Virgile's Vineyard (12 page)

‘You can choose from about twenty editions,' she explains, without even consulting the catalogue. ‘In Latin, that is. Unfortunately, there's no French translation worth reading. There's one coming out in Catalan next year but maybe you don't want to wait.'

Stupidly, I came all this way without a moment's thought for the subtle linguistic warning in Villanova's title. But I know it would take me months to understand the Latin, and the Catalan I wouldn't even recognize. So I brave her scorn and ask for the vilified
version française
.

I am not sure what I expected. Some kind of technical vinicultural treatise, I suppose. Or a first compendious encyclopaedia of local wines. But what I get is a bizarre, fifty-two-page mixture of astrology and alchemy, much of it devoted to some very dubious-sounding ‘recipes' for a series of wine-based Wonder Drugs. My favourite infuses straightforward wine with a mixture of garlic, cinnamon, liquorice, resin and ‘mastic' to produce an elixir allegedly capable of warming the kidneys, purifying the blood, banishing melancholy, relieving haemorrhoids and stopping your hair going grey, all in the same miraculous dose.

But at last Mme Gros's love of Noilly Prat is explained: she must see a similar promise of eternal life in its own only slightly less extraordinary list of ingredients.

A sobering thought indeed.

*

The first of my visitors has come and gone. And waving her off, I hardly knew which had done me more good – the unaccustomed separation from my strimmer and chainsaw or Sarah's unfeigned enthusiasm for the house and the land, the village and the countryside, the food and the wine. Her amazement made me listen with new ears to the morning birdsong, evening frogsong and night-time stillness and her bright-eyed curiosity took us into corners of Uncle Milo's land that I had never found time to explore.

One day for instance, at the far extremity of the wood, we found a curious, circular, stone-built, stone-roofed shelter, half-hidden by creepers.

‘Another shepherd's hut?' speculated Sarah, as we ventured inside to admire the unexpected intricacy of its dome-like ceiling.

‘A
capitelle
,' corrected Mme Gros, appearing from nowhere in the doorway. Her primary objective was to check that Sarah represented only a temporary addition to the community but, having come this far, she was willing to share another of her nuggets of folklore. ‘You'll find lots of
capitelles
round here,' she explained. ‘They were used by women field-workers for giving birth.'

She looked meaningfully at Sarah, as if to say ‘let that be a warning'.

‘I won't be a tick, I feel a baby coming on,' Sarah giggled, unaware of my neighbour's underdeveloped sense of humour.

‘
Pas de respect, ces jeunes gens
,' snorted Mme Gros, as she tutted her way back through the wood.

On another day, Virgile joined us for lunch and we sat together in the shade of the courtyard arches, sampling something new to me, as well as to Sarah – a local speciality, which he had forgotten to tell me he made. ‘Carthagène,' he called it, as he poured us each a glassful from the plastic bottle in which the continuing delays in his
mise en bouteille
had forced it to travel. ‘I can't think why we didn't taste it back in January. It's one of my passions.'

The curiosity in our hands looked exactly like an ordinary pale pink
rosé
but the taste was quite different: intensely grapey, yet somehow noticeably higher in alcohol than wine.

‘It's a blend of pure, only lightly fermented grape juice, with pure unflavoured alcohol,' he explained. ‘The addition of the alcohol – the
mutage
as it's called – stops the juice fermenting and preserves its natural freshness and sweetness: an invention, as it happens, of your mate Arnaldus, down at Montpellier.'

‘But how do you make it pink?' asked Sarah. ‘Mixing red juice and white juice?'

‘Not at the best addresses,' replied Virgile, more tolerantly I suspect than if I had asked the same question. ‘You use red grapes – in this case a blend of Syrah and Grenache Noir. But you allow the juice only a brief contact with the skins, especially if you want a delicate colour like this.'

‘Well, it's one of my passions too,' declared Sarah. ‘I'd like a dozen when it's bottled.'

Virgile had also brought us a couple of the wines that he made in 1997 on his grandfather's land in the Côtes du Ventoux and we dutifully set about comparing them over our
charcuterie
and salad. Both bottles were simply and stylishly signed ‘Virgile' in gold marker pen – a prototype, he told me, for the rather more sophisticated serigraphic design now commissioned for his Languedoc wines. But intriguingly, each of the bottles also bore a different barrel number: 32 and 46.

‘How many barrels did you make?' asked Sarah, imagining a long and tunnel-like
cave
, lined with casks.

‘Two,' answered Virgile with a grin that showed he understood as much about marketing as he did about wine-making.

‘Well, I think they're the best two reds that I've tasted in years,' announced Sarah, as she placed another substantial order for his Coteaux du Languedoc.

Both the Ventoux and the Carthagène were undeniably delicious but I couldn't help wondering whether Sarah's purchases might have owed less to the charms of the wines than the charms of the wine-maker. She has, after all, always claimed to be allergic to anything red and indifferent to anything sweet. And she did tell me it was particularly tactless to return to the courtyard with the cheeses, just as Virgile was enquiring about her marital status.

So, while I can hardly see Sarah abandoning her high-powered city career for dutiful days behind his tasting counter, I think she may well be back before the summer is much advanced to see more of his ‘black gypsy eyes'.

*

‘Marvellous man, your uncle,' said Manu, surveying my ripening cherries at the beginning of the month. ‘Always very generous with his produce.'

‘Marvellous quality,' he said, when he appeared on my doorstep before breakfast this morning with a basketful of the glossy, black-red fruits. ‘But you mustn't be disappointed with the quantity. It's the same across the region. Too much temperature variation from day to night in the early spring,' he insisted as he mopped the juice stains trickling down his chin.

However, my later discovery that Mme Gros had bought up the village shop's entire supply of preserving sugar left little doubt that I had unwittingly emulated Uncle Milo's generosity.

Not that Manu has stripped my trees entirely bare. He has left me plenty that could still be reached if I had a taller ladder and others that could perhaps be used for jam, if I had the patience to cut away the little blemishes where the insects have sampled them first. (If only they would gorge themselves on one cherry at a time, instead of these roving comparative tastings, there would be plenty for everyone.) But after an hour or so of unrewarding exertions, punctuated by vicious attacks from an insect population jealously defending its prerogatives, I decide to make do with Manu's little hamper.

*

Virgile's mighty empire now extends to a rented garage in one of the winding and exceptionally narrow streets behind the church. This is where he keeps his new (but not, of course, brand new) tractor. It is also where a small but formidable-looking herd of many-armed mechanical spraying monsters is kept in captivity – each, he explains, designed to tackle a different phase of the vine's development or a different kind of treatment.

There are two main enemies, apparently: a downy mildew and a completely different powdery mildew, otherwise known as oïdium. Each is matched by two main weapons: the first, a pale blue mixture of lime, copper sulphate and water, popularly known as Bordeaux Mixture because Bordeaux is where it was invented, and the other, a white powdered form of sulphur. It seems that the current hot, dry weather will reduce the risk of the downy mildew but, unfortunately, somehow favour the spread of the powdery kind. The only consolation is that the same climatic conditions will also be good for the distribution of the remedial sulphur dust.

‘It's all I seem to do at the moment,' Virgile yawned, as we inspected the new garage annexe one stifling hot afternoon. ‘Very early every morning too, before the sun's too high, and then late in the evening when it's cool again. It'll go on like that for weeks. The worst is the land down at Nébian. It's too far away to tow the big machines behind the tractor, so I have to go in the van with a spray that I can carry on my back. And carrying thirty-five kilos of liquid and motor in these temperatures is no joke!'

‘Is it normally as hot as this in May?' I asked, as we returned to the airless heat of the alley. Some village women who had been gossiping in the shade of an adjoining doorstep when we arrived, were now clinging to the changing shadows on the other side.

‘This is pretty exceptional,' he assured me, as we settled under Le Pressoir's awning for two of the coldest beers that Marie-Anne could muster. ‘More like the end of June or July.'

Twenty minutes with a beer proved long enough for us to have essentially the same heat-struck conversation with half a dozen passing wine-growers. (If there is one social group that spends more time talking about the weather than the English it must surely be the wine-growing community, and no one was in much of a hurry to relinquish the shade of our awning that afternoon.) The other burning issue in each of these exchanges was the great
palissage
debate: to raise or not to raise it. Everyone agreed that the vines were growing at the rate of about four centimetres a day and badly needed support. Opinions, however, differed on the risk that hoisting up the wires might shake away the latest application of sulphur dust. Decisive as always, Virgile concluded that there was only one solution in such temperatures: a second beer.

‘Rather bad luck for you,' he commiserated, as he handed me my refill. ‘With all those late-planted trees.'

As if I needed reminding about my twice-daily watering struggles! So, to shift the focus back to someone else's problems, I asked why his spraying goes on so long.

‘It has to be repeated every ten days or so,' he sighed. ‘Much easier, if you're non-organic. Systemic fungicides last the whole year but the organic treatments are only good for about a week and a half – even less, if there's any significant rainfall.'

‘If only,' I think to myself, as I set off home to the evening watering cans.

*

‘Sparkling wine was invented in Limoux in 1531,' said Manu, determined to prove that Krystina didn't have a monopoly on dates. ‘Well, here in the Abbey of Saint Hilaire to be more exact,' he added as he fanned himself with his baseball cap.

We were resting in the welcome shade of the abbey cloister, enjoying a picnic lunch, after driving as far as the yellow broom-filled hills and lush green valleys to the south of Carcassonne. The picnic had been assembled by me, having learned from experience that it was well worth getting up half an hour earlier to avoid Mme Gros's packed rations. I think she regards a sandwich filling as an opportunity to clear her fridge.

‘It was all thanks to an early spring,' Manu elaborated. ‘The monastery wines started fizzing of their own accord, in their stoppered jugs.'

As he helped himself to thirds of salami and another foaming glass of the oddly named Blanquette de Limoux that we had purchased on the way, I began to suspect further hours in the village library.

‘So how come everyone outside the Languedoc gives the credit to a different monk – Dom Pérignon, in Champagne, in the following century?' I challenged him.

‘Ah,' said Manu, as we hit the buffers of his historical knowledge. ‘Good question.'

‘Ah,' echoes Jean-Pierre Cathala at the Caves des Sieurs d'Arques, on the outskirts of Limoux, an hour later. ‘Good question.'

The PR man for this huge and highly sophisticated co-operative has just done an Internet search for an answer. The best that he has come up with is a claim that the same (necessarily long-lived) Dom Pérignon invented the process here in 1531 and then took the recipe up to Champagne a hundred and thirty years later. Monsieur Cathala seems quite satisfied with this, being far too busy promoting the story of 1531 to worry overmuch about its verification (as indeed might we be, if we had marketing responsibility for a thousand growers and five thousand hectares).

‘Or maybe,' he suggests, as an afterthought, ‘it was our monks who did the inventing, while others perfected the technology when corks and bottles arrived in the following century.'

This sounds potentially more plausible but I am still not sure that I entirely follow the point.

‘You do understand how the “Champagne Method” works?' M. Cathala asks Manu who has been nodding sagely.

‘Oh, indeed … One of the great methods,' he stumbles. ‘But perhaps, for the benefit of my English friend …'

‘All fermentations produce carbon dioxide,' M. Cathala obliges, as Manu assumes an attitude of bored all-knowingness. ‘In a
Méthode Champenoise
, however, there's a secondary fermentation inside the corked bottle. The closed environment dissolves the carbon dioxide in the wine – from which it can only escape, in the form of bubbles, when the bottle's opened.' (Manu tries a ‘couldn't have put it better myself' kind of expression.) ‘Unfortunately, the secondary fermentation produces a sediment and it was certainly in Champagne that they found the technical solution to this.'

‘It's called “riddling”,' he adds, after an expectant pause. (Manu experiments with more of a ‘tip of my tongue' sort of look.) ‘In the 1810s, the Widow Cliquot discovered that, if you gradually twist and turn the bottle upside down, the sediment ends up in the neck. Then if you open it, the built-up pressure spits the sediment out and you can quickly top it up and recork.'