Grape Expectations (24 page)

  In France there is a dedicated police force called 'the Fraud Squad' who make sure that labelling is correct and within the rules. There is no room for loose marketing statements. An error on a label can result in a fine or worse as a winegrower friend who had also been a wine merchant had recounted.

  'For a small mistake on a label I spent several weeks getting to know the interior of the Sainte-Foy prison,' he said. 'It was incredible. I had no idea what I was in for; they arrested me and threw me into prison. My lawyer came round and I asked, "How long until you get me out of here?" He said, "Best case scenario, if you are innocent, six months." You can imagine what that was like.'

  His wife pulled a face that said it all. In the end he was there for eighteen days for a tiny error on a label that he hadn't known was an error. He spent Christmas in jail, not knowing what he had done, as the wine was sold to him as one thing but it turned out to be another.

  Clearly what we put onto the labels had to be certified to the letter.

Three weeks later the results of the AOC request arrived. Our whites had passed but the rosé had failed. The comment was 'herbaceous'. Since the failure was due to the tasting, not the analysis, we could resubmit if we wanted to, but it would cost us another full set of fees. Lucille arrived and we tasted the rosé together. It was sublime; crushed strawberries with a long finish, ideally suited to the markets we were targeting, dry but deliciously fruity.

  'I can't believe they failed this wine,' I said.

  'Perhaps the panel tasted a sweet rosé before yours and it made it too dry for them. There is no limit on the amount of residual sugar in Bergerac rosé,' said Lucille.

  'But "herbaceous"? I get no herbaceousness on this wine.'

  'Me neither,' said Lucille. 'You must resubmit.'

  'No way,' said Sean. 'On principle I won't. If they fail wines like this I don't want to be part of this AOC. Anyway, it's too expensive to resubmit for such a small run. It adds a euro a case to this wine which is already expensive to produce.'

  I too was beginning to doubt the AOC. When it came to Bergerac no one had heard of it. Perhaps we were better off without it. On the down side,
vin de table
was also bristling with constraints. We could not put the vintage, the varietal or the word château on the label. Most New World wines, unhindered by AOC, could use all these elements and more on their wines without tests or tasting panels.

  In March I plumbed the depths of despair. Perhaps there was a seasonal element to my emotional valleys but there was also a hard reality. We continued to haemorrhage cash. We did not have enough money to pay for the bottling.

  My parents arrived for a two-week visit. They were in a different zone to us; retired and living a life of comfort in North America with not a lot to worry about except their next round of golf. My dad could not understand why we were putting ourselves through so much to follow our dream. He saw the exceptional work, both physical and mental, the challenges of a new country and the financial stress, and could not fathom what had made us leave good jobs in the city.

  'This house is a corridor of crisis,' he said, 'just look around.' He pointed to the chaos that accompanies two small children with time-starved parents. 'You can't carry on at this pace. You'll be dead before you reach retirement. You'll be old before your time.'

  I explained that life in a start-up is always tough and more so for us with a new language and culture as well. He ignored me and continued his tirade.

  After two weeks of his harrying and repeating 'this house is a corridor of crisis', I wondered if we were completely mad. But one evening, momentarily overcome by the exuberance of a couple of whiskeys followed by a glass of Haut Garrigue, my dad broke into a Zulu dance. Ellie, who had been sick, was ecstatic. For the first time in days she brightened up.

  'Dance, Grand-père! Dance!' she commanded. Grand-père, nervous at the Napoleonic style of his granddaughter's request, continued to dance. For the next couple of days Ellie kept Grand-père away from his thoughts of the corridor of crisis with regular commands of 'Dance, Grand-père! Dance!'

  Ellie was at the tail-end of an ear infection combined with a tummy bug that had left us with little clean linen. Her bedtime prayer said it all.

  'Dear God,

  'Thanks you for making Ellie better. Thanks you for making Sophia better. Thanks you for making Daddy better. And Dear God thanks you for making Grand-père dance.

  'Amen.'

An invitation to attend a dinner hosted by one of the major cork manufacturers was perfectly timed since we needed to make our decision about which corks to use for our bottling. Bottling was a minefield and the responsibility for each of these elements was with us. We had to get to grips with it and make the right choice. I took copious notes.

  Cork trees only produce enough cork to be harvested at about twenty years of age but they live for hundreds of years if managed and harvested correctly. The quality of the cork and the care of that cork after harvest are paramount to good wine. Corked wine, created by trichloranisole (TCA), a bacteria found in cork, has a nasty smell like mouldy newspaper, wet dog or a damp basement. Depending on the level of TCA, this odour can be anything from a faint hint to complete contamination, leaving the wine undrinkable. While there is no health risk, even a hint dramatically reduces the enjoyment of a wine. TCA is largely why screw caps have gained ground recently.

  'Don't worry about the length of your cork, the quality is what's important,' said the presenter.

  'That's what I always say. It's the structure, not the length,' said Regis, a wine producer from the Pécharmant appellation. Chuckles rippled round the room.

  'Make sure when you're putting the corks in you don't go too fast, and keep the bottles upright for three minutes before they are boxed.'

  'Yes, but you shouldn't go too slowly either. I find you need to keep a good regular pace,' said Jean-Paul, a winemaker from Saussignac, and laughter rippled again.

  A year before I would not have known a good cork if it bit me. But the never-ending debate of wine closures came up regularly at community events like the Saussignac growers' evening.

  'I would not use plastic,' said Jean-Marie. 'You know, I did a test with some yogurt. I put it at the bottom of my fridge for two years. It was fine when I opened it, no mould at all, but it tasted of plastic. That's food-grade plastic, like what they use for plastic corks. I wouldn't want that in my wine.'

  'And they use plastic on the interior of the screw caps,' said Thierry.

  If the wine was stored for a long time with either of these options, they could leave a taste of plastic and a hormone disrupter in the wine.

  Sean decided on closures made from natural cork but treated to be guaranteed free of cork taint. With the components for the bottling finalised we made our spring offer to our regular customers. We needed to plan how much wine to box. Wine that is fully dressed and boxed should be sold within six months or the labels and boxes degrade. A wrong estimate either way is costly. We expected a bumper response since it was the first wine made by us. But many customers emailed to say their cellar was stocked after massive February wine sales.

  I did a quick survey of the main wine retailers and found that the wine crisis was biting hard. I had read that New World producers, whose costs were a fraction of European producers', were flooding the market and that in an effort to compete, French producers had cut prices to well below cost. My survey confirmed that good French wines were selling for 25 per cent less than when we left Dublin almost two years before. Winemakers were slashing prices to offload stock. The comfortable, secure life we had left suddenly looked very appealing.

  Sean sent vat samples of our wine to our highest priority target client, a chain of about twenty-five wine shops.

  The client tasted them and asked us to send samples of the finished wines when they were ready. I was totally depressed. What was I expecting? An immediate order for all the production we had? I bemoaned the situation to Fiona Kingwill.

  'You sent him unfinished samples? It's suicide! Don't ever do that. We were tempted into doing it with our reds in the early days. People said "Wine buyers will be able to project forward what the wine will be like". It's not true. What a disaster. Many of the people we sent the samples to would not take calls from us after that. The wines were too raw. We ruined a host of contacts. Wine buyers are not winemakers. They are not used to tasting unfinished wine.'

  I felt the familiar ball of nausea in my stomach.

  'So what do we do?'

  'You have to make the investment in the bottling and hope it all works out.'

  With the lead times required for the dry components it was impossible to put off bottling and still fulfil demand in time. Investing in bottling was a risk we had to take. We had to have faith. Our wines were good. The bottling bills would only need to be paid two months after and we would have to have closed some sales by then.

Bottling needed a minimum of three people alongside Pierre, so my parents were co-opted into giving a hand. On the auspicious day Pierre quickly set up his bottling unit, sterilised it and charged the stations with bottling material. My dad was selected to stack the bottles onto the machine. Mum took the capsuled and labelled bottles off the machine, boxed them and pushed the box through the taping machine. Sean took the finished boxes off the line and stacked them onto pallets.

  As the first finished wines came off the line I felt a surge of pride. It was like watching Sophia go to her first day of school. Those wines were part of us and had our hopes and dreams tied up inside them.

  Pierre zoomed around on the forklift making sure each point in the bottling unit was stocked, stacking pallets into our storeroom and sorting out hitches along the way. I made regular batches of tea and biscuits while Ellie was a perfect angel, playing for hours in the corridor of crisis and spreading her play zone throughout the lounge and kitchen. It was a demanding two days that kept Dad too busy to make any comments about the fast-extending corridor. The tough physical work involved only served to confirm for him that we had truly gone off our trolleys.

  'We've got spare time, let me give you a tour of my château,' said Pierre as we finished. We piled into his car. Having never visited the private parts of Saussignac Castle, I was ecstatic at the opportunity. The commune owned one wing and I had been there for events like the annual 'Arts au Château' and the Christmas market. The private sections were owned by a diverse cosmopolitan group: one of the two main towers by two American artists, the other by an English family who used it as their holiday house. Pierre owned the middle section while the wing opposite the one owned by the commune was split in two: one part owned by a local French family that didn't use it and a second part owned by a Kiwi man and his French wife who spent half their year selling antiques in Auckland and the other half sourcing them from their pied-à-terre in France.