Virgile's Vineyard (19 page)

‘I'm sorry but I think you'll find it's Occitan,' contradicted Monsieur Privat from the corner table that continued to be kept for him, no matter how high the season.

Babette really ought to have remembered that he might know better than her. It was she herself who had told me that he was a retired schoolteacher – of Spanish, no less.

‘It means speed,' M. Privat explained, as if still at the lycée. ‘At least “
abrivada
” does. The “a” at the end of an Occitan word is pronounced like an “o”. You'll see the connection at the weekend …'

‘I hate to disagree,' said Monsieur Puylairol, the beekeeper, as diffident as ever. ‘But I always thought it was Languedoc dialect for “
abreuvoir
” – a watering place. In this context, a booze-up. He'll see the connection at the weekend …'

In a sense, they were both right. But I had to wait until Sunday to understand why.

On the second Sunday of August, the steep ascent of the main village street is closed to pedestrians. A massive cattle truck is parked just outside the medieval gateway to seal off the bottom end. The entrances to the narrow side alleys are comprehensively blocked with metal crowd barriers and crowds duly gather behind them for a close-up view of the afternoon's sport.

The balcony of La Maison Vargas, being just inside the gateway, must offer an even better aerial vantage point but, happily for me on this occasion, they prefer the excitement at street level and I can look to them for explanations.

The object of the proceedings, they tell me, is to give the more fearless local youth an opportunity to race a succession of bulls through the village. They start from a kind of corral erected up near the café and they chase the beasts down to the truck waiting open-doored at the gate, all the time avoiding the opposing possibility of the bulls chasing them. The principal aim, which secures the maximum crowd hysteria, is to grab the bulls by the horns and stop them in their tracks but, as the typical bull is considerably larger than even the heartiest village contestant, this is best attempted in teams. So six or seven heroes, eager to prove their testosterone counts, hurl themselves at the animal in a concerted struggle to get a grip on any part of its anatomy, including the tail, that might slow it down. It will not be the most dignified afternoon of the creature's life but, as I know from my visit to Nîmes, there are incontestably worse fates.

This then is the ‘speed' element on which M. Privat insisted. M. Puylairol's ‘watering', it seems, is largely centred on the village café, where the Vargases tell me Babette is enjoying exceptional trading conditions. In fact, the throng is reported to be dense enough for Manu to have ventured up there, in the hope of infiltrating the bar without being spotted by Mme Gros. Indeed, as soon as the first bull has thundered past us – his pursuers several humiliating metres behind – we see Manu, taking his life in his hands as he hurries down the middle of the street towards us, balancing a tray of beers.

Manu's progress is slowed by the overriding need for periodic checks that his illicit purchases remain undetected but he reaches us just in time to squeeze round the barrier before a second bull gallops heavily past – again unimpeded by the quartet in pursuit.

‘No stamina, these boys today,' he scoffs as he hands round the beers.

Exceptionally, he appears to have dug deep into his own dungarees for this round. The unaccustomed
entrée
to Babette's must have gone to his head – or so I imagine, until the Vargases whisper that he can keep the change.

‘We'll be happy to share a glass,' they add, leaving Manu happily draining two, as a cheer goes up from the crowd and yet another bull evades its gang of would-be assailants.

‘In my day, I'd have managed a two-year-old on my own,' swears Manu. His boasting is, however, rapidly silenced by a contemptuous contralto laugh at his elbow.

‘
Ah, te voilà, ma chère
,' says a man whose liberty is about to be forfeit.

*

‘Of course I knew about the local firewaters,' said Krystina, producing a couple of outsized antique balloon glasses. ‘Languedoc brandy used to be just as famous as Cognac.'

I took my pick from a well-stocked seventeenth-century-looking drinks cabinet and followed her out on to a starlit terrace.

Virgile's hardness-to-get had unfortunately left me still in the frame. But my house was teeming with sun-seeking families from obscure corners of my address book and Virgile had his brother visiting. So, reluctantly, I was risking alternative refuge in one of the château's sumptuous guest suites, having first discreetly verified that it could be locked from the inside.

‘It was even your thirteenth-century friend, da Villanova, down at the Medicine Faculty, who introduced the technique to France,' Krystina explained as she steered me towards a jasmine-scented pergola. ‘Admittedly, it was Cognac that established the country's first distillery ages later, in 1624, but it didn't take our local boys long to catch up.'

I was too engrossed in my fruity Marc de Muscat de Frontignan to be over-disconcerted by the proximity enforced by Krystina's tiny stone bench.

‘Brandy was a perfect solution for low-quality wine – mainly sold to sailors at first because it took up less space and travelled better than wine. It soon spread ashore though, particularly to the Northern European markets. A hundred thousand hectolitres a year leaving Sète by the end of the seventeenth century. A thousand distilleries …'

Languedoc
eaux de vie
might soon have become my mastermind subject, if Krystina had not chosen this unlikely moment to pounce. I should have seen it coming, but I was too enthralled by the stars. I had never seen so many and so bright. And anyway, who would have expected the lunge, when it came, to be so sudden?

The brandy balloon fell from my hand.

‘Oh, leave it!' she breathed, no more bothered by the broken goblet than she was by the wasted
marc
.

‘No really …' I tried to wriggle free. ‘I'll get a broom.'

‘We were made for better than that,' she panted and tried to pull me closer.

‘You could cut yourself,' I persisted until, unwillingly, she accepted that the mood, like the glass, had been shattered.

‘Don't bother to wake me in the morning,' she called as she swept from the terrace. ‘I've decided not to come to Faugères.'

*

Matthieu gave me two Faugères addresses to find: two growers spear-heading the revival of an entirely different
eau de vie
, the ‘Fine de Faugères' – a distillation of the local wine itself, he told me, as opposed to its grape pressings.

As I arrive at the first, in the heart of the village of Lenthéric, a dusty, dented 50cc motorbike draws up from the opposite direction. By most people's standards, Didier Barral has been enormously successful since he persuaded his father, Léon, to leave the local co-operative in 1993, but he despises what he sees as his profession's usual badges of achievement.

‘That's not how I see success,' he says, as he treats me to a parody of the ‘modern wine-maker' directing vineyard operations by mobile phone from the wheel of a Range Rover. ‘For me, it's a question of happiness in what I'm doing, fulfilling work for the people who help me and a healthy balance of nature on my land.'

From anyone less refreshingly down-to-earth, Didier's aspirations might have sounded pompous, but from him they are both humbling and inspiring: the only possible honourable creed.

He is already offering a glass of straw-coloured white wine before I can explain that I am really on the trail of the Faugères
fine
.

‘That's not so easy,' he explains, as he gives the greying stubble on his otherwise youthful cheeks a pensive scratch. ‘All in bond, you see – so we don't have to pay the tax until it's had its three years in wood. But that's ninety per cent Terret, what you've got there – the traditional Faugères brandy grape. And like the
fine
, it's aged in wood. That's why there's a slight oxidation in colour and taste. It's a natural product you see.'

I explain that, having sampled the
fine
at Matthieu's, I am not so much hoping to taste it as to find out more about its ‘renaissance'. For this, Didier suggests I should try the second of my addresses – but not before I have tasted a formidable selection of his reds.

It seems a shame to have left Manu behind, but ever since one of the grandchildren fell off the grotesque inflatable alligator which now dominates the deep end of the pool, my neighbour has been confined to base for lifeguarding duties. ‘Your friends really mustn't feel excluded,' said Mme Gros, when she saw them leaving for the beach this morning. ‘The kiddies are very happy to share.'

Didier explains how he usually keeps the individual grape varieties – the Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre, Carignan and Cinsault – scrupulously separate until they are blended just before the final bottling, but every sample seems as rewarding as many another grower's finished wines. He also keeps everything for two years before bottling – partly in wood for his top blend but otherwise in stainless steel – which avoids the need for filtering. Natural products again, he emphasizes.

If there is a common characteristic running through all the different
cuvées
, it must be their ripe, fruity intensity. One of the ripest and fruitiest of all is his Mourvèdre – a variety outside the range that I have encountered with Virgile but one that I have heard is notoriously difficult to bring to maturity.

‘I never have any problem,' says Didier unapologetically. ‘It's all a matter of how you manage the land. The one thing Mourvèdre can't stand is drought, but if your vineyard is a healthy, balanced, natural environment, you'll have all kinds of insects and animals burrowing down into the soil, letting whatever moisture there is get down to the roots. It's simple, natural things like that which make the difference.'

His aim, he summarizes with a modest smile, is to make something irresistible: a bottle of wine that no one would willingly leave unfinished. It sounds so simple and obvious but I suppose the measure of his success must be my own almost Manu-like reluctance to hand in my glass.

At the Château de Fabrègues, a couple of kilometres outside the village, the facts that I was looking for emerge with the speed and precision of a practised publicist who clearly longs to see both the name and the substance of Fine de Faugères on everyone's lips.

‘
Appellation Contrôlée
since 1947,' explains Jean-Luc Saur, the dark-green-boiler-suited proprietor of the château and president of the
appellation
. ‘Long before the wines got their classification in '82. But ironically, no one was making much
fine
in '47. Demand for spirits was declining and the distillery that had a virtual monopoly was holding massive stocks, up to a hundred years old – so there wasn't much incentive to make any more. In fact, production dried up altogether in the fifties.'

‘Until Matthieu?' I ask.

‘More or less,' he acknowledges, as he ushers me into a long, tunnel-vaulted tasting room. ‘One or two people did experiment but, to qualify for the
appellation
, you have to do all the distilling and maturing in Faugères, as well as simply growing your grapes here. So until Matthieu set himself up inside the boundaries, anything distilled elsewhere ranked as simple Eau de Vie du Languedoc.'

‘So last year's was the first authentic
fine
for half a century?'

‘Absolutely. With thirteen growers participating.'

‘And more than that this year, I assume?'

‘Less, I expect. Last year's production will keep most people going for a while. I'm sure we'll make more ourselves, but remember, we've already got five thousand bottles' worth from the last vintage, doing its three years in oak. And I'm not kidding myself that we'll be selling it in cases of six! All of it still in bond, of course, but maybe you'd like to taste our wines,' he offers. ‘You'll find them different from most of the Faugères you've tried. We don't believe in reds for easy early drinking.'

I am grateful for the warning. I take a tentative sip of the first densely black sample and find it almost overwhelmingly astringent: the bitter taste of tannin, which Virgile has taught me comes from contact with the grapeskins and pips. I am prepared to believe its importance in making slow-maturing, long-lived wines, but for me, it is all too reminiscent of over-steeped tea and I can really only take on trust the idea that something fruitier might be lurking in the background for the future.

Monsieur Saur, meanwhile, is positively relishing the austerity. ‘They're tough in their youth but they've great potential,' he promises.

But it is Didier Barral's irresistibility yardstick that comes to mind, as I eye my unfinished glass.

*

The last of my guests are gone – some more reluctantly than others.

There were those who realized within minutes of arrival that they had made a terrible mistake. Those unfamiliar insects in the showers, the unexpectedly fresh temperature of the freshwater pool, that wildness and unpredictability everywhere, both outside and inside the house, were all so far removed from the sanitized Mediterranean villa of their imaginings. This group tended to console itself by sitting moodily in deckchairs and emptying glasses faster than I could open bottles.

Others, however, embraced both the pleasures and the challenges of a life beyond chlorine and air-conditioning. They found such inspiration in my inexhaustible fig tree that they begged to monopolize the kitchen at mealtimes. They saw such charm in my picturesquely impractical granite sink that they fought for the privilege of washing up. They then harnessed themselves to my strimmer for the rest of the day to work up an appetite for the next round.