Vintage (15 page)

Wearing the black dress she had bought at Beatrice Biancarelli’s, Clare entered the petit-salon with its marquetry bookcases and ancient Savonnerie carpet. Noticing with relief that the faded green hangings of Genoa velvet had as yet been spared the attentions of Laura Spray, she crossed to the window and looked out on to the evening park.

The few days she had spent in Bordeaux had gone quickly. She had enjoyed showing the place where she had grown up to Jamie, but she had had enough of Laura Spray, with whom there had been daily confrontations. She would not be sorry to get home to the more prosaic delights of Notting Hill.

Although Viola had had her suspicions that
Charles-Louis
was up to something, Clare saw no grounds, apart from her father’s infatuation with the American socialite, for her mother’s misgivings.

True, there were rumblings, both in the chais and in the vineyards, concerning the Baron’s cashflow problems. The vineyards were full of holes and, given the superb quality of the grapes which the remaining vines produced year after year, Albert Rochas had a problem accepting that the Baron could not afford to replant.

In the cellars, where Clare had introduced Jamie to her erstwhile companion the cellarmaster – although Jean Boyer had been even less forthcoming than the chef de culture, whose preoccupation was the vineyards – the old man had seemed equally malcontent.

Owing to the nature of the soil, the chais at Cluzac, in common with those of many of the other châteaux, were built partly above ground and partly below to provide insulation. They were not, in the traditional sense, cellars at all. The long low, wistaria-covered outbuildings, their thick walls pierced only by small windows closed with painted shutters, stood below their tiled roofs on the north side of the courtyard. These outbuildings housed not only a succession of vast and intercommunicating dark dank bays, where the barrels in which the wine was matured were stored on wooden chocks, but also the administrative offices, which were under the care of the estate manager, Monsieur Boniface, whose drooping moustache, neglected teeth and lugubrious appearance belied his name.

Unlike most of the other châteaux in which ‘inox’ – stainless steel vats in which temperatures could easily be controlled – had been installed, no effort had been made, or money been spent, on keeping the Cluzac chais up to date. At vintage time the grapes were fermented, macerated and dumped indiscriminately in old wooden cuves, idle for eleven months of the year, which had to be scraped and disinfected before they could be used again.

After shaking hands politely with Jamie, the
bow-legged
Jean Boyer, whose credo it was that ‘one barrel of wine could work more miracles than a church full of saints’, had, to Clare’s surprise, abruptly turned his back on them. Swaying, in his darned red jersey, between the neatly aligned barrels, which stretched far into the distance, he disappeared into the crepuscular depths of the cool chai.

Following him, Clare explained to Jamie that the capacity of each of the barriques bordelaise was officially designated at 225 litres. The shape, circumference and
number of iron bands were also specified, and each barrel yielded 25 dozen bottles.

For the first two months after they were filled, the barrels remained upright, allowing the carbon dioxide from the fermentation process to be dissipated more easily. They had to be topped up two or three times a week for the first year. Once the level remained constant, the casks were turned bonde à côté (‘three-quarter bung’) for approximately four months. Three times in the first year the wine had also to be ‘racked on its lees’ or carefully transferred from one cask to another, leaving behind a deposit of vinous sludge, after which it was clarified or ‘fined’.

The making of a claret required meticulous care on the part of the cellarmaster, whose job it was to control the softness and sweetness of the wine so that neither fruit nor oak predominated. It was the tannins imparted by the wood that helped to give wine its character.

Catching up with Jean, Clare asked how his wine, which he blended and assembled and about which he was fiercely proprietorial, was coming along. Her innocent question, intended to open up their usual dialogue, if only about his wartime exploits and his missing fingers, provoked an unexpected diatribe aimed indirectly at her father.

‘Il me faut des barriques!’ Jean waved his arms over the innocent rows of red-bellied barrels. ‘Il me faut des barriques.’

This statement was followed by a rapid explanation, which Jamie had some difficulty following, not only of how, in order to maintain the quality of the de Cluzac wine, Jean desperately needed to replace at least
one-third
of his barrels, but that the vat house was in urgent need of reroofing, and the petrol pump in his old Renault needed changing.

‘Avez-vous demandé à Papa?’ Clare asked, attempting to calm the cellarmaster down.

Jean Boyer rolled his eyes expressively and spat
contemptuously
on the beaten earth floor.

‘J’en ai ras la bol de demander’

‘What does he say?’

‘Il répond toujours la même chose. Impossible. Impossible. Impossible…!’

Standing at the window of the petit-salon as she waited for Jamie to struggle into the dinner suit he had hired in Bordeaux for the Fête de la Fleur, and for her father and Laura Spray, Clare trusted that the problems of the estate which so exercised Jean Boyer and Albert Rochas would hopefully be resolved by the new South African owner.

‘You’re not going out like that!’

Charles-Louis, who had appeared in the doorway of the petit-salon, looking extremely distinguished in his midnight blue tuxedo, was staring at the swell of Clare’s breasts, visible through the keyhole opening of the black dress.

The coldness and disapproval in his voice took her back to her childhood, when, denigrating her best efforts, her father had voiced his opinion of her school work, attacking his daughter for being a failure, rather than simply upbraiding her for not getting twenty out of twenty for her composition.

She faced her father. She was no longer eight years old.

‘You told me to go to Biancarelli, Papa,’ she said innocently. ‘Surely you don’t want me to cover up three thousand francs’ worth of Versace.’

The Baron was saved from replying by the entrance of Laura Spray. She wore a tangerine silk suit, with an ankle-length knife-pleated skirt and long jacket. This was topped by a flowing chiffon scarf in the same colour,
which was wound nonchalantly round her neck (presumably to disguise its scrawniness) and flowed like an orange tributary down her back. The basically simple outfit, which had, without doubt, cost an arm and a leg, would not have been too bad had it not been garnished with the lemon marquise diamond, matching drop-earrings, three rows of – presumably priceless – pearls fastened with an outsize emerald clasp, a
ruby-encrusted
lapel brooch and a beaded orange and diamanté evening purse. Any analogy with a Christmas tree would have been unkind to the Christmas tree.

Unable to see clearly without her spectacles, and too vain to wear them, Laura appraised Clare’s revealing dress (already voted ravishing by Jamie) and the gash of crimson lipstick which provided the only distraction in her ensemble.

Jamie’s sentiment was apparently endorsed by a great many of the men, married and otherwise, who –
mesmerised
by the luminosity of the flawless skin Clare had inherited from Viola, not to mention the dramatic scarlet and black of her appearance – gravitated towards her in the vast and brightly lit marquee which had been erected in the grounds of the eighteenth-century chartreuse (a hermitage built in the shape of an unequal quadrilateral) that was Château Laurent.

The entry of Baron de Cluzac, with Laura Spray on his arm and closely followed by his daughter, could not have caused more of a stir in the ‘ballroom’ – which had taken several days to erect and was modelled upon that at Versailles – had they been royalty. Charles-Louis rarely showed his face among the Médocains; Laura Spray, whose designs on the Baron were ruminated upon at Bordeaux dinner parties and circulated, de bouche à l’oreille, among the château owners, was the subject not only of gossip but of speculation; Clare de Cluzac had not
been seen in France for a great many years, and her escort not at all.

The Rothschilds had bought Lafite with money from banking, and the Agnellis an interest in Château Margaux with the profits from Fiat cars. Milli and Mathias Mercier had sold their successful clothing business five years ago to buy Château Laurent for an undisclosed sum.

With the help of Halliday Baines, the enthusiastic young couple, newcomers to the area, had carried out an ambitious renovation programme, which included new bottling plant and ultra-modern vat stores and computerising the management system of the château. Their ambition, apart from dedicating themselves to wine rather than blue jeans, was twofold. To restore Château Laurent second-growth claret to its former glory, and to host the Fête de la Fleur. The latter they thought, mistakenly, would set the seal on their arrival in the Médoc.

No sooner had Charles-Louis and his party been
welcomed
by a decidedly apprehensive host and hostess, than they were waylaid by a sweating Claude Balard, his white dinner jacket straining across his belly.

Momentarily taking Balard’s outstretched hand, and greeting his negociant’s turquoise-clad wife and seventeen-year-old daughter, Christiane, briefly, without presenting them to Laura Spray, the Baron continued his progress across the room. Eschewing the reception area, in which the champagne flowed and a
string quartet played softly, he made straight for his place of honour at the top table.

‘A tu vu ça?’ An affronted Marie-Paule addressed her husband, wondering whether the Biancarelli dress, to which she had painstakingly matched her satin shoes, had been a waste of money. Christiane Balard, a girl as sweet at her brother Harry was boorish, wore a simple white figure-hugging shift with a single row of seed pearls. She took her parents by the arms.

‘The Baron has only just arrived, Maman. I’m sure he’ll talk to us later. Was that Clare de Cluzac? And who is the lady in orange?’

Humiliated in the sight of everyone – in the immediate vicinity alone she picked out Comte and Comtesse Laterre from Château Laterre, Natasha and Alexandre Rostov from Prieuré Gélise, and Julien and Stephan Castinel, twin brothers from Castinel, a Palladian château in the heart of the Médoc – Marie-Paule ignored her daughter’s attempt to defuse the situation. Staring after the Baron’s party, with the same resentment with which the Russian insurgents had regarded the families of the Tsars, she put Charles-Louis’ behaviour down to the fact that she was only the wife of a negociant, rather than to the fact that she was unappealingly plain and unbelievably boring.

‘Next year they will be laughing on the other side of their faces!’ She was referring to her husband’s bid for Château de Cluzac and her own misplaced belief that it would be successful.

Determined to drown her sorrows, Marie-Paule led the way to the flower-decked bar, at one end of which stood Halliday Baines, already a little the worse for wear, and at the other Big Mick Bly, his neck as thick as mortadella, who towered above the sycophantic group who surrounded him as they hung on his every word.

While the Baron and Laura Spray – revelling in her role as First Lady and comparing it favourably to her elevated status in the Palm Beach set – seated one on either side of Milli and Mathias Mercier at the top table, played King and Queen, Clare and Jamie were seated at the other side of the room with Christiane and Harry Balard (in an embroidered silk waistcoat and yuppie wing-collar), and Alain and Delphine Lamotte.

The months of preparation had almost resulted in a crise de nerfs for Milli Mercier. She was determined that the Château Laurent dinner, which celebrated the harvesting of the grapes approximately a hundred days hence – on the successful outcome of which most of the guests depended for their livelihood – would not only outshine the Fêtes de la Fleur of her rivals, but would long be remembered in the annals of the Médoc.

These days it was unnecessary to peruse the repertoires of the grands chefs, such as the notorious Vatel, who was said to have committed suicide when, at the banquet he had prepared for Louis XIV, the fish had not arrived on time. After lengthy consultations with a couple of traiteurs and a top Bordeaux restaurateur, Milli had come up with a suitable menu to which Mathias, consulting his cellar books, had matched the wine.

Keeping a nervous eye on the slow progress of the dinner (the first course of which had not been served until well after ten o’clock) in the marquee, which she had festooned with ivory silk imported specially from Thailand, Milli Mercier herself did not touch a thing.

At the Balard table, Marie-Paule, who had eaten too much and by the time the coffee was served could scarcely keep her eyes open, was dreaming about the Venetian Carnival, complete with Doge’s Palace, which she would create for the Fête de la Fleur at Château de Cluzac. At the young people’s table, Alain Lamotte, for
whom the night was still young, was waving away the smoke from his cigarette and outlining for Clare his ambitious plans for her father’s estate, when a gavel was banged and silence called for, for the speeches.

After Mathias Mercier, pride illuminating his face like that of a schoolboy who had succeeded in his Baccalauréat, had replied to the toast to the host and hostess (now more of a nervous wreck than ever), and resumed his seat, Baron de Cluzac, guest of honour and Président de l’Union des Grands Crus, rose slowly to his feet.

Short and to the point, delivered with a charm and panache which cut no ice with Clare, his few and
uninspiring
words were received with as much enthusiasm as if they had been the American Declaration of Independence. When he sat down, to sustained applause and a public embrace from Laura Spray, who had been gazing raptly at him during the whole of his performance, it was the cue for the serious part of the evening’s entertainment to begin.