Virgile's Vineyard (8 page)

‘I must have slept through something pretty spectacular!' I called back above the din.

‘
Incroyable!
' he yelled, as we watched some dead branches tumbling rapidly over a little waterfall. ‘Another few centimetres and it would have taken the bridge! Wonderful exercise for the fish though!'

‘Fish?' I hollered hoarsely.

‘Trout,' shouted Manu. ‘
Délicieuses!
Especially upstream a bit, in that pool in your wood. You ought to try them. When things are calmer.'

My drive to meet Virgile for another round of pruning told much the same story after the storm. The rivers had turned a dark muddy brown and the track leading down to the village road was half washed away.

‘
Quelle nuit!
' called M. Vargas, from the foot of his dramatically eroded terraces. He looked as if he had aged four or five years in the last few hours but I was surprised to see him alone. ‘Of course, it would be the morning that Agnès goes down with flu,' he lamented, more despondent than I had known him. ‘
C'est une catastrophe!
'

I felt that I should have offered to help but I was already late and I knew that Virgile liked punctuality.

As I drew into Saint Saturnin, I found him opposite his
cave
, killing time with the owners of Le Pressoir. Neither of them had been in evidence when I had eaten there in January, so Virgile introduced me.

‘Marie-Anne …'

‘
Enchanté
.'

‘Pius …'

‘
Enchanté
.'

‘My English “apprentice” …'

‘
Ah, c'est vous, donc
. It's you who's brought us this English weather!'

Marie-Anne pointed accusingly at the blackboard from which the long night of rain had washed every trace of yesterday's ‘
suggestions du jour'
. She looked tired before the working day had even begun – a condition no doubt explained by the two toddler daughters who came running out of the restaurant to tug at the calf-length hem of her chic linen skirt.

‘
Enchanté, quand-même
,' said Pius warmly.

He looked equally stylish in well-cut trousers and narrow-striped shirt but noticeably less ruffled by the vicissitudes inherent in attempting to run both a restaurant and a family on the same morning. He insisted we go inside to see the new exhibition of abstract paintings he had just been hanging.

‘This isn't really a restaurant,' laughed Virgile. ‘More of a picture gallery with food.'

‘Nonsense, it's a jazz club with food
and
pictures.'

Pius is clearly passionate about all three and it is some time before he has finished detailing the coming season's concerts.

‘I hope you brought your boots,' says Virgile, when we finally set off. ‘It'll be wet.'

The Carignan we are going to work on is another of his newly rented
parcelles
but the fact that he has already carried out the kind of pre-pruning that was left to me in January should have made our task easy. Our boots, however, are soon so caked with mud that we are lumbering down our respective rows like a pair of lead-weighted astronauts, ponderously tending some boggy lunar vineyard.

Yet somehow Virgile remains immaculate. For a moment, I thought a small smudge of mud had besmirched his forehead but then I realized it was only the distinctive little birthmark above his left eyebrow. His denim creases are, of course, impeccable and his dark, neatly trimmed hair as unruffled as if it had just left the barber's shop. He could pass for a city professional on a ‘dress down' day, were it not for one small detail. As he stoops to show me the first sign of life in the vineyard – the rising sap ‘weeping' gently from one of my cuts – I catch sight of a single, narrow, tightly knotted plait of hair, starting just at the nape of his neck and disappearing subversively down the back of his collar. A discreet but significant glimpse of a less conformist spirit.

‘Will you still be bottling your early wine this month?' I ask, as I ponder how best to make sense of a particularly lop-sided old vine.

‘I can't. You see, I still can't decide between paper labels and something printed directly on to the glass,' he calls from a distance, making much faster progress down his own row than I am managing on mine. ‘
Sérigraphie
, the process is called.'

‘Are labels more expensive?' I ask, having only ever seen the alternative on a mass-market supermarket wine.

‘No, it's the serigraphic method that costs more. But labels mean an extra process, sticking them on. An extra machine to organize. It all depends whether I can achieve something smart enough. But bottling and labelling are the least of my problems right now. I'm much more concerned about the bank.'

‘Why, what's happened?'

‘They've rejected my business plan. Refused to finance it. Everyone else that I've shown it to thought it was fine. But this is politics.'

‘I don't follow …'

‘I'm the only private grower in Saint Saturnin. At least, I'm the only
particulier
who sells his wine in bottles. There's the Poujols family, round the corner – two geriatric brothers who have always made their own wine – but they sell it all in bulk to a
négociant
, a middleman. So they don't really count. Everyone else in the village takes his grapes to the co-operative. So there are those who'd rather I didn't succeed.'

‘You're joking …' I bought some wines there only last week and although the premises on the edge of the village were utterly factory-like and charm-free, I have certainly been enjoying the best of their bottles.

‘No, believe me. It's the same with some extra Grenache I was hoping to rent. The owner's been leant on. He's says he'll either let the land to some youngsters in the village who work with the co-operative or he'll take an EC subsidy to rip out the vines – even though they're perfectly healthy. In other words, anything except rent it to me.'

‘But that's outrageous! I'm amazed you seem so relaxed about it.'

‘Well, what's the worst they can they do to me?'

All sorts of possibilities for agricultural sabotage spring to mind but I keep them to myself.

‘Don't look so anxious,' he laughs. ‘I can manage without the Grenache. And I'll find another bank – I've got a meeting this afternoon and another next week. I'll be all right. But I ought to be on my way. As soon as I've smartened myself up a bit.'

I wish him luck and head back home, wondering what I can find in the fridge for a late lunch. But no sooner have I opened the door to consider my limited options than Manu is there on my doorstep with a glistening fresh trout in a plastic bag.

‘A little treat for you – from your wood,' he explains. ‘I think you'll be impressed. The two we had for lunch were excellent.
Formidable!
Even the wife's cooking couldn't spoil them … No really, there's no need to thank me,' he adds. ‘What else are neighbours for?'

Before I have time to ponder this nicety of etiquette, a furious female voice thunders from the other side of the stream.

‘MANU! Come back here! I want to know how I'm supposed to put my shopping in the deep freeze when you've filled it up with fish!'

*

‘You didn't tell me you were off to Saint Chinian,' said Krystina, as soon as I answered the telephone. ‘Escorted by your neighbour, I gather.'

‘Well, you see, it's more of a wine day,' I faltered, as I realized that I must have mentioned the excursion to Babette who must have felt it her duty to give the event some wider publicity.

‘I'm not your keeper, of course,' she bristled. ‘But I can't send you off in a state of historical ignorance. I'll pop up at once.'

‘I was just locking up,' I explained, as Manu's horn reminded me that we were already late.

‘Then we'd better do the crammer's course right now,' she decided, as I performed an elaborate mime in the doorway entitled ‘person reluctantly taking telephone call', in the hope that Manu would go easy on the horn. ‘You remember our friends Saint Guilhem and Saint Benedict of Aniane?' (Loud horn blast.) ‘Well, the Languedoc in those days was a very small world. They had this other friend called – confusingly enough – Saint Anian.' (Louder, more insistent horn blast.) ‘And it was Anian who left Aniane and founded Saint Chinian in 782. Hence the name.'

‘You're losing me.'

‘Saint was pronounced “Santch” in those days,' she explained, in the special, exaggerated tones perfected long ago for her slow learners. ‘Santch Anian … Saint Chinian.' (Even louder, syncopated rhythmic horn blast.)

‘Krystina, I've really got to go …'

I had no time to feel guilty. I was too busy feeling car-sick, as Manu did everything within the little red van's power to make up for lost time. The village of Saint Chinian lies only about fifty kilometres to the south-west but it is separated by winding river valleys and tortuous mountain passes that double that distance. And for much of the cliff-edge mountainous stretch, the hairpin bends were made hairier still by a programme of roadworks which had recklessly removed every last metre of safety wall before starting to renew even the most vital parts of it. Not that such trifles inhibited Manu from using both hands to point out distant beauty spots at the bottom of precipitous drops; or from accelerating down the middle of the only straight descent to make sure that none of the high-performance vehicles trapped behind us could overtake. Indeed, as we arrived in Saint Chinian, I was half wondering whether Krystina's driving might have been more soothing.

Manu has already briefed me on Saint Chinian's key facts as he sees them: ‘Twenty villages … Separate
appellation
since '82 … Mostly red, bit of
rosé
… What more did I want to know?' He is therefore straining at the leash to sniff out a grower or two before lunch, but I somehow feel that I owe it to Krystina to track down the abbey first. There is nothing obvious on the skyline, so we ask at the elegant seventeenth-century Mairie, where every member of staff pulls the blankest of faces until one of their number remembers Mme Guibert.

‘You're standing in it,' says this small, serious-looking lady, having sped to our rescue on her bicycle. ‘What's left of it anyway. It used to be the abbot's lodgings, before the Revolution. Just as our Salle des Fêtes was part of the church's gothic nave. There was also a second, smaller abbey on the other side of the river but they flattened all that was left of that to build the rugby stadium in about 1900. No, there's really more monastic legacy in our wines than in our buildings nowadays.'

Manu's thirst-riven features could hardly spell ‘I told you so' more clearly. Returning to the village square, he would happily knock at the door of any
vigneron
possessed of a bottle and a corkscrew, but Virgile has advised me to look out for the Moulinier family.

‘We'll have to ask,' says Manu, hurrying into an impressively comprehensive-looking wine emporium, where he accosts the energetic young man restocking the shelves. ‘Moulinier,' he barks. ‘Can't find the blighters anywhere. Just like all the rest – too damn full of themselves to put up a sign! Been looking for hours!'

‘Then look no further,
monsieur
.' The young man politely offers a business card. ‘Pascal Moulinier. Welcome to our shop.'

Manu's discomfiture is only momentary: if a tasting is to be organized before lunchtime, there is no time for apologies. But to his dismay, the youngest of the Moulinier line proposes a preliminary visit to his vineyards.

‘Everyone thought my father was crazy,' he chuckles, as we head for the countryside. ‘Giving up a solid job with the Customs to try his luck at wine-making. No experience. No money. No vines. Just some long-abandoned hectares of
garrigue
, picked up cheaply because no one else would touch them. In the early eighties, this was. Then a couple of years, just clearing and planting.'

‘Like the medieval monasteries,' I suggest, with the fellow feeling of a man who really ought to be strimming his own wilderness.

‘Exactly. And just like them, we spent a good few years experimenting to find out what worked where. Did you know the monks would often wait a whole generation to see if land was good enough for wine, before committing themselves to building? Well, here's our own belated gesture of commitment.' We are now in the middle of a very muddy building site. ‘By this year's harvest, we'll finally have somewhere big enough to house both the family
and
the wines – and right at the heart of our vineyards.'

His excited confidence is surely belied by the surrounding half-built chaos. Manu taps an impatient foot in the builders' rubble; he has correctly deduced that there can be little prospect of a tasting here amongst the scaffolding and concrete mixers. But Pascal has mysteries to unfold for us first.

‘How's your geology?' he asks unexpectedly.

‘Non-existent,' I admit.

‘It's very important in Saint Chinian,' he enthuses. ‘Well, we think so, anyway. We've got perfect examples of the area's three soils on these slopes here.' A sweeping gesture encompasses the carefully tended patches of vines alternating with substantial tracts of untamed
garrigue
all around us.

‘Oh, please don't make him tell us about them!' reads the thought bubble above Manu's head, but his prayer is unanswered.

‘Those steep, grey, gravelly slopes behind us are called
schiste
. Slate, I think you say in English. Marvellous, heat-retaining soil, giving vivid, high-definition wines. Over here, a mixture of clay and limestone. More pebbly, producing fuller, softer wines. Wonderful soil again, except when you're breaking it up for planting. Then finally down here, we've got sandstone. Quite rare in St Chinian but fantastic for Grenache …'