Grape Expectations (8 page)

  Sean postulated that we could spread the poo using our back packs with some minor adjustments. It involved piercing holes into the bottom of the packs and running tubes from the holes, then filling the packs with extremely noxious material and walking up and down each side of each vineyard row aiming the issue from the tubes at the base of the vines. I carefully explained with the aid of calculations related to the weight, distance and smell why we should reject this notion out of hand. I was beginning to doubt whether my husband's sense of practicality was a match for farming. We moved on to the next option, to repair the spreader, and decided it would take too long and probably be more costly than buying another one.

  'Phone around to find out prices for a new one then,' said Sean.

  'What is it called and where would I get one?' I replied, reaching for the phone.

  'I don't know. You'll have to phone Jamie.'

  A few minutes later, thanks to our lifesaver Jamie, I had what I thought was the name – an
'epondre anglais'
. I didn't know exactly what it meant –
pondre
is to lay eggs, I knew that, which seemed a little strange – but I had the numbers for three places that supplied them. I called the list ending off with Monsieur Bonny, who was rapidly becoming our local mechanical genius.

  Monsieur Bonny had one of the happiest, friendliest faces I had ever encountered. He was a small fellow with boundless energy. In his late fifties, although he didn't look it, he had been working as a mechanic in his family workshop in Coutures since he was thirteen years old. He had a wonderful, strong Dordogne accent.
Maintenant
,
justement
and other similar words ending in 'ent' or 'ant' become 'ain' and take on the most beautiful sing-song ring when he says them.
Besoin
, the word for need, also ends more softly, sounding more like
'beswain'
. We made his acquaintance soon after moving in and had been regular visitors to his workshop ever since.

  Monsieur Bonny explained that it was an
épandeur d'engrais
, a fertiliser spreader, and nothing to do with English or laying eggs. Several machinery sales people in the Dordogne were having a good laugh on me. Monsieur Bonny had a second hand one that would be perfect for us. A few hours later Sean was spreading chicken manure as fast as he could. Ellie and I watched from the kitchen window laughing as he and the strange machine with its awkward wagging tail sped up and down the rows leaving a smelly trail in their wake.

Sean was getting neurotic about machinery. He smashed the back window of the tractor with the fertiliser spreader. Days later he drove under a tree and dislodged the exhaust. His number of visits to Monsieur Bonny in Coutures was travelling in the opposite direction to our bank balance. Soon Sean was back with Monsieur Bonny buying electric secateurs in preparation for the pruning season. This automatic pruning apparatus could take your finger off in a second. I eyed them warily, relieved that he would be wielding them and not me.

  Sean had learnt the basics of pruning on the vines in our back garden in Dublin: now he had to prune 25,000 of them. Pruning is one of the most important jobs in the vineyard and physically demanding. Jamie spent the afternoon with Sean helping him get familiar with this new task.

  While Sean learnt the practical details of pruning I tried to get the plumber, the tall, dark and handsome Monsieur Lombere, to commit to a date for fitting the new shower and toilet into the broken bathroom in our house. I had been waiting for months for him to do the promised work. We had family arriving for Christmas and I was agitated. When I signed his formal
devis
for the work – a quotation that becomes binding on both parties once signed – I'd included the statement that the work had to be completed before the end of November, which was now a sniff away. The charming but unresponsive Monsieur Lombere was taking no heed. I explained my worries to Jamie when he came up from the vineyard, showing him the name of the plumber as I had written it down when a friend in the village gave me the number. Jamie cracked up. 'Mr Lambert!' he said, writing down the correct spelling. 'I'll call him for you. He's doing all the renovation work at our place.' I went red, feeling like the village idiot. Despite years of classes I still had no clue about French spelling and pronunciation.

  Jamie's powers of persuasion were epic. Within hours, Monsieur Lambert called to say Jean-Marc would start the bathroom on Monday. He arrived on cue: a muscular fellow with a clean-shaven head and an upbeat attitude that remained even when he had to look into the bowels of old toilets. I showed him the renovation target. The bathroom had bright multi-coloured mosaic tiles on the floor, pink-flowered tiles on the walls, a broken basin, a broken toilet and a black depression in the wall where a shower had once been. I asked him what the white box behind the broken toilet was.

  'It's a
broyeur
. A
broyeur
is a chopper that minces the waste into a smooth mixture so that it can travel down a small waste water pipe instead of a large sewage pipe.'

  I interrogated him about whether this was acceptable sanitary practice and he assured me it was. The only alternative was to rebuild the main wall of the house so we could replace the small pipe with a large sewage pipe. The wall was close to a metre thick and three hundred years old.

  'You will have to use a
broyeur
in your new bathroom,' he concluded. 'You can use this one, it works perfectly.'

  He flushed the broken toilet and I heard the signature chopping sound of the
broyeur
. I was horrified by the whole idea but reluctantly accepted his suggestion, although I had a feeling it would be trouble.

  A few days later, after the new floor tiles were installed by our tiler, Jean-Marc reappeared to fit the new bathroom. I had worked until past midnight the night before removing the old pink flower wall tiles from the shower area. I was adamant that such an unskilled job had to be done by me to save money. The tile removal took much longer than anticipated but there was no way I was going to be the reason for a delay in the work after the pressure we had put on Lambert. I planned to cunningly paint the rest of the tiles with a tile primer followed by a coat of cream paint. Removing more of them was out of the question.

  When we bought the new shower tray Sean and I struggled to move it a few feet so I told Jean-Marc to let us know when he needed some help to get it upstairs. Before I knew it he had the tray upstairs without a murmur. Within a day he had finished the new bathroom. The following day our tiler tiled the shower walls while I painted the primer over the remaining pink flowers.

  Once my final coat was complete it was a total transformation. The bathroom was gleaming cream, white, glass and chrome. Between my paintwork on the wall tiles, the new floor and Jean-Marc's fitting of the bathroom components that I had searched Bordeaux for, it looked like something that would happily pass in a stylish boutique hotel. Jean-Marc stopped by to fit the last element: the taps on the shower.

  'It's very pretty,' I said.

  
'Ça fonctionne,'
declared Jean-Marc, making it clear that in the world of plumbing, function was far more important than form.

Sean got on with the pruning, key to the health of the vine and to excellent grapes. The vines looked like scraggly bundles of dead twigs attached to small tree trunks. The first step was to prune each vine from this unruly state down to one or two carefully selected canes that would be the bearers of next year's bounty. Canes are the young branches that grow from the main trunk of the vine. There are many and selecting the right ones for the following year is a skilled job requiring concentration, judgement and stamina. Sean lost weight, gained muscle and looked healthier despite the harsh weather. In their hibernating state the vines were becoming his friends.

  When we arrived, the farm was a large chunk of land distinguished by obvious markers like buildings and tracks. Now it was becoming familiar, each part of the vineyard had a name and a personality. In front of the house looking down into the Dordogne valley was the merlot vineyard we called Lower Garrigue. Running away from the
pressoir
, the part of the winery where the grapes are pressed at harvest time, were the vineyards we called Hillside, consisting of young sauvignon blanc, ancient sémillon and merlot. Beyond Lower Garrigue heading down to the valley floor were a set of vineyards called Lenvège which originally belonged to the Château Les Tours de Lenvège, a half-kilometre from us.

  The original medieval tower of Les Tours de Lenvège was built in the twelfth century for protection. It contrasted dramatically with the main château in the village built in the late seventeenth century in a more decorative style. Our farm was the look-out. This was particularly important during the period of English rule of Aquitaine, and also in the wars of religion when the powerful merchants of Bergerac were Protestant but most of the surrounding villages, like ours, were Catholic. We were slowly getting to know our new place.

  It was not just vines that Sean met while pruning; he regularly saw deer, hares and pheasant. One day he came face to face with a giant wild boar. The boar blew several smoky breaths into the cold morning air then sauntered off without causing any trouble. Still, when he didn't come in at the expected time I was thrown into a state of panic. The electric secateurs gave me a chill every time I looked at them. When Sean was out pruning I kept checking to see that he wasn't a blob of blood on the frost.

Sophia was in great form and loving school. At first she struggled to say her teacher's whole name, Mademoiselle Fournier, and would regularly call her 'Fournier' which sounded hilarious and unwittingly insolent.

  A week before the annual Christmas outing a pressurised letter appeared in Sophia's notebook demanding proof of her school insurance. School insurance is obligatory and covers damage or personal injury caused to your child or that caused by your child to others on outings of extra-curricular activities. I had given them the number of the policy several months before so I couldn't understand what the problem was. Mademoiselle Fournier explained patiently that we needed an official letter from the insurance company as proof. Thereafter she spoke to me as if I was one of her students, slowly and with great enunciation, but in a kind rather than 'school marm' way. She regularly checked I had understood the messages in Sophia's schoolbook by asking the same thing in several different ways. She was delightful, as was Martine, her assistant.

  Martine was a fifty-year-old woman with long blonde hair, a good physique and incredible enthusiasm for life. She was always dressed impeccably and I wondered how she looked so good with a horde of three-year-olds to look after. I couldn't keep clean for longer than a few minutes each morning before having something thrown over or thrown up on me.

  Martine was a wonder and she had a soft spot for Sophia, greeting her every morning with a huge smile, the obligatory kisses on each cheek and a cry of 'Ma Kiki!' Each time Sophia wore a dress she exclaimed,
'Oh, si belle, si jolie, cette petite robe!'
On hearing Martine's compliment about her pretty dress, Sophia's face would light up and she would skip into the classroom. Even the more austere
maîtresse
would furnish kisses to the kids in the morning.