Virgile's Vineyard (13 page)

‘All there is to it,' endorses Manu, with an improvised, two-handed gesture, which he hopes approximates to the requisite twisting and turning action.

‘Of course, we no longer do it by hand,' says M. Cathala, deciphering Manu's semaphore. ‘We've got mechanical riddlers, like mechanical most things. But come – I'll show you.'

It takes some time for us to tour the co-operative's impressively high-tech production line, from batteries of computer-controlled pneumatic grape-presses, through forests of temperature-regulated, stainless-steel fermentation vats, to a dazzling white laboratory full of gadgetry for every conceivable sophisticated analysis.

It takes almost as long for M. Cathala to outline the stringent quality controls that they impose on their members. At harvest time, for instance, they issue tickets authorizing the picking of particular
parcelles
on particular days. Anything brought in late is rejected, just as anything arriving in trailers loaded above a certain marked level (risking damage to the grapes and even premature fermentation) is automatically downgraded for
vin de pays
.

By the time we reach a line of curious, metal cage-like cubes – each about a metre and a half across, suspended at odd angles from metal stands and filled with scores of bottles of Blanquette – I have almost forgotten about Mme Cliquot and her clever idea.

‘Riddling machines,' M. Cathala reminds me, as one of them gently rattles its way through a precisely timed and carefully measured partial rotation.

‘But why
Blanquette
?' I ask, as we pass the impressive conveyor belt where the bottles will be automatically disgorged, replenished and recorked.

‘Cos it's white, of course,' chimes in Manu, suddenly over-confident.

‘Not exactly,' comes the mildest of put-downs. ‘It's a local name for the principal grape variety – the Mauzac. Probably so called because of the fine white down on its leaves. Not that it's much known by any name outside Limoux,' he admits, with a smile.

He explains that the 1938 Blanquette
appellation
– almost the oldest in the Languedoc – allows the Mauzac to be blended with up to ten per cent of Chardonnay or Chenin, while a newer 1990 classification known as Crémant de Limoux permits up to twenty per cent of each of those
cépages
. In fact, he says, Chardonnay does exceptionally well here, as recognized by an even newer designation, called simply Limoux, introduced in 1993 – apparently the only
appellation
for pure Chardonnay in the whole of the Languedoc.

‘We mature the Chardonnays in oak,' he tells us, as we enter what is apparently almost a kilometre of underground barrel-lined galleries. ‘But these are the cream,' he announces proudly, as we reach a perceptibly smarter tunnel, ‘the Tocques et Clochers.'

He was expecting even us to have heard of the co-operative's most ambitious marketing idea but he quickly resigns himself to further explanations.

‘First we choose the best grower, or just occasionally two of them – with the best
parcelles
– from each of our villages. We supervise the production of a couple of exceptional barrels from each. Look, this one's from Saint Hilaire, for instance. It's the first time this chap's been selected. His predecessor no longer wanted to work within our extra-rigorous quality controls for these special wines. Anyway, we auction the results on the Sunday before Easter every year. Wine merchants and restaurateurs come from all over the world. But not just for the Chardonnays. There's also a gala dinner cooked by a celebrity chef – that's the
Tocque
bit, the chef's traditional tall white hat. The auction proceeds go to a different Limoux wine village each year – to be used for the restoration of its bell-tower …'

‘The
Clocher
,' says Manu, catching on faster than usual.

‘
Voilà
,' endorses M. Cathala. ‘But there's a small catch for the village that's about to benefit. On the day preceding the auction, it has to host the biggest street-party-cum-wine-tasting you've ever seen. More than twenty thousand visitors descending on a village of maybe seven hundred and fifty inhabitants.'

‘Ah well, all in a good cause,' says Manu, as he tries to remember whether Easter will be early next year.

*

I do not linger over my goodnights.

Manu may not be the Languedoc's greatest mental arithmetician but, when Jean-Pierre Cathala excused himself to meet a Canadian television crew, he could swiftly calculate the eighty minutes remaining before the co-operative's tasting counter closed. And his insistence on putting them to productive use made the little red van's return not just long and hot but also terrifying.

I stagger exhaustedly indoors for some water and am halfway to the kitchen tap when I am hit by a sense that something has changed. Something outside is not quite as I left it.

I return to the courtyard, wondering what it was that I dimly noticed in my haste. The fountain is still bubbling away. The outdoor dining table and chairs are still in their places, the arcade as shady as ever, the garden the same half-tidied semi-chaos … And then I see it.

On the hillside to the south-east of the house, there is an entirely new building. I am certain it wasn't there when I was having my breakfast on the balcony terrace. But it's there now – a huge, metal, barn-like structure, the walls painted sandy brown and the roof sandy pink in perfunctory imitation of the traditional local stones and terracottas. Now that I think about it, I have been vaguely aware of some tree-felling and earth-moving activity up there over the last few days. I just innocently assumed that someone was preparing the terrain for some new vineyard or olive grove, never dreaming that a prefabricated eyesore of indeterminate function was about to shatter forever the fragility of paradise.

I was too tired to investigate the monstrous new blot on my landscape last night. I went straight to bed before it was even fully dark but immediately my imagination raced into frenzied overdrive. All sorts of alarmingly plausible explanations chased one another through my semiconscious dreams, lurching luridly from the noisy to the noisome. I woke, convinced that any hopes of future peace or beauty had been shattered, and went outside for a better look from one of the higher terraces behind the house. And there I found Manu up even earlier, inspecting the ripeness of my apricots.

‘Goats,' he said, pointing to the barn. ‘Owned by a complete rogue, as well,' he added, more cheerfully than I felt the situation warranted.

Just my luck, I thought. Both noisy and noisome.

‘Didn't he need planning permission?' I asked, as if the situation might still be reversed.

‘Even rogues can book tables in the Mayor's favourite restaurants,' he answered. ‘But listen, I've an idea to cheer you up – the Feria down at Nîmes. I was supposed to be taking the wife this evening but her back's playing her up. No good at all on those benches.'

‘Benches?'

‘You'll see.'

‘She won't mind my going with you?'

‘I wasn't going to tell her,' he whispered conspiratorially. ‘But then I thought, if you sent her some flowers for her sickbed? Your roses being so much more plentiful than mine …'

I left Manu stripping my rosebeds and went down to the château to see whether Krystina knew anything more about the goat farm. She didn't but, predictably, she did know a lot about Nîmes and, as soon as she knew I was heading that way, she insisted on a little ‘preparation' over coffee and croissants. The founding by the Romans I knew about but not the Wars of Religion.

‘Nîmes was a major Protestant stronghold,' she explained, piling Sèvres porcelain carelessly on to a tray, ‘and consequently, the scene of a major massacre of Catholics in 1567.'

‘I always thought of Protestantism as more of a northern, cool-climate religion,' I remarked, as Krystina squeezed herself on to the tiny gilt-legged sofa where I was already sitting.

‘Well, they certainly flourished in the heat of the Languedoc,' she resumed, moving closer still to accommodate her coffee cup on a minute expanse of cream-coloured damask behind her. ‘Three-quarters of the population of Nîmes went over to Calvinism. Or Huguenotism, as the French variety called itself. And when they'd done enough damage in Nîmes, they quickly found other places for a scrap. They even attacked our own dear Lodève in 1572.' Krystina's coffee cup wobbled dangerously as the drama heightened. ‘The Bishop and most of the local nobility were forced to seek refuge in – would you believe it? – this very château!'

Carried away by the excitement of the village's hour of fame, her hand descended on my thigh in a gesture of emphasis that suddenly turned the delicate damask coffee-coloured.

‘Never mind, I was getting tired of it,' she muttered nonchalantly.

*

Manu was right. Driving into Nîmes in full Feria fettle, the miseries of life in goatland do seem very far away. As do the austerities of Calvinism.

Manu's choice of festive attire had set the tone before we left. It would, of course, take more than the Feria for him to dispense with his trademark blue dungarees and red baseball cap. However, today the overalls are disguised beneath a multi-coloured Hawaiian beach shirt and brightly spotted neckerchief – the striking
ensemble
only slightly marred by the fact that he must have purchased the shirt when he was several sizes slimmer.

I have rarely seen so many people so single-mindedly intent on enjoying themselves. As the little red van searches for a parking space in the heart of the city, it seems that almost every centimetre of the city's broad pavements has been filled by temporary terrace restaurants – surely more than even these hungry hordes can collectively hope to patronize. And everywhere there is music, sometimes piped and sometimes live but always competitively loud to drown the efforts of neighbouring revels.

It is only as we start our third and slowest crawl around the city centre (we should never have ignored the invitation to ‘park and ride' from the outskirts but Manu knew best) that I notice the unmistakable Spanish air of the festival banners stretching between the plane trees. Huge, shallow cooking pans of bright yellow paella outside the pavement restaurants reinforce the Spanish flavour, as we proceed on foot (Manu having barged his way into a space to which a timid tourist had a better claim). The same could even be said for much of the music, in so far as anything much can be distinguished in the general cacophony.

It is all very surprising, so far from the Pyrenees. But then comes the biggest surprise of all. The highlight of our day – Manu can keep his secret no longer – turns out to be a bullfight. And that, of course, is why the banners looked so Spanish. Half of them were covered with images of bulls and matadors.

Bullfighting is something over which I always assumed the Spanish had a monopoly but
La Corrida
turns out to be very big in Nîmes. Indeed, it is difficult to believe that the streets are still so populated when we see the crowd that has already flocked in its smartest festival best to the well-preserved Roman arena, which serves as the city's bullring.

Manu's tickets indicate that we are destined for a section of the arena unpromisingly billed as the
Vomitoire
. Knowing how reluctantly he and his money are parted, I have visions of somewhere vertiginous at the top of the steeply tiered banks of seating. However, his absent consort must have insisted on the best because the minute section of hard wooden bench reserved for us is remarkably close to the action.

‘Got the tickets from a chap called Luc,' says Manu. ‘Oh, but you know him, I think. Didn't he sell you a truffle? Thought so, yes, amazing fellow, Luc. Nothing the blighter can't track down, if the price is right. But then, you see, he's owed me a favour or two, since the winter …'

Our seats may be close to the action but they are a long way from the nearest entrance staircase, so we have to squeeze past a tightly packed selection of Nîmes' plumper citizens before we can reach them.

‘
Les coups de pied sont gratuits chez vous?
' protests one of the plumpest, when Manu trips and kicks her in the back.

Apparently, the distinctive combination of dungarees and beach shirt have set him apart as an outsider – or maybe it's just the company he keeps. In any event, Manu's grudging apologies are drowned by the opening fanfare.

In the rush to get here, there was very little time to consider how I felt about my first bullfight. I didn't even know whether it was part of the Nîmes tradition to kill the bulls; but some twenty minutes into the proceedings, the answer becomes bloodily clear.

Manu is appalled – not by the killing but by the unpardonable ineptitude of the first matador's performance.

‘Mere embroidery,' he snorts at the Spaniard's clumsy business with sword and cape. ‘The woman on the meat counter at Hyper U could do better.'

Not only a vociferously opinionated commentator, he is also uncompromisingly biased.

‘You'll soon see how things ought to be done,' he nudges me as a strikingly handsome young matador takes his turn in the arena. ‘Sébastien Castella,' he explains excitedly. ‘He's only nineteen and he's from our
département
. Well, all right, he lives near Seville now but he was born in Béziers.'

Manu rises wheezily to his feet to applaud his undisputed ‘
héro de l'Hérault'
. However, to my puzzlement, Castella has hardly started engaging his first bull before Manu starts jeering with all the volume that his smoker's lungs permit.

‘
Honteux! … Scandaleux! … Execrable!
…'

The strident derision continues unabated while the slender youth faces five hundred and fifty kilos of opponent with what, to my untutored eye, seem entirely admirable bravery and skill. Only belatedly, as the beast slumps lifeless to the sand, do I realize that it was the bull, not the boy, that was the object of this scorn – the two of them regarded by the crowd in general as equally important and equally judgeable competitors, albeit with subtly unequal life expectancies. But now, as suddenly as the hero's sword pierced the animal's heart, Manu's limited lungpower joins the cheers of an ecstatic crowd. A red baseball cap soars skywards, while jubilant white handkerchiefs are waved all round the arena, and for this signal of universal approbation, Castella is awarded one of the little-lamented bull's ears to decorate some remote Sevillian mantelpiece.

What Manu needs, of course, is more informed opposition than I can hope to offer, with which to argue the merits of the matadors and the aptitude of the animals long after the event has ended. And so it is that a succession of innocent strangers, who might have other plans for their evening, find themselves embroiled in a series of fierce-fought controversies in the streets and bars surrounding the arena, before Manu will at last contemplate dinner. He then insists on one of the bargain pavement paellas and a giant jug of Sangria, at a table as close as possible to the brass band so that we can be as close as possible to its accompanying trio of tight-T-shirted gogo girls. I can therefore scarcely hear his ‘Never think this used to be a Huguenot city, would you?'

‘Too puritanical for wine, I suppose, the Protestants?' I shout back hoarsely.

‘They needed it for communion,' I can just about lip-read. ‘And not just for the priests, for everyone.'

‘But social drinking?' I yell back at him.

‘Mr Killjoy, Calvin,' is I think what Manu replies. ‘Told his followers it was a sin to buy a round of drinks!'

A man after your own heart, I reflect, as the bill lands on my side of the table and Manu leads me off to discover the Feria nightlife in earnest.

*

I wake with a profound sense that I have discovered enough nightlife in a single night to last me the remainder of the year.

Having persuaded me that there could be no question of driving home when the festivities finally calmed down around four in the morning, Manu had booked us a hotel, which was firmly at the wrong end of the budget category. (I think it was the derelict awning flapping outside my window that woke me but it might equally have been someone cursing the discomfort of the beds on the other side of the paper-thin walls.) However, at least Manu decided that sharing a room would be one economy too far and I thus remain innocent of all that lies beneath the blue dungarees.

When I cross the corridor to check on his welfare, I find him unable to face daylight, let alone breakfast, until I have been out to buy him a pair of the biggest and darkest sunglasses known to Nîmes. He groans wretchedly when I remind him that we have only half an hour to get to our rendezvous in the Costières de Nîmes, outside the city. He winces painfully at the crunch of the gravel when we turn into the picturesque courtyard of the Château Mourgues du Grès. He then squints in bemusement at the motto on a sundial, set high on a sun-drenched wall: ‘
SINE SOLE NIHIL
'.

‘Nothing without sun,' says Anne Collard, the slim, smartly dressed young woman who comes out to greet us, with hardly a hint of disbelief at the outsized sunglasses and the paella-stained Hawaiian shirt which are steadying themselves against a balustrade. ‘It's been there since the Revolution but we took it as our logo. It so much expresses our philosophy, our aim of capturing all the intensity of the purest, sun-ripened fruit … But is your friend all right?' she hesitates.

The buzzing of the cicadas in the late morning heat isn't helping Manu's headache.

‘Perhaps he'd prefer the
salon
to the tasting room?' she offers as, with saintly generosity, she ushers the grubby overalls on to a comfortable white sofa. ‘
Mourgues
was a Provençal name for Ursuline nuns,' she resumes, assembling six or seven different Costières de Nîmes on a coffee table. ‘The farm belonged to a convent over near Beaucaire.'

‘And
Grès
? That's a kind of sandstone, isn't it?' I ask, more to drown the muffled moaning from the sofa than to prove how much I remember from my Saint Chinian geology course.

‘Exactly. But you must have seen the most distinctive feature of these vineyards, driving in – the
galets
, the lovely rounded pebbles? Did you notice the colours? From golden yellow, through pink to red? Well, it's after them that we've named our first three wines – the freshest, fruitiest white,
rosé
and red – “Les Galets Dorés”, “Les Galets Roses” and “Les Galets Rouges”.'

Her pouring of the first of these is eyed by Manu with unprecedented wariness. For a moment I think he is about to decline but, heroically, he stiffens his resolve and visibly wills himself to lift the glass.

‘The
galets
make wonderful storage heaters,' she enthuses, as she lines up some
rosé
beside the white. ‘Absorbing sunshine by day and radiating it on to the grapes at night. They're unique to the Costières de Nîmes, washed all the way down here from the Alps by the Rhône.'

‘You're only a couple of miles from the Rhône, aren't you?' I ask, the burden of small talk falling to me, as Manu conserves his limited powers of speech for a whispered ‘
Juste un petit peu'
at the approach of the Galets Rouges.

‘Yes, in many ways we feel more a part of Provence and the Côtes du Rhône than the Languedoc. You'd even see the Mont Ventoux from the top of our slopes, if it weren't for the heat haze.'

‘So are your slopes quite high?' I ask prosaically, finding it difficult to scintillate with Manu muttering prayers for deliverance to the elegant, vaulted ceiling.