one had disturbed it since whatever seismic convulsion shaped these hillsides in the first place.

‘I thought you had more trees than you could cope with already,' she observed with ample justification.

‘Not peach trees,' I explained defensively. ‘And Manu says I ought to replace a couple of dead Mirabelles. And the paddock looks so empty,' I continued, knowing privately that, more than anything, I was simply impatient to make a creative mark on my landscape after so many months of cutting and clearing and burning.

Our famously resourceful café proprietress was disappointingly unhelpful in the dynamite department but she did know someone with a giant, tractor-mounted drill, which she thought should solve the problem. As long as the job didn't need too much discussion.

The importance of Babette's proviso became clear as soon as Monsieur Mas applied himself to this morning's doorstep preliminaries. A big broad smile beamed down at me from a big round head on big broad shoulders. But the smile was entirely toothless. If I had not already seen a mechanical drilling device, with accompanying tractor, lurching up the lane, M. Mas's sibilant speech of self-introduction would have given me no hint as to his identity. He, on the other hand, was too busy fiddling with a whistling hearing aid to guess that my own first words might merely be ones of greeting.

‘
BON… JOUR
,' I tried again more slowly.

‘
M'sssshhhuhhMassshhh
,' he announced once more.

I was already hoarse with fruitlessly repeated salutations before I could even begin to address the subtler message that the stakes so mysteriously dotted round the paddock coincided with the spots where his drill was to dig the required holes.

But now that the holes are dug and the fruit trees duly planted, another thought has struck me. The field where I have chosen to plant my trees is effectively the only part of Uncle Milo's estate where there is no convenient water supply. Almost everywhere else, there appears to be some sort of outpost of his still untested watering system. But not in the paddock, I realize belatedly.

‘You'll need to do that every day, when it gets warmer,' calls Mme Gros contentedly from the other side of the stream, as she watches me hobble out of the bathroom with a watering can for the tenth time.

*

‘I wish I didn't have to do this,' says Virgile gloomily, as Laurent, his friend with the filtering machine, presses the start button.

Laurent looks silently on, as the pump starts noisily sucking the wine from the peace and quiet of its fibreglass tank and forcing it down the pipe to the point where it pushes its way through the multi-layered, card-like filter before returning again to the calm of another newly sterilized
cuve
on the other side. Laurent's wordless solemnity suggests that he considers it a great shame too but maybe he is just taciturn by nature. It is Virgile who voices the concern.

‘You never know how much intensity you're losing,' he frets. ‘I didn't intend to filter it at all but I had a problem with the wine in one of my barrels. I thought it was developing too much volatility – too much acetic acid. So I was afraid to bottle without filtering first.'

‘But I thought it was the wine you're keeping to bottle next year which was now in the barrels,' I respond, confused.

‘Oh, didn't I tell you? I decided to mix them after all. I thought the weightier wine for next year needed balancing with some of the freshness of this year's. And vice versa. But the net result is, everything now needs filtering.'

He takes a sample of the newly clarified wine in a glass. He sniffs it, tastes it and passes it to Laurent. ‘What do you think?' he asks tensely.

‘It certainly looks more brilliant,' says Laurent, avoiding the issue.

*

‘Great pus-filled swellings in the armpits and groin,' said Krystina, as Babette thrust two generous
salades niçoises
on to our sun-dappled table.

It was the first day that extra tables and chairs had spilled out beyond her café terrace to fill as much of the Place de la Fontaine as the chaotic parking of cars and vineyard machinery permitted. Scores of lunchers were celebrating this first confirmation of summer. Monsieur Privat seemed only too pleased to be sharing his shady table under an ancient plane tree with a trio of Scandinavian girls, while the Vargases, back from the coast, continued Madame's convalescence on the sunnier side of the square. Babette had still not found time for tablecloth-making but nobody cared. They were much more interested in their carafes of well-chilled
rosé
and the colourful salads that were giving the
coq aux olives
a well-earned rest.

So who but Krystina could have chosen such a moment to regale me with a grisly account of the Black Death?

‘Disastrous for wine production,' she persisted between mouthfuls.

‘Lack of workers?' I asked, having lost most of my own appetite.

‘Lack of customers as well,' she explained. ‘Wiped out a third of the population by 1400. You'd never think Montpellier was Europe's most important medicine school. But the professors seemed to be much more interested in doctoring wine. You see, the medieval stuff was still very short-lived. Anything left by summertime was likely to be sour and the spicing of wine to disguise the deterioration became one of the Medicine Faculty's specialities. You'll get a better idea when we're down there.'

Krystina's threat, however, reckoned without my secret knowledge that Wednesday was ‘Aromatherapy Day'. So this morning, in a gesture of rare defiance, I have taken advantage of this prior claim on her liberty to find my own independent way to the university city.

Arnaldus de Villanova is the man I am looking for. Not the man himself – he died in 1311 – but his bestseller, the
Liber de Vinis
, the first book ever to be printed on the subject of wine and endlessly reprinted, it appears, until at least the sixteenth century. But no one seems to have thought fit to give him a statue in the Faculty's imposing classical entrance hall of fame. Only the librarian upstairs seems to show proper respect, as she ushers me to a research desk with surprising lack of interest in either my motives or my credentials.