Virgile's Vineyard (26 page)

She indicates the uppermost of three crates of bottles, each about a metre cubed.

‘You have to be a monkey, to taste our wines!' she laughs, as I search for a foothold on the bottom crate. ‘In theory, you see, it's me that's responsible for cellarwork and marketing. Not forgetting the endless paperwork. That's me too. The vineyard activity's meant to be Daniel but with the state demanding more and more time from its teachers …'

‘Do you have much help?' I ask, clinging desperately to the top crate with my fingernails.

‘A boy in the
cave
who needs constant supervision,' she replies. ‘No superabundance of neurones there either! But I'm fed up with brilliant apprentices who disappear to found their own domaines as soon as we've taught them anything.'

I have to keep reminding myself that this is the patient half of the marriage.

‘But what have you got there?' she calls, when I successfully stretch my hand through a crack to touch glass at last.

‘I've no idea,' I say, as I inch my way downward with an unlabelled bottle.

‘What does it say on the cork?' she asks.

‘1995,' I manage to read at my awkward angle.

‘No, put it back,' she says. ‘I must have got the crates muddled. It's '96 we want. Much more forward than '95 for Pinot Noir, so we'll sell it first. Try the next one along,' she suggests, as I struggle back up again.

After more gymnastic activity than my limbs have known in a decade, we finally assemble the precise six bottles that she had in mind and retreat across the windswept courtyard to a smart little tasting room at the top of a short staircase on the side of the house. We sit on cold metal chairs at a café-style table and Mme Boyer pulls her sheepskin coat more tightly round her. The room is not significantly cosier than the
cave
. It is sparely decorated but a poster on a freshly painted wall underlines the fact that the Clos Centeilles forms part of a recently recognized, superior sub-section of the Minervois, called La Livinière.

‘I'm happy to belong,' says Mme Boyer. ‘But you have to appreciate, these
Appellation Contrôlée
rules aren't about making wine
good
. They're just about making it
less bad
!'

She cites the minimum planting densities, which have been puzzling me since someone mentioned them earlier in the year. I could understand a maximum but why a minimum?

‘A crude way of limiting yields,' she explains. ‘Close planting makes the vines struggle a bit, reducing their yields. So setting a minimum makes up for growers too lazy or ignorant to prune as hard and debud as thoroughly as they should. But take my word for it, the vines' suffering always shows …'

Happily, Mme Boyer's reservations about the regulatory framework are not interfering with her bottle-openings. I already have a glass of 1998 ‘Capitelle de Centeilles', made exclusively, she tells me, from Cinsault – the variety which, according to Daniel, made the Languedoc's reputation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Into a second, she is pouring a 1999 ‘Carignanissime', made exclusively, as its name suggests, from Carignan.

‘Ironic really,' she admits. ‘Daniel's advice to his pupils has always been, “Rip up your Carignan and start again – don't tinker around trying to redeem its deficiencies with
cépages améliorateurs
.” Pretty iconoclastic stuff in the seventies. The traditionalists practically threw him out of his teaching post, forgetting that Carignan was unknown here until after phylloxera. But now, of course, with every second
vigneron
making his hundred per cent Syrah, they simply shrug their shoulders and tell him “
c'est normal
”! It makes him apoplectic.'

‘But presumably he didn't … practise what he preached?' I venture, as I lift my glass of Carignanissime.

‘It's a long story,' she says. ‘Daniel's original four hectares, about ten kilometres away, were all replanted by the end of the seventies, well before most of his imitators. Syrah, Mourvèdre and Pinot Noir, he used – traditional Languedoc
cépages
, he insisted, from the days before phylloxera. Even this Pinot Noir,' she adds, as she pours me the so-called ‘Guigniers de Centeilles' that cost me so much muscle-ache to extract from its crate.

‘Then in the summer of 1990, we suddenly lost the use of the
cave
we were renting over there – I say “we” because I'd also appeared on the scene by this time. So we had absolutely nowhere to vinify the harvest. Talk about panic! But right at the last minute, some other purchaser backed out of buying this place. We loved it as soon as we saw it but the house was semi-derelict, the
cave
only just about usable and it came with an additional ten hectares of Grenache Noir, Cinsault and Carignan, all in urgent need of picking. With only primitive cellar equipment, we were so desperate we thought we'd have to sell everything in bulk for a song. We didn't even dare to taste the wines until the spring. And then we suddenly discovered how rich and concentrated the Cinsault was.'

‘But the Carignan?' I prompt.

‘Ah yes, the Carignan.' Mme Boyer pulls a face, which is difficult to reconcile with the attractive, fruity wine in the glass. ‘It left us pretty cold, to be honest, seventy-year-old vines or no seventy-year-old vines. Heavy tannins, no aroma and a tendency to dry out as it aged. But we couldn't eliminate it all at once because of the time involved – not just the ripping up and replanting but the wait while alternatives established themselves. So I suppose we got used to it. We certainly came to despise it less. We learned, for instance, that we could soften the tannins and enhance the aroma with a
macération carbonique
.'

‘And the ageing problem?'

‘Drink it young,' she laughs, as she completes my somewhat bewildering row of samples with her top wine – a Syrah, Grenache and Mourvèdre blend called ‘Clos de Centeilles'.

Before she can elaborate, there is an ominous-sounding crash from the direction of the
cave
and she rises quickly to her feet.

‘I'd better leave you to it. I told you about the low neurone count out there.' But then she pauses with one foot halfway out of the door. ‘You have to understand why we went into wine-making. We loved fine wines, Burgundy especially in Daniel's case – hence the passion for Pinot Noir. Unlike most growers who never touch a drop from outside their own domaines, let alone outside their regions.'

Another crash.

‘You know, sometimes I'm not sure the combined IQs of the
tractoriste
and the cellar boy add up to treble figures,' she sighs, looking despairingly down the stairs, but still she lingers a moment longer. ‘We weren't interested in being the biggest or the best or the most expensive,' she says. ‘We wanted to make wine that people would
enjoy
. That's what we believe wine is for.'

Yet another crash.

‘Maybe not even
double
figures,' she calls, as she speeds down to the
cave
.

*

‘Close that door!' orders Virgile, when I linger for a moment in the entrance to the
cave
. ‘I'm trying to keep the cold out. There are three electric heaters in here. It's warmer than my flat.'

It seems such a short time since it was the heat that we were doing everything we could to keep out – almost as short indeed as the interval since ice buckets were rudely chilling the same red wines that we now nurse up to ‘room temperature' in carefully cupped hands. But the swift return of colder weather has left Virgile with a temperature-related problem on his hands. While most of his malolactic fermentations have obligingly finished, with every last drop of malic acid eliminated, the cooler temperatures have encouraged two of them – the Grenache and one of his Syrahs – to stop halfway.

‘If the heaters don't get them going, they'll stay like this until the spring,' he says.

‘And would that be serious?' I ask.

‘It would be inconvenient,' he says, preparing to lock up, ‘not being able to finish with a process and move on. It would also mean I couldn't give them any more sulphur dioxide, exposing them to bacteria over the winter. I'd certainly sleep easier if they started up again. The Syrah, I think, may already be under way – you can hear a bit of bubbling, if you put your ear to the
cuve
– but I'm not sure about the Grenache. I'm waiting for a fax with the latest analyses. I think the concrete may be insulating it too well but I'm afraid there's just too much of it for me to move it out into the only fibreglass
cuve
that's empty.'

‘And the sheep-shed?' I enquire, as we abandon the snugness of the cave for the chilly square outside. ‘Still waiting to hear from the Poujols?'

‘They rang me this morning.'

‘To say “yes”?'

‘To say they haven't managed to meet yet.'

*

‘
Tous pour chacun; chacun pour tous
,' muses Manu at the sight of the combative slogan set in stone on the façade of the Maraussan Cave Coopérative, between Béziers and the Minervois. All for each and each for all.

‘They needed a fighting spirit in 1901,' says the aptly named Michel Bataille, the co-operative's energetic-looking young President.

‘To found this place, you mean?' Manu slowly latches on to the significance of the bright centenary posters in the entranceway.

‘Correct,' says the President, as he takes us into a rather soulless meeting room lined with fading black-and-white photographs of the pioneering participants. ‘Remember, the turn of the century was a time of crisis. Wine wars and all that … But Maraussan's initiative was a bit more positive.'

‘Was this the country's first wine co-op?' asks Manu, still worrying away at the message on the posters.

‘Correct again. You see, the Languedoc wine trade was dominated by two extremely wealthy groups – the major châteaux and the powerful
négociants
, the middlemen, who had such a stranglehold on pricing they could buy up the wines of the smaller growers for next to nothing. That is, until Elie Cathala, a socialist lemonade-maker of all people, had the bright idea of cutting the middlemen out. He saw an opportunity to sell directly to the numerous purchasing co-operatives that the fast-expanding working populations of Paris were already establishing. Provided, that is, that the growers could achieve a sufficient critical mass and be seen to be sufficiently socialist themselves.'

Manu could not have chosen a better moment for a listless wander down the room and a myopic squint at a well-preserved coloured chart hanging between the photographs. M. Bataille explains that this is an early graphic explanation of the establishment's original principles, produced for the benefit of the Ministry of Agriculture, where I suspect official eyebrows may have been raised as high as Manu's are this afternoon.

‘Twenty per cent of the profits went on proletarian propaganda,' the President elaborates. ‘A further five per cent to the central co-operative movement, twenty-five per cent to other workers' organizations and only the remaining fifty divided between the co-op's actual members. And divided, what's more, in equal shares, regardless of contribution … But it worked,' he responds to Manu's involuntary shudder. ‘By 1905, they had over two hundred and thirty members in a village of only four hundred families. They had their own railway trucks and soon they established a network of over thirty distribution centres round the country. They were shifting fifty thousand hectolitres a year at a time when many of their neighbours were pouring last year's wine into the river to make way for the next vintage.'

‘And all made here?' I ask, as we follow him into a cavernous
cave
, lined with gigantic wooden barrels.

‘Not at all,' he replies. ‘Not at first. These earliest collective efforts were more about marketing than wine-making. And even when they got this building up in 1905, it couldn't handle more than fifteen per cent of the volume they were selling. Until it was extended, the rest was made and stored at members' homes.'

I am surprised how little activity there is today. Even allowing for the fact that this is a relatively quiet period, the
cave
has a neglected air that is hard to reconcile with all the certificates for wine fair medals adorning the walls. But M. Bataille anticipates my thoughts. In 1995, he tells us, Maraussan banded together with half a dozen neighbouring co-operatives to form the Vignerons du Pays d'Ensérune – the largest co-operative wine enterprise in France, with 1,880 members and nearly fifty salaried staff – enabling them to concentrate production in the three most modern sites.

‘But we haven't forgotten those fundamental values,' he insists, turning back to one of the centenary posters and its quotation from the co-operative supremo for the
département
, extolling the virtues of ‘solidarity, equity, the sharing of knowledge, means and risks … the collective struggle in the service of the individual and against individualism …'

Manu winces more convulsively than before.

‘We no longer reward everyone equally,' M. Bataille reassures him. ‘You could do that with a single product, the one anonymous
vin de table
. But now, with more than twenty different wines, at widely different prices, we have to have different rates, based on quality as well as quantity.'

At the age of forty-two, Michel Bataille has been elected President of the Ensérune umbrella structure, as well as that of Maraussan, for each of the last four years. He rushed back this afternoon, in his city suit, from a conference in Montpellier, where he had been discussing falling market shares with his opposite numbers. This evening, he says it will be pullover and jeans for an emergency meeting to rally the uncomprehending troops in the face of ever-strengthening New World competition.