Virgile's Vineyard (16 page)

Well, now that she mentions it, yes there is perhaps some unaccustomed competition for the everyday, omnipresent humming of the cicadas. A deeper, angrier kind of buzzing.

‘I meant to mention it when I noticed it last month,' she apologizes unconvincingly. ‘But as it is, I'm not sure you'd be wise to go inside.'

I am about to press her for more details when a rapid darkening of the sky provides me with all the explanation I need. A swarm of hundreds – thousands possibly – of bees swoops low above our heads and up through the rosebeds to the point where the roof juts out above my bedroom window. Most of them disappear immediately beneath the rooftiles but sufficient remain on the terracotta gutter to turn its shiny green glaze into a dull, pulsating yellow.

‘A bees' nest,' says Mme Gros superfluously. ‘And from what I can see, your bedroom is full of them. You won't be sleeping there for a while.'

‘They're protected,' warned Mme Gros, when I suggested an insecticide the following morning. ‘You'll have to call the beekeeper.'

‘They're too far under the roof tiles,' said Monsieur Puylairol, when I persuaded him to come up from the village to take a reluctant look.

Even behind his all-enveloping mask, he seemed far more apprehensive in their company than I was. (The poor man really does need career-counselling.) But he assured me that the difficulty was purely technical.

‘There's only a couple of centimetres between the tiles and your bedroom ceiling,' he said. ‘It's impossible to remove the nest. You'll have to call the fire brigade.'

‘Some people have all the luck,' said Krystina, when two handsome teenagers leapt from the fire engine with a barrel of insecticide and started propping a ladder up against my bedroom window.

‘But I thought they were protected,' I said to the youth who seemed to be in charge. ‘I thought I wasn't allowed to kill them.'

‘You're not but we are,' he informed me.

‘So brave,' sighed Krystina wistfully, as she watched him pull a loose white space-suit over his tight blue uniform.

‘Is this your bedroom under here?' asked the senior, more muscular fireboy, as he started drenching the roof with poison and Krystina calculated the plausibility of a second bees' nest in her own bedroom.

‘Anywhere else you could spend the night?' asked the number two, as he set off to spray the house from the inside as well. ‘They're going to be a bit upset for the next twenty-four hours but after that you'll be left in peace.'

I couldn't face another night in Mme Gros's spare bed but I wasn't sure that I dared face Krystina's invitation to the château either. My safely self-contained ‘studio' seemed easily the least of the three available evils – even if every window had to be stiflingly sealed against airborne intruders. But this assessment survived little more than an hour of sweat and suffocation, and at dawn this morning, it is from one of Uncle Milo's threadbare deckchairs beside the pool that I observe Manu tiptoeing past for a little pre-breakfast ‘thinning' of my vegetable patch.

I wait until he has gathered almost a basketful of my small, firm courgettes. Then just as he is about to make a start on the runner beans, I trumpet an unexpected ‘
Bonjour
' from half a metre behind him.

‘
Nom de Dieu, tu m'as fait sursauter!
' he exclaims, as he drops the basket.

His precious pickings tumble over the edge of the terrace but he rapidly recovers his composure. ‘I didn't like to wake you. But you see, the thing about courgettes is, the more you pick them, the more they grow. And I said to the wife, if someone doesn't get over there and do a bit of work, he'll have a terrace full of marrows and wonder why I didn't warn him.'

*

The landscape is changing.

As I drove down to meet Virgile on the edge of Saint Saturnin, I could see that everywhere the once individually discernible vines were merging into continuous rows of greenery. A closer inspection revealed youthful bunches already starting to ripen, as they turned from hard green pellets into something more convincingly grape-like. A few of the individual grapes were even beginning to change colour from green to black. Acidity levels inside them, Virgile explained, would be starting to diminish, with sugar levels rising.

You could be forgiven for thinking that nature rather than man was doing the work at this time of year, but not in Virgile's vineyard. According to him, there were now far too many leaves.

‘It would have been better to leave those big outer ones,' he said, trying not to sound too dismayed at my first ten minutes of foliage-thinning.

‘I thought we had to aerate the grapes,' I mumbled defensively, wondering why my uncompromising exposure of his youthful Syrah had failed to please. Hadn't he said that too much foliage harboured mildew and other diseases? Didn't he tell me it encouraged butterflies to come and breed their harmful vine worms? Surely, the more I stripped away, the healthier the crop would be.

‘The grapes need shade as well as air,' he explained. ‘Especially on the far side of the row, where the vine gets all the heat of the afternoon sun. But at least you've left those,' he consoled himself, as he peered over the top of the row.

Only because they were invisible, I thought to myself, as I massaged my aching back.

‘Remember, it's sunlight on the leaves that ripens the grapes,' he continued. ‘Not sunlight on the grapes. It's the leaves
underneath
the grapes that need to go. And those in the middle, of course. And even more importantly, the side shoots …'

So I had another go. Much more expertly, I thought. Plenty of shade. Plenty of material to ripen the grapes.

‘But now you've left all these side shoots,' said Virgile, on his second inspection. ‘Any shoot growing out from the base of a leaf-stem needs to go.'

‘But these have all got grapes on them,' I protested. ‘I left them deliberately.'

‘They're not grapes, they're
grappillons
,' he said, leaving me little the wiser. ‘They'll never ripen. So they need to come off. We have to focus all the energy on the proper bunches.'

The trouble was, the
grappillons
looked so much like grapes. Just a bit farther behind in their growth. So how could I be sure? Maybe anything on a side shoot had to be a
grappillon
.

‘
Ça va, Patrick?
' called Régine mischievously from a couple of rows away, where her more experienced efforts had been winning greater approval. ‘
C'est simple, n'est-ce pas?
' she chuckled, as I braced myself for Virgile's third assessment.

But miraculously, it appears, I have finally got the balance right: well aerated shade and no
grappillons
.

‘The butterflies won't like it one bit. They'll go straight to the neighbours!'

He smiles approvingly and we pause for some much-needed mineral water, splashing more of our precious rations than we can really afford over sweat-drenched necks and faces.

There is little sign of the weather cooling. Yesterday some anti-insect candles, left out on my terrace, melted into puddles in the afternoon sunshine. It was far too hot to sleep in the evening and I just sat in the pool with the water up to my chin and counted stars until a hint of a breeze made it possible to think of bed. It was consequently all I could do to keep this rendezvous at nine o'clock – but Virgile and Régine have been hard at work since six.

‘I meant to tell you,' he says, as he steers us back to work. ‘I've made the big decision. I've sold everything to Puech.'

‘Hundred per cent?'

‘Unfortunately. It was that or nothing. But the great thing is . . .'

I never learn about the great thing because he is interrupted by his mobile telephone – something that has happened every few minutes throughout the morning. Some of the callers are casual labourers whom he is trying to book for the
vendange
but most are simply suppliers letting him down: in this case, the supplier of his boxes, announcing another fortnight's delay. A compromise alternative design is suggested to speed things up but no, Virgile insists, he wants them to be perfect. He wants his distinctive signature printed on every box, just as it is on every bottle and cork.

‘Maybe now you can see why I needed Puech,' he sighs, as he puts the phone back in his pocket. ‘I haven't even time for the admin, let alone the sales side of this job.'

‘Won't they let you keep anything, not even for friends?' I ask.

‘Hardly anything for myself, even. But you and Sarah won't have to go as far as Nîmes. You'll be able to buy from Jean-Marc. His restaurant's a wine shop as well, you know …'

Virgile's final words are drowned by a crescendo of counting from Régine. ‘ …
neuf … dix … ONZE! Voilà, enfin, c'est fini!
'

She started downing tools as soon as Saint Saturnin's church clock started striking, having agreed to work until eleven. She was, however, forgetting a curious eccentricity of many of the local ecclesiastical timepieces. For reasons that no one has been able to explain to me, the clocks are programmed to duplicate the ringing of every hour. The first and second peals are exactly two minutes apart but opinion is divided as to which of them should be taken as the accurate time signal.

‘The first is only a warning,' laughs Virgile. ‘Still time for one more vine, Régine!'

‘Indeed, why not finish the row?' I am starting to suggest, when a resounding ‘
Ta gueule!
' persuades me that Virgile's assistant will be sticking to the letter of her contract.

*

There is nothing like a white-knuckled motorway drive with Krystina to induce a sense of nostalgic regret for the days when there were only two ways to leave the Languedoc – either rough seas or stony donkey tracks. For centuries, it was virtually cut off by the surrounding mountains and its wines were more or less unknown outside the region. Or so Krystina has been telling me, as we speed past fields of heavy-headed sunflowers towards Carcassonne and beyond.

Apparently Bordeaux monopolized the Northern European markets from the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the English King Henry II in 1152 onwards. Meanwhile Burgundy exercised an effective stranglehold on the river route to Paris. There were scarcely any usable roads and the maritime alternative round the coast of Spain was expensive, slow and beset by dangerous storms and pirates. The Languedoc was effectively land-locked.

Until 1666, that is – today's key date – the year when a certain Pierre-Paul Riquet began work on a canal that was to link the Mediterranean to the Atlantic: the Canal des Deux Mers or the Canal du Midi, as it is more commonly known.

‘Nothing new in the idea,' says Krystina, as the BMW takes a sudden, skidding turn down a minor road signposted ‘Seuil de Narouze'. ‘The Romans wanted to do exactly the same. As did Charlemagne. But there was a technical problem. You noticed we were climbing for the last thirty kilometres or so? Well obviously, a canal would have to go up the hill and down the other side.'

‘But isn't that why canals have locks?'

‘Locks can only get a boat uphill if there's enough water coming down. And here the water needed to be coming down on both sides of the hill.'

Ignoring a no entry sign, Krystina has been racing towards a formidable-looking chain across the track ahead of us. At the very last minute she judges it robust enough to deter her from further acts of civil disobedience and slams on the brakes.

‘That's what had defeated everyone,' she explains, as we proceed on foot towards an attraction billed as the ‘Partage des Eaux'. ‘Until clever Monsieur Riquet spotted a spring up here that could be divided and channelled down in both directions.'

We have reached what looks like a simple T-junction between two canals – the smaller waterway, the leg of the T, feeding the larger horizontal arms, which lead, it seems, respectively eastwards and westwards, towards the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Riquet's spring has long since disappeared – swamped apparently by the various rivers that he diverted to augment what would otherwise have been a useless trickle.

It all looks so simple and obvious – but the Inland Waterways Association of Great Britain was sufficiently moved to erect a plaque in 1981 as a token of its ‘
grande admiration'
, so I suppose I too should be impressed.

‘It must have taken a lifetime to build,' I say to assure Krystina that I am.

‘Only fifteen years,' she answers. ‘Despite needing tunnels and aqueducts to cross the more difficult terrain.'

A burst of cheerful, heavily Dutch-accented greetings from a passing tourist long-boat, weighed low in the water by its cargo of Gouda, bicycles and sun-cream, prompts a footnote to the effect that the last commercial traffic died in 1989, before a brisk turn on a fashionable heel signals the end of the first part of the visit.

Still on foot, I obediently follow Krystina down a tree-lined avenue towards a stumpy stone obelisk on a rocky plinth.

‘Poor old Riquet,' she says at the foot of the obelisk. ‘He died just a few months before the canal opened in 1681. And he died completely penniless, having lost the whole of his personal fortune on the project. He'd made his money “farming” Louis XIV's salt taxes. That's how he came to be travelling so much and saw for himself how badly the region needed a better transport system. And the Royal Languedoc Canal, as it was known until the Revolution, fitted nicely into the King's policy of opening up French trade routes. The only snag was, he couldn't afford to contribute very much to justify the “Royal” bit, what with building Versailles and fighting his endless wars. But by this time, it had become a personal obsession for Riquet. Hence the poor man's ruin …'

‘Krystina …' I try to interrupt, having noticed some alarmingly black clouds approaching from the west.

‘Vast undertaking though, employing twelve thousand “heads” … “Heads”, you notice, not people. A man counted as one, but a woman only two-thirds … Anyway, a massive step forward. Opened up tremendous economic prospects for the Languedoc. Except for the wine growers.'

She pauses long enough to register a distant peal of thunder but shrugs it off disdainfully.

‘Until the late eighteenth century, Languedoc wine still had Bordeaux protectionism to contend with. Heavy taxes, limits on barrel sizes and, cleverest of all, a ban on other regions' wines, except in the weeks immediately after the vintage, when the new wines weren't ready and the old ones had either been drunk or turned to vinegar.'

A dramatic flash of lightning, illuminating the whole of the westward view, makes scarcely more impression than the thunder.