Virgile's Vineyard (18 page)

‘Everything is geared to preserving the freshness of perfectly ripe fruit,' he emphasizes. ‘That's why we use only these temperature-controlled, stainless steel vats. We pick everything by hand – with several successive rounds of harvesting in each
parcelle
for maximum ripeness – and then we rush it into the
cave
, using pneumatic presses to extract the juice. But unfortunately I can't show you those,' he apologizes, as we prepare to say our goodbyes. ‘We felt there was still a risk of oxidation with the big one that we used to use and the smaller ones on order haven't arrived. If they don't hurry up, everything's going to be
Vendange Tardive
– even the red!'

Manu stops, one foot inside, the other outside the
cave
. He must have misheard. Mme Maraval said nothing about a red.

‘The Cabernet Franc,' says Alexandre. ‘Our other new experiment. Didn't my mother …?'

But his words are lost on my companion. Lunch suddenly forgotten, he is back at the tasting counter.

*

‘Your friend doesn't take “no” for an answer, does she?' says Virgile.

‘Krystina, you mean?'

‘With a K and a Y,' he confirms, as he pours me a glass of red wine from Jean-Marc's well-chilled decanter.

‘She's tracked you down already? Offering fistfuls of cash, no doubt. But you told her “nothing for sale” and sent her here?'

‘Oh, I didn't mean “no” for an answer on the wine.' He smiles a little bashfully. ‘She accepted that fairly easily. I meant the invitation to dinner at her château.'

‘What did you say?' I ask, trying not to sound too obviously delighted at this apparent refocusing of her attentions.

‘What do you think?' he answers, frowning at his glass. ‘I haven't got time for a social life. I mean, you'd have thought last week's storm would have wiped out a few of my grapes, wouldn't you? But not a bit of it,' he sighs. ‘I'm having to employ a couple of people for a
vendange en vert
– stripping the bunches back to my goal of six or seven per vine.'

‘But what if there's another storm?' I ask, thinking that surely Krystina won't let a little thing like grape-thinning stand in her way. ‘What if you end up with too few for the magic three glasses?'

‘I'll have to take a chance. If I leave it any later, the vines will have wasted too much energy on the grapes that need to be removed.'

He sniffs the wine doubtfully. It didn't seem so bad to me but he hasn't told me what it is yet.

‘You don't recognize this?' he asks.

It does taste familiar but I'll make a fool of myself if I try to guess, and Jean-Marc is too busy rushing between tables to offer me any clues.

With no bookings for the evening, he invited the two of us to join him for a quiet threesome over some interesting bottles. He even shaved for the occasion. But thanks to the weather, Montpeyroux's Place de l'Horloge has been overwhelmed with unexpected customers. There is scarcely an empty place at any of his large, wooden-slatted outdoor tables and even Céline, Virgile's favourite waitress, has had no time for more than strictly professional courtesies.

‘It's not as if I haven't enough to do,' Virgile sighs. ‘I was out at five-thirty this morning, ploughing up weeds – too much competition for the vines, in this heat. But with so much else to do, I've left it all a bit late.'

I'm impressed but the important thing is, will Krystina be?

‘I should really be spraying everything for vine worms – organically, of course, using a special micro-organism that's eaten only by these particular butterflies. There's no harm to other insects. But once inside the butterflies, it starts munching its way through their intestines.' He grins with the vengeful satisfaction of one who has already sweated to annihilate the first and second of the three generations that beset the vines in the course of a summer.

‘I don't seem to hear so much about the moon these days,' I remark, still clinging to my faith in Krystina's tenacity.

‘Oh don't!' he moans. ‘I can't remember when I last even looked at my biodynamic calendar. It's just gathering dust! But next year …'

‘What do you think?' Jean-Marc interrupts, with a nod towards the wine, as he hurries past with a perilous pile of empty dishes. ‘Has our boy done well?'

‘He means this is
yours
?' I ask, as I try to reconcile the reticence in my glass with the opulence that was so impressive last week.

‘Doesn't taste half as good as the hand-bottled sample, does it? It's gone completely dumb – traumatized by the bottling, I suppose. It'll be fine in a month or so,' he endeavours to persuade himself. ‘But at least, now that Puech's lorry has taken all the bottles away, I can forklift the barrels round to the garage and make a bit of space in the
cave
. I'm miles behind in preparing it for the
vendange
!'

‘What else would you like to drink, my friends?' Jean-Marc reappears, mopping sweat from his forehead with the trademark tea-towel.

‘Or maybe even
eat
?' implores Virgile.

It is nearly ten o'clock and he has to be up at first light to plough another patch of vines before his six o'clock grape-thinners report for duty. Even Krystina, I am beginning to fear, may fail to find space for herself in this schedule.

‘Soon,' says Jean-Marc and he darts to the other side of the square to take a dessert order.

‘I've had a letter from the co-op,' says Virgile, having pushed his own production aside and selected something himself from the wine racks indoors. ‘About the land I'm renting in Saint Saturnin. Serge, the owner, used to take the grapes to the co-operative and the letter says they're refusing to let me vinify my crop independently.'

‘Can they do that?'

‘It's a term of my lease that my production's outside the co-op. But Serge should have served them with a formal notice. I suddenly remembered the other day and typed up something for him to sign. But I can't remember whether it was two or three months before the
vendange
that it was supposed to be served. If it's two we might be all right.'

‘And if it's three?'

‘Strictly, it's Serge's problem but in practice it'll be mine as well. At the end of the day, it'll be a question of money. We'll see. I may have been in time and the co-op's letter may just be a bluff.'

‘Can't you get some legal advice?'

‘The only specialist that I know of is away on holiday.'

‘I'd really like to know your opinion of this.' Jean-Marc pauses long enough to deposit two glasses of yet another red wine. Then he vanishes to deliver some bills to the first of his customers who are ready to leave. ‘I'll be with you any minute now,' he promises unpersuasively, as he passes back again in search of another table's first courses.

‘How about you?' asks Virgile, now ravenous enough to take the law into his own hands and rustle up some bread and olives from the kitchen. ‘Are you winning up there?'

‘It doesn't feel like it. I thought things would have finished growing by now. Maybe I'm trying to water too much but I can't seem to get it right. If I don't irrigate, things shrivel and die; if I do, they grow faster than I can keep them under control. And of course, the more I clear away the jungle, the larger the area that I have to maintain. The grass on my top terraces is nearly waist-high. In fact, I've borrowed a couple of horses from a cousin of the Vargases.'

‘Petrol-free lawnmowers?'

‘It seems like my best bet. The machine that Manu persuaded me to spend all that money on is really better suited to a more modest garden like his.'

It is just after midnight when Jean-Marc does at last join us for a bowl of chilled gazpacho, but no sooner is he seated than a customer query calls him away. By the time he returns the soup has ‘gone warm', and much to his irritation poor overworked Céline has presumed the dish abandoned and cleared it away. But perhaps this is just as well, as the
patron
now has a series of seemingly endless goodnights to be said.

The village clock is just striking one when the last guest leaves and the plates of chargrilled lamb that are destined for our table finally appear in the restaurant doorway. However, before an almost tearfully weary Céline can deposit them, Jean-Marc suddenly has misgivings about disturbing the villagers if we remain in the square, so we carry everything, including wines and glasses, inside to the discreet upper room where we fêted last month's
mise en bouteille
. Then, just as hope flickers that we might at last enjoy a pleasant half-hour with our host before falling asleep on our plates, he remembers that he has forgotten to stack and padlock the outside furniture.

‘Start without me,' he calls, as he disappears back down the staircase.

Sadly, we both start and finish without him. Indeed, he is still in the bar, apparently dealing with the sensitive subject of Céline's resignation, when we descend to make our excuses for departure.

‘But what about cheese and dessert?' he protests as we edge apologetically towards our vehicles. ‘At least a coffee, surely? We've hardly spoken all evening …'

*

I woke very late, feeling curiously disoriented and wondering blearily why the noises from outside my shutters seemed so exaggeratedly near and loud. The usual rasp of Manu's van, for instance, was inexplicably reverberant as it struggled up the track – now rougher than ever since the storm. The familiar rustling from his gardening activities was somehow magnified into a tumultuous and oddly immediate hubbub.

Reluctantly I opened first my eyes and then the shutters. I blinked in the mid-morning sunlight and slowly focused on the fact that I was mistaken. It was neither Manu's van nor his gardening that had penetrated my unconsciousness. It was a huge yellow lorry, completely blocking the entrance to my drive. And on the back of the lorry, rotating from a kind of crane, an enormous mechanical scythe was ripping its way violently through the trees and shrubs beside my entrance-way.

Loath as I was to face the world, there was no escaping the conclusion that one or two questions needed to be asked here – and asked before rather than after the surrounding vegetation had been entirely razed to the ground. I braced myself for a confrontation.

‘It seems the modern goat needs electricity,' said the foreman, pointing towards the new
bergerie
on the nearby hill. ‘The supply has to come from here, which means the little wooden post that you've got at the moment won't be big enough. So we're giving you a lovely new one, free of charge.' He gestured down the track towards a second yellow lorry, loaded high with concrete pylons.

‘But this is my land. And those are my trees you're hacking down,' I spluttered.

‘Oh, I don't think you'll find they're yours,' he said, as he opened a file of papers. ‘We've got all the necessary permissions from the owners …'

‘But I
am
the owner of this little triangle,' I insisted and went to get my copy of the land registry plan.

‘Well, even if you're right,' said the foreman after twenty minutes of dogged argument, ‘the alternative is, you keep your little wooden post on this little triangle and we put up two more of the big ones over there in front of your house, on land that you certainly don't own. It's the only other way that we can get our cables across the valley.'

‘But that would be twice as bad!'

‘I knew you'd understand.'

‘But it's so big. And so white.'

‘It turns a sort of grey eventually.'

‘Such a contrast to the trees.'

‘We could paint it brown,' the foreman finally offered and despairingly I gave in. I couldn't see a better solution. But ever since Manu first saw the finished result this morning, he has hardly stopped laughing.

‘Is that supposed to look like a tree?' he manages to articulate between guffaws.

He's right, of course. The bright shade of russet that constitutes the electricity company's notion of brown is never going to blend into this or any other treescape – not even in the autumn, when the leaves are at their reddest. And the gloss paint has a dependable knack of catching the sunlight at all sorts of different times of day.

It is another reminder of the extreme fragility of paradise.

‘I think I must be the only Frenchman not on holiday,' said Virgile, slumping wearily into his solitary armchair with a homemade after-dinner
tisane
. ‘Have you noticed? Even the vines are deserted at this time of year.'

‘I thought August holidays were compulsory for the French,' I answered from the sofabed. ‘Won't they cancel your citizenship?'

‘Others may be ready for the
vendange
but I'm not,' he sighed. ‘There's so much weeding I should be doing, plus another round of spraying. And as for the
cave
… I need so much more equipment to handle the extra volume this year and I haven't even bought most of it yet!'

‘And the legal problem with the co-op?' I asked, wondering whether much of his effort might still be in vain.

‘I think we might be all right. There's certainly been nothing in response to our notice.'

‘What does Serge say about it all?'

‘Luckily, he sees the funny side,' yawned Virgile, rubbing sleep from his eyes. ‘He says, if one of us has to go to prison, it ought to be him because I'm productive and he's completely useless. I could certainly have worse landlords.'

I was feeling almost as exhausted as Virgile myself. Whatever the percentage of the English population currently on holiday, much of it seemed to have arrived to share the sunshine at my house. Blithely ignoring the capacity of a three-bedroomed property, improbable numbers of visitors had been determined to demonstrate how much they were missing me and their sense of loss had conveniently climaxed in August.

It was not so much the shopping and cooking that had worn me out. Indeed, many of my visitors were proving keen enough to indulge their favourite Mediterranean fantasies in my kitchen. It was the sheer logistics of juggling bodies between beds, sofas, futons and poolside recliners, borrowed from Krystina – which is why I had asked to spend the night on Virgile's sofabed.

‘I saw a friend of yours last night,' he said with a grin.

‘Krystina?' I asked, my hopes of rejection suddenly reviving.

‘No,' he blushed, ‘your neighbour. Monsieur Gros, isn't it? He was down here playing
boules
in the square outside the cave but I think he'd had a few too many in Le Pressoir, so his
boules
kept rolling in amongst my
cuves
. You hadn't told him about me, it seems.'

‘He's very possessive. I didn't think he'd understand.'

‘I don't think he does … Understand about my sort of wine-making, I mean. We got talking, you see. He was telling me how I didn't need half my equipment. “A lot of silliness” were his precise words,' Virgile chuckled. ‘He said I was nearly as bad as this English neighbour of his, the one that he'd been dragging round the Languedoc all year, trying to teach him a thing or two about wine. That's when I guessed there could only be one of you. But don't worry, he said he'd get your ideas straightened out when you helped him with the
vendange
.'

‘He said what?'

‘I didn't think you knew about that bit!' Virgile laughed at my look of blank dismay. ‘But I'm sure the
vendange
is going to be early this year,' he sighed again. ‘The grapes are ripening so fast.'

Then a brighter thought struck him.

He crossed to his little galley kitchen for a large empty gherkin jar. Well, not in fact empty it transpired on closer inspection – the gherkins and their brine had been replaced with water. Or so I thought, until Virgile removed the lid and I smelt the vivid perfume of an
eau de vie
.

‘This is my own,' he said, as he poured us each a little. ‘We call it
marc
. It's distilled from something that we also call
marc
, just to confuse you – the pips and grape skins left over after the pressing. I'll show you in October.'

I took a sip. It was intensely fruity but uncompromisingly fiery.

‘You remember Matthieu?' he asked. ‘The part-time guitarist who came along to help, that first day we planned to do the bottling? Well, distilling's Matthieu's main work. He made this for me. He does it for practically everyone round here. You ought to go and see him.'

So I did.

‘There's not a lot I can show you in August,' says Matthieu, when my car has finished inching its way down one of Montpeyroux's narrowest back alleys to find the borrowed, barn-like garage, where he says he has been ‘squatting' for the last year. ‘You were lucky to catch me. I'm off on holiday tomorrow. You'll need to come in a couple of months to see the action. But as you're here …'

He beckons me out into a chaotically cluttered back garden, where several ancient, rusty-looking distilling contraptions are lurking in the shrubs. If only Manu were here, I think to myself, as he pauses to gather up a crate of oddly assorted lemonade and beer bottles and some tasting glasses.

But then I hear the hoot of a carhorn from the alleyway.

‘You forgot your notebook,' calls a familiar voice from a little red van that has somehow managed to follow me. ‘I persuaded the wife you'd be distraught.'

I am surprised that the prospect of my distraction cut any ice with Mme Gros. She has been making it abundantly clear that she finds the arrival of the pylon far less amusing than her husband does. Our relationship was never one of easy banter, but on at least three occasions in the last few days her refusal to speak to me has been unambiguous. It was hardly surprising. The shiny red eyesore completely dominated the view from her own garden and she held me responsible. I was no longer to be tolerated beneath her roof for so much as a Coca-Cola. At least, not until the advent of her grandchildren.

The day before they arrived, her pursed lips started to soften. Her gimlet gaze became eerily benign. How charming, I thought, the restorative power of infant society. But the real explanation dawned early this morning, when I and all but my heaviest sleeping guests were woken by shrieks and splashes from the garden. It was perfectly simple: I have a pool and Mme Gros does not. Her grandchildren like to swim (they always swam in Uncle Milo's day, it seems) and clearly a cessation of hostilities was considered diplomatic before an assertion of bathing rights.

‘Can't get the youngsters out of your pool,' chuckles Manu, confirming my analysis. ‘It's the only thing they wanted to do for the whole fortnight last year! Oh, yes, delighted,' he adds, accepting a glass of
eau de vie
.

Matthieu explains that it was made with
marc
from Sylvain Fadat, the Montpeyroux grower whom I met in January.

‘That's really how it started,' he says. ‘Most of my work used to be in Burgundy but last year Sylvain was organizing Montpeyroux's Fête des Vins. I was booked to play some ‘gypsy jazz'. In the end I never played, but Sylvain heard about my Burgundian
eaux de vie de marc
and he got quite excited by the idea of having his own. So did a lot of the local growers. Not necessarily as a commercial product, maybe just for private enjoyment, or for giving to regular customers.

‘By the way, you don't have to finish that,' he adds, extracting a particularly grimy-looking bottle from his crate and pouring us each a second glass. ‘I know you're both driving.'

Seeing me about to empty my Domaine d'Aupilhac into a flowerbed, Manu deftly plucks the glass from my hand to juggle three in his two: something which, it has to be said, he is managing commendably well, until a loud snapping of branches startles both of us. Rather as trees are flattened by elephants intent on reaching their waterholes, so, it seems, the surrounding shrubbery is being trampled by someone determined to reach the scene of our tasting. Before Manu can assess the volume of alcohol spilt in this moment of alarm, a well-established pair of oleanders is parted by the emergence of a formidable stomach belonging, we soon learn, to Monsieur Bascou, the owner of the garage and the garden.

‘It's
marcs de cépage
that interest me most,' Matthieu continues, having placed a well-filled glass of the second product in the landlord's expectant hand. ‘Spirits made from one or maybe two distinctive grape varieties. Like this one – just smell it,' he urges. ‘It's Muscat, so grapey …'

To spare Manu the challenge of additional glassware, Matthieu leads the party to a rickety garden table, barely visible beneath an assortment of bottles, tools and potted plants competing for space. A guitar in a half-open case occupies one of the rusty chairs. ‘You should have seen this place before I tidied up,' he whispers, while the slower-moving M. Bascou catches up.

‘This is from Virgile's friend, Olivier at Mas Jullien,' Matthieu explains, as Manu squeezes a broad pair of buttocks between the narrow arms of one of the vacant chairs.

M. Bascou, whose girth makes Manu's waistline look almost wasp-like, seems to know from experience that he would be safer finishing his samples at home. He will, after all, have other opportunities to work his way through the range. So with a farewell assault on a group of mahonias, he sets off to wherever he lives at the other end of the undergrowth.

Matthieu meanwhile rummages for a half-hidden flagon beneath an adjacent arbutus, before pouring us something Cognac-coloured, as a contrast to the clear, colourless products that we have sampled up until now.

‘It's only the effect of oak,' he explains. ‘The tradition began when barrels were the only means of storage and transport. I think stainless steel preserves more individuality but occasionally growers ask for some time in wood.'

‘Why don't they simply make their own?' I ask.

‘Not allowed to. Not without special licences, which don't make sense for a few hundred litres. Anyone with a vine or a fruit tree used to have the right to distil his own …'

‘Me included?'

‘Absolutely. But the Ricard establishment – you know, the
pastis
manufacturer down near Agde – got the law changed in 1953, wiping out small-scale
eau de vie
production for decades.'

‘So how come people like Manu …?'

Before I can reconcile the idea of half a century of prohibition with my New Year introduction to my neighbour's home distillation, an immoderate imitation of a man being stung by a passing insect reminds me that this was not supposed to be widely publicized. Better perhaps, in any event, to be on our way while Manu can still rejoin his vehicle unsupported.

‘But what if this really catches on?' I ask in parting. ‘What if every grower wanted his personal
marc
production?'

‘I'd make sure there were lots more distilleries!' he answers emphatically. ‘I can't spend all day on this business.
Après tout, je suis musicien!
'

*

Fortunately for Virgile, one of the few individuals not observing his patriotic duty to be on holiday this month is a man called Monsieur Ferré. I can tell that he is not on holiday because his head is sticking out of a kind of porthole at the far end of Virgile's
cave
and he is singing snatches of
Carmen
at a volume that tends to draw attention to itself.

There are two of these portholes, in fact, but I had scarcely noticed them before, with so much other equipment squeezed into the usable space in front of them. The initial phase of the boiler-suited baritone's endeavours has, however, revealed a pair of concrete fermentation tanks, built behind what I had simply assumed to be the back wall, and M. Ferré is now busy replastering inside the first of them. Each of these
cuves
is about twice the size of Virgile's existing fibreglass alternatives. Together they will give him vital extra space for this year's much increased production and, apparently, all they need is a week of the singing restorer's labours to bring them back into commission.

Meanwhile, in front of the concrete tanks, I can now see a rectangular pit, about a metre deep in the floor. It is equally invaluable for the
vendange
, says Virgile (without exactly explaining how) and equally in line for M. Ferré's reconditioning, it seems, just as soon as he has finished a
reprise
of the ‘Toreador Aria'.

Leaving M. Ferré aside, however, I do find myself wondering where everyone can have gone. Every second person I try to contact is away on holiday – so much so that you might expect the region to be deserted – but, as if in an effort to compensate, an astonishing proportion of the rest of the world's population appears to be vacationing
here.

The forty-minute drive to the coast can now take most of a weekend and I have to park so far away from the Saturday market that I feel I might as well walk to Lodève from home. And if the postcard queues in the village shop get any worse, Nathalie's
baguettes
will be stale before I even get to the counter.

I have become quite unreasonably resentful at the disruption of my off-season routines.

Paradoxically, however, the time when so many of the locals are away on holiday seems to be the time when every self-respecting village chooses to have its principal annual festivity. On almost any day, I could choose between half a dozen different
fêtes locales
– except, of course, that the traffic is much too congested to venture farther afield than our own. But anyway, what distant excitements could possibly cap the
Abrivado
here at home?

‘What's an
abrivado
?' I asked when I saw the poster in the village café.

‘It's Spanish,' said Babette, without enlarging on its meaning.

She was too busy making a trayful of ice-cream sundaes for a table of tourists. From September to June she would revert to her no-choice, foil-wrapped choc ices but it needed only a handful of Americans unfamiliar with the exchange rate to ensure that her more elaborate, high-season
carte des glaces
paid for itself.