Grape Expectations (20 page)

  'I don't know how we will do that with Sean one-handed. His parents leave tomorrow. I couldn't do it alone.'

  '
C'est vrai
. But it would be a pity to lose it.
C'est très joli
.'

  The botrytis noble rot was not what the average person would call pretty. The grapes were shrivelled and mottled; grey, yellow and black; many were furry… but they tasted heavenly. The
Botrytis cinerea
attacks the grape skins, creating little perforations that allow the grape to shrivel and concentrate its juices without losing its freshness. In the process the 'noble rot' imparts delectable honey, almond and apricot flavours and creates a wine that is deliciously concentrated.

  'What press will we use?' I asked, as much to myself as to Lucille.

  We had planned to borrow a manual press from a neighbouring winemaker but Sean needed to collect it with the tractor – which remained out of the question given the state of his hand. To use our electric press we needed a minimum load. Saussignac has to be hand-picked selectively over a minimum of three picks. Because the botrytis develops at different rates on different bunches you pick only the grapes that are at the level of development you want – this means picking selectively multiple times through the same vineyard. For most winegrowers it is three to five picks spread over several weeks from late September to early November. I had no idea how much yield we would get from our selected rows at each pick.

  'You should ask one of the other Saussignac producers. Someone experienced. I am not a specialist in
liquoreux
,' said Lucille.
Liquoreux
is the French word for a botrytis-style dessert wine like Saussignac or Sauternes.

  'We want to do a light Saussignac, something around eighteen to twenty,' I said, surprising her with my knowledge on the subject. We wanted to make our wine slightly less sweet than the average Saussignac, which was around 21 or 22 potential alcohol (also known as 'must weight' – a measure of the amount of sugar in grape juice, which indicates the amount of alcohol that could be produced if it is all fermented to alcohol, rather than left as residual sugar). This meant we needed to pick to have a level of around 330 grams of sugar per litre. Of this, around 200 grams would become alcohol, creating a level of 12 per cent and the rest would remain as natural residual sugar in the wine.

  'Be careful,' she said in her typical cautious manner. 'It's easy to make a mistake and land up with too little sugar to be AOC Saussignac.'

  At my request Thierry Daulhiac, the president of the Saussignac appellation, came round that evening. We walked down to Lenvège and he tasted a few grapes then pulled out his refractometer. I had bought one for Sean the week of the finger amputation; we hadn't used it yet. Thierry took a bunch of grapes in his fist and squeezed the juice expertly over the screen. He looked into it then passed it to me.

  
'C'est déjà au dessus de vingt-cinq. Tu vois?'
(It's already over twenty-five. Do you see?)

  I nodded sagely.

  '
C'est joli. Très joli.
Very pretty, yes, even more pretty than mine.'

  I was getting the idea about the 'pretty' term, an indicator of the quality of the noble rot rather than physical beauty. I was taken aback by the disarming honesty that allowed him to admit this to me, an outsider without a clue. He walked along the rows looking at the grapes.

  'There is enough for you to press it in the electric press, I think. Anyway, if there isn't enough there are ways to fill it.'

  'How?' I asked.

  'A rice bag for example, or
autrefois
, in the old days, they used straw.'

  'Where would I get a rice bag?'

  'I don't know. You'll have to ask someone who uses the same press, perhaps the Sadoux.'

  'How should we pick to get a result of eighteen to twenty?'

  'Perhaps the best way is to do a medium pick on the first pass, then check the level and on the next pass adjust the pick to compensate.' We walked down a row and Thierry showed me which bunches he would take – brown or mixed gold and brown showing good botrytis – and which he would leave – gold or green and gold – to get a medium result. I tried to imprint the images in my head. Thierry's boyish face spread into a wide ironic grin.

  '
Enfin
, it's not easy.'

  It looked easy for him. Dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, he had such an easy confidence in the vineyard, a confidence that comes from years of experience. He sensed, almost by instinct, what the grapes he picked and squeezed onto the little screen of the refractometer would offer in sugar concentration.

  'So, are you going to do a little Saussignac?' he asked.

  '
Ça dépend
. With Sean injured it's not easy.'

  '
Sans doute
. But it's very, very pretty.
Enfin
, it would be a pity to lose it.'

  That evening I called Pierre Sadoux to find out about the press. Pierre-Jean, his father, answered and I introduced myself.

  'We might not have enough Saussignac to fill the press,' I explained. 'I know you have the same presses so I wondered if you could suggest a solution.'

  
'C'est difficile, oui,'
replied Pierre-Jean, not offering a solution.

  'Do you have any suggestions?'

  'You could borrow a press that can take a smaller load.'

  'Hmm, but Sean is injured so moving a press won't be easy. Thierry Daulhiac mentioned straw.'

  '
Oui, c'est vrai.
You can do that. But you must make sure that the straw is in perfect condition. It must be from this year and not old straw.'

  I remembered the Barses kept hay for their sheep so I called Bernard. He agreed that we could collect a bale if we needed one on the day.

  That Monday the Saussignac producers union held a day for wine professionals and journalists to experience picking noble rot at Château Le Chabrier. The gentle picking operation was followed by tasting of Saussignac wine from each of the producers present. As we tasted through the wines I told Richard Doughty, an organic producer we had met a few times, about Sean's finger amputation.

  'He was lucky,' said Richard. 'A good friend of ours, a Saussignac producer, died when he fell into a harvest trailer ten years ago.'

  I felt sick to my core, horrified that the winegrower accidents we had read about were so prevalent among people we now knew. I resolved to give Sean another lecture on taking care.

  We sat down to lunch at two large tables set up in the entrance hall of Château Le Chabrier, a seventeenth-century hunting lodge. Melt-in-the-mouth pâté toasts and succulent figs with Roquefort blue cheese grilled on top were served as the starter to accompany a flight of different Saussignac wines. If that wasn't enough to seduce the invited wine professionals, pork roasted with prunes and Saussignac followed. Joel the Jolly, seated next to me – fortunately unarmed – told me he had cooked it. He proudly admitted to keeping the water gun in the car at all times, and then laughed heartily as he recounted a story of leaving rotting steak under the mayor's car seat. The mayor took a week to track down the disgusting stench. Leaving aside stinking steak, this pork dish was the best pork I had ever had. I was convinced that Joel was joking about having cooked it. Thierry assured me it was true and some sleuthing in the kitchen revealed that it was.

  The cheese board that followed was a voyage of flavours from the region and beyond; Échourgnac, the wonderful cow's milk cheese with walnut liquor made by nuns in the Dordogne, Cabécou, the local goat's cheese, an enormous round of Brie de Meaux and a selection of blue cheeses. The grand finale was a luscious apricot and almond tart. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Matched with a young Saussignac, redolent of apricot compote, it was sublime.

  I went home in time to help Sean finish off the day's winery work. It was the twilight of the Feely seniors' stay. We had been through one of the most intense periods of our lives and were closer for it. The next morning I said a tearful farewell to them and Sean took them to the airport while I got on with the winery ward round.

  Sean walked back into the winery just as precious cabernet sauvignon shot onto the winery wall.

  'What the heck's going on here? Why didn't you wait for me to get back?' he demanded.

  I had not tied the over-pipe sufficiently tightly and the pressure of the pump had shot the pipe out of the vat. I hastily switched off. Relatively little had been lost and the incident gave Sean the opportunity to step back into the driver's seat. I could have waited for him but John and I had been doing this successfully the weeks he was out of commission and I wanted to get ahead with the work.

  He overreacted partly to reinstate his position as leader in the winery. Now he was able to do most of what was required as long as he protected his bandage from getting wet or dirty. I cut back my time in the winery realising that the less time we spent together the better. Working together was very different to being married. I wasn't sure if it was possible to achieve both successfully.

  Sean was ambivalent about harvesting the Saussignac. He was still running on morphine and finding the wines he had in the winery tough enough to control without another baby coming into the ward. I desperately wanted to have Saussignac in the range. There was something exceptional about the wine and the group of producers that made it. Sean's hand was sufficiently healed to drive a tractor. I decided to see if a few friends would help.

  After one positive response from a retired English couple in Saussignac, Sue and Ian Cameron, who had become friends, I got no more takers. Sue was a major force in the village; active on the
syndicat d'initiative
, the local tourist office and initiative committee, welcoming to newcomers and a gardening dynamo. One couple would not be enough to help us on our own. Most of our local friends and neighbours were vignerons and had enough on their plates already. The O'Briens and Rogers from Ireland were due to arrive in two weeks but they would be too late. We had to get at least one pick in before that and we couldn't afford to pay for a team of hand-pickers. Seeking consolation I tucked into a row of
touche de sérénité da
rk cherry chocolate as the phone rang.

  'I just heard about Sean's finger. Fiona and I can come and help harvest. Do you want us to make an open invitation to our friends?' said Bruce Kingwill.

  Bruce and Fiona, his wife, were South Africans who lived a few kilometres away. A stylish couple in their fifties and dedicated Francophiles, they had moved to France to follow their passion to make wine and restore houses. For a few years they made small quantities of wine, buying grapes in from other growers. They soon realised that winegrowing was a tough business – just as we were discovering – hard work, masses of red tape and difficult to make financially viable. Their renovations were magical: they had transformed several semi-ruins into ultra-charming French country houses. They had already hand-harvested many times so I wasn't expecting a positive response from them. Sympathy for Sean's plight must have played a part.

  Relief and cherry chocolate filled me with well-being. 'That would be fantastic. If we get enough people we'll start at nine on Tuesday morning.'

  'I can't promise anything,' he said.

  But on Sunday Bruce confirmed ten more participants, making our team sixteen – enough to do the vineyard in a morning. Our crew of pickers was a cosmopolitan melange of nationalities and ages ranging from ten to seventy years old. I gave a demonstration based on my hour with Thierry then set them loose. Soon I was running up and down the rows checking the contents of buckets, making adjustments and fielding questions. Some were fast, others were fastidious.

  At the end of the morning, we had enough grapes to go ahead with our electric press straw free. While Sean pressed the grapes I served lunch: great bowls of steaming soup, baguettes, cheese and quiche followed by luscious tarts from our local
boulangerie
. The pressed juice yielded a potential alcohol level of 24, significantly more than our target of 18 to 20. It was rich and luscious, oozing with apricot and almond flavours. With the next pick we would have to seek a less sweet – or in Thierry's terms, '
serré'
– result, which would mean picking some of the golden grapes, not just the brown.

  Over the following days Sean threw himself ever deeper into winery work while I zoned into renovations, housework and children. Our friends from Ireland arrived, the constant presence of visitors helping to cover over the cracks in our relationship. With our large crew of friends staying we were once again busier than ever. We got them working on our second and third picks – the O'Briens true experts now in their second year of picking Saussignac. The week flew by and soon the Rogers were gone.

  On the last night of the O'Briens' holiday, Thierry Daulhiac came around to discuss our application to be included on the Route des Vins. We had applied as soon as we had arrived to be featured on this tourist map with contact details and locations of vineyards that sold direct to the public. It had taken us a year to get this far. To say I was frustrated with the speed of our integration into this tourism initiative would be underplaying it. In retrospect, as with many frustrations in France, I had come to appreciate it as we had needed the time to finish the tasting room renovations. The ruined outbuilding that was closest to the entrance, and that had been the seasonal Portuguese workers' house in the old days, had been transformed. An engineering friend, Tim, had helped Sean renovate the caved-in roof, install a new window and door and tile the floor while I had repainted the room and the wood ceilings.