Virgile's Vineyard (23 page)

As he hurries out into the square with the towel round his waist, I notice a postcard sellotaped to the front of the fuse-box. It features a photograph of Che Guevara, overprinted with a catchphrase. ‘
Soyons réalistes,
' it says. ‘
Exigeons l'impossible!
' (Let's be realistic – Demand the impossible!)

It could be Virgile's own motto, I reflect, as I take the key.

*

Five or six of the branches on the plum trees have snapped, which is hardly surprising. The weight must have been intolerable. Nature's niggardliness with the cherries and apricots has been absurdly over-compensated by a plum crop of epic proportions. Even the insects, which appear to have systematically punctured almost every pear and apple in the orchard, have given the plum trees an inexplicably wide berth.

Ludicrously, as soon as Virgile's
vendange
was over, I compounded the problem by mounting an almost twenty-four-hour guard. Too late, the full enormity of the potential harvest has borne in on me and, just when a dawn raid from Manu would be the greatest blessing imaginable, Mme Gros has been refusing to accept anything more than the daintiest of punnets.

‘Please don't worry about us,' she bristled, with the deeply affronted air of one who would sooner see her husband drink himself to oblivion than allow him anywhere near my plums.

I have been making enough jam to fill a market stall. I have bottled some of the fruit in alcohol for the winter and pickled more in vinegar. I have filled every spare centimetre of the freezer, given bulging carrier bags to anyone in the area who I thought would let me and even borrowed a prune-making machine from the Vargases. But still the trees are heavily laden.

A hearty casserole in the shelter of the village café's reinstated plastic windbreak has brought temporary cheer but no solutions. I am just beginning to wonder whether I should humble myself to beg for Manu's intervention, when Babette arrives with an enormous slice of tart, heaped high with what are unmistakably the plums that she had from me.

‘What a treat!' I gulp, as I fight back the tide of nausea.

*

‘Nobody blames your uncle,' says Mme Gros, as her penetrating stare unequivocally accuses me. ‘No one expects a dying man to worry about potholes in the drive. And we know you've had a lot on your own plate. But we were rather hoping by now …'

We are standing on opposite sides of one of the deeper chasms in the track that leads up from the post boxes to our respective properties. We share the use of at least a hundred and ninety of its two hundred metres and, fondly imagining that the cost of its upkeep would be similarly shared, I have in fact, for a number of weeks, been looking for a tactful opportunity to broach the subject of a joint repair bill. But Mme Gros has saved me the trouble by coming straight to the point. The drive, she insists, belongs to me and me alone and, with it, the responsibility for maintenance. Her
notaire
was quite clear on the point.

‘It's been bad enough all summer,' her reproaches continue, as we stand aside to let the wheels of a little red, grape-laden van spin deeper into the remaining gravel. ‘But with all this coming and going for the
vendange
, it's a nightmare,' she grumbles, as she stumps off to the village to purchase one of the Languedoc's less munificent harvest lunches.

Manu's picking began only a couple of days ago. The ripening of the grapes is always relatively late up here because we are so much higher than villages like Virgile's, but this year most of the local growers were able to start earlier than usual, at the beginning of last week. However, the timing of Manu's grape-gathering is always geared to the four or five days of sick-leave taken by his sons and, oddly, this seems to require a degree of co-ordinated pre-planning. So it is a vanload of somewhat overripe fruit that finally lurches out of its rut and up the hill to the semi-derelict lean-to that serves as the family
cave
.

Rather to my surprise, I have seen very little of either Manu or the sons. The notion that I was to be favoured with a place in their picking team seems to have been quietly forgotten. I imagine they are all far too suspicious of fancy ideas picked up in Saint Saturnin to let me anywhere near the scene of their vinicultural crimes. But notwithstanding the rather mushy-looking grapes, Manu still seems quietly confident that he can maintain his customary quality levels.

‘Quantity might be down though,' he warned me last night. ‘I might have to ration you next year.'

Virgile's
vendange
is not in fact quite over. During the last two weeks, Magda and Margherita have seen active service with a variety of other growers who, for various reasons, had later harvests than Virgile. Yesterday, however, they were called back to base for a final campaign because Virgile had not yet made his beloved pink Carthagène.

He originally planned to do the same as last year and make it with a blend of Syrah and Grenache Noir. However, this year the grapes were so ripe and the skins so richly pigmented that the juice was already deeply coloured before it even left the
érafloir
. So were the Carignan and Cinsault. Too deeply coloured, he reluctantly decided, to achieve the delicate, pale
rosé
that he wanted.

At first, having sent all his Grenache Blanc to the Gignac co-operative, he could see no alternative. But then he remembered some slightly later-ripening varieties of white table grapes that came with one of his rented ‘job lots'.

‘But how will you make it pink?' I asked, as I joined Arnaud and the Polish girls for a positively last session with the secateurs.

‘I still haven't worked that one out,' he admitted unconcernedly. ‘There's a tiny bit of Grenache Noir that we overlooked before.'

‘You mean, this time, the
rosé
really will be a blend of white and red?'

‘Time will tell,' he replied.

We stripped the field of every last Chasselas grape but still we needed more. Reluctantly, Virgile accepted the sacrifice of most of his precious Servent, the variety he had hoped would be keeping his table supplied until the end of the year. It was, however, a few kilometres away, so he and Arnaud went ahead in the van, while I followed behind with the ‘
ladeez'
.

We had just reached the relevant vines and I was about to pull up beside the van when I smelt something burning. On closer analysis, I could see something burning. There was smoke coming from the window of Virgile's van, and as he jumped out, gasping, from the cabin, it billowed from underneath the steering wheel.

‘Drive away!' screamed Magda, as Virgile started ripping out his dashboard to get access to the burning wires. ‘Get the car away from the fire!' she shrieked again, as Margherita gave voice to what I took to be similar sentiments in hysterical Polish.

Arnaud, stumbling from the other side of the cabin, yelled something unintelligible from lungs choked with the acrid smoke. ‘Disconnect the battery!' he tried again.

‘It's in the back!' shouted Virgile, still wrestling beneath the steering wheel, where flames had started to flicker.

‘For god's sake, drive away!' was still the preferred option for Magda and Margherita, and it struck me they did have a point. It would hardly be constructive to fuel the fire with a second vehicle. So, feeling less than heroic, I followed their recommendation and drove to the opposite corner of the field. By the time we ran back, we found that Arnaud the electrician had saved the day. The drama, like the fire, had fizzled out with the isolation of the battery.

The girls were by now in tears. They had been close to tears ever since discovering the night before that all the buses back to Poland were full for the next two weeks, which meant they would have to face another three-day train journey. The self-ignition of the van was the last straw.

Virgile, on the other hand, seemed as cheerful and focused on the work in hand as ever. ‘Thought we'd be roasting the Chasselas for a minute, there,' he observed wryly, as he started distributing the empty crates for the final gathering of Servent.

He did, however, have a problem. His van was immobilized and he needed a lift from me to pick up his tractor as the only other means of delivering the grapes to the
cave
, and a mobile phone call
en route
confirmed his suspicion that his ‘minimum insurance' did not extend to fire damage. The business plan blessed by his bank was going to need a bit of adjustment. Likewise his plans for the rest of the day, while he tried to find a competent repairman who could also lend him a car. The Carthagène would have to wait for twenty-four hours.

‘But I still haven't decided how I'm going to make it pink,' he confesses this morning, as he takes off his shoes and socks and rolls up the legs of his jeans past the knee. Saint Saturnin is about to be treated to a display of the dying art of foot treading, which the space constraints of the
cave
require him to stage in the square outside.

The awkward metal bulk of the
érafloir
has at last been banished to the garage but its place has been taken by the almost equally sizeable wooden wine press, which I last saw in January – now borrowed back, it seems, from whoever lent it for last year's operations. It is the old-fashioned, hand-operated variety, shaped like an enormous drum, with slatted sides, through which the juice will escape as a wooden lid pushes gradually down on the grapes. Arnaud has almost finished scrubbing it ready for action but first come the gentler preliminaries from Virgile, as he rinses his feet in a bucket and steps into the first of a line of crates which I have been organizing on the cobbles.

‘Don't we get to see the boxer-shorts today?' calls Marie-Anne from outside Le Pressoir, as Virgile hitches up his jeans and advances to the next crate, like a seaside paddler stepping from one rock pool to another.

‘No chance,' he shouts, as Arnaud and I begin to fill the drum with the first of the freshly trodden grapes.

‘What's your price?' chimes in Pius.

‘Take every wine but mine off your list!' comes Virgile's first and final offer, which predictably puts an end to the negotiations.

The first of the juice is already streaming through the wooden slats as Arnaud – a tower of stamina and strength, as always – fits the lid and starts the strenuous, steady rocking backwards and forwards of the long, sideways-projecting lever that slowly forces the lid down.

‘I've cracked it!' proclaims Virgile, still squelching about in the final crate, as the level of frothy white juice in our plastic collecting tub rises. ‘I've figured out how to make it pink.'

Climbing swiftly out of the grape pulp, he pauses only for the briefest of rinses before starting to organize his pump. The inward pipe he rests in the nearly brimming tub, while the outward one is hung over the top of a recently emptied
cuve
– or rather, not quite emptied, as Virgile explains. It still contains the skins and pips from one of his Syrahs, which should have been emptied out for distillation yesterday, when the wine was drawn off. But the problems with the van left a lot of things undone.

‘This should give a touch of Syrah flavour, as well as the bit of colour,' he explains, as he starts to pump the pure white grape juice over the
marc
. ‘Mustn't leave it too long though. Maybe a couple of hours.'

The juice from the second load of pulp undergoes the same process, except that it is already subtly pink from the small amount of forgotten Grenache Noir that was rustled up for the purpose. Even before the pumping is complete, Virgile runs off a sample from the bottom of the
cuve
and finds to his dismay that, less than half an hour after the infusion began, the colour is already too dark – a proof, if any were needed, of the incredible concentration of this vintage.

‘There go my Christmas table grapes,' he sighs resignedly. ‘I'm going to need every last bunch of Servent to make this pale enough again.'

*

‘I am
not
going trainspotting,' I told Krystina, in a rare moment of self-assertion. ‘I don't care how enormous the impact of the railways on the nineteenth-century wine world was, I don't need a field trip to grasp the point.'

There were trees to be pruned – ludicrously tall and straggly fruit trees in desperate need of my saw.

‘
C'est un peu tard, quand même
,' said the Vargases – both, for once, as fit as they are ever likely to be – when I announced my plans last week. ‘Summer's the time for pruning, if you want any fruit next year. Otherwise you risk diseases. Still, beggars can't be choosers …'

I persuaded myself this morning, however, that it was nearly as warm as an average July in the Cotswolds so I may just get away with it.

Krystina has grudgingly appeared in a kind of
haute couture
safari suit, which is apparently the closest she gets to gardening clothes. But her sulky demeanour as she steadies my ladder tells me it could take some while to jolly her back into full pedagogic gear.

‘Give me a date,' I coax, as I tackle the last of the ridiculously high branches on an apricot.

‘1855,' she mumbles grumpily.

‘The year of what?' I prompt, as the branch begins to topple.

‘The first train from Montpellier to Paris,' she admits unwillingly.

‘But I thought the Parisians were already drinking our stuff,' I encourage her, exchanging the pruning saw for secateurs with the aim of shaping the remaining growth into something more recognizably tree-like.

‘Only when they had to,' comes the reflex correction. She may be about to weaken.

‘It wasn't so much a question of likes and dislikes, more a matter of price and durability,' she starts again, then checks herself, agonizes for a second and finally throws grouchiness to the wind.

‘You see, the railways cut the cost of transport by eighty per cent. And they were so much faster than the canals – even the lighter, more perishable wines could travel. The vineyards round Paris, with their much less favourable climates, simply couldn't compete and were quickly turned over to cereals …'

Krystina, predictably, has nearly as many ‘Tales from the Railway Bank' as I have apricot trees, but as I diversify to the almonds, so she broadens her own theme. ‘The railways were only a part of a wider industrial revolution,' she explains, still anchoring my rickety wooden ladder. ‘The urban population explosion brought enormously expanded demand at the cheaper end of the market. Hérault wine production nearly quadrupled between 1850 and 1870, as more and more vines spilled down to the plains and grapes like Aramon and Terret yielded dramatically higher volumes …'

I am no longer really concentrating, feeling suddenly overwhelmed by the chaos of severed timber that needs to be tidied up in the little remaining daylight. Small for the outdoor bonfire, large for the hearth indoors was the kind of thing that I had in mind but Krystina has no patience with such fastidious segregation. She hurls everything in sight towards a formidable unlit pyre near the stream. It is already almost as big as a bonfire safely can be. In fact, it is starting to look like some sort of defensive barrier between me and my neighbours.

‘You realize that bonfires are illegal until the First of November, don't you?' calls Mme Gros with evident satisfaction from the opposite side. ‘Especially with your drive impassable to fire engines!'

*

‘Just the Carignans left to do,' says Virgile, as he opens a tap.

The traditionally fermented version immediately gushes out from its
cuve
and into the handily perforated crate, which is suspended as an improvised sieve across the freshly scrubbed pit in the cellar floor. He catches a little for a swift appraisal of colour, smell and taste and passes it to me. (It is already surprisingly drinkable – firm and fairly one-dimensional, yes, but not at all ‘difficult'.) An activation of the pump sends it gurgling on through a series of hosepipes to an empty
cuve
on the opposite side of the cellar, leaving only the wine-soaked
marc
in the original. He opens the porthole at the bottom and starts shovelling out the
marc
by hand. A dozen or so bucket-loads – perhaps half the total amount to be processed – and the waiting wine press is full.

‘Arnaud's favourite,' jokes Virgile, as the taller and slimmer of the two young men applies himself to the rhythmic pushing and pulling of the metal lever that slowly forces the residual wine from the skins to the chain of waiting buckets. ‘Hogs all the best jobs for himself,' he teases, as the skins get drier and Arnaud's puffing gets louder.

Virgile's efforts are needed on the other side of the press, constantly tasting the bright purple-red liquid that is flowing increasingly slowly from the broad metal spout. At a certain point he decides that the wine is losing finesse. ‘See for yourself,' he says, as he offers the glass. ‘It's harder and greener-tasting.' So the remaining bucket-loads are consigned to a separate
cuve
of mixed variety
vin de presse
, already started in the earlier sessions. I ask about its fate and he says he'll wait and see.

‘It may give extra weight to the principal blend,' he suggests. ‘Or I might make something completely separate. It depends how things develop … And on my mood …'

Duplicate quantities from a second press-full complete the procedure and then there is the little matter of filling the tractor-trailer with the newly compacted skins. Virgile and I manage to heave the four substantial crates from today's operations unaided, while the tireless Arnaud starts what promises to be a couple of hours of cleaning up. However, the dozen or so crates from the previous days, which have been gathering flies on a patch of wasteland outside the borrowed sheep-shed on the edge of the village, need the strength of all three of us because they have, unfortunately, been gathering rainwater as well. This not only makes them almost impossibly heavy, it also leaves a blood-red trail dripping all the way through the village as Virgile drives off.

‘You're going to be popular,' I say when I draw in behind him at our destination.

But I need hardly have worried, as most of the other tractor-loads queuing behind us are oozing in a similar fashion. It is one of the busiest afternoons of the year in Saint André de Sangonis, a village about ten kilometres from Saint Saturnin and home to one of the
département
's largest distilleries.