Virgile's Vineyard (2 page)

Everyone else called her ‘Babette'. In fact, everyone else gave her careworn cheeks at least three kisses on arrival or departure and I wondered how long I should have to be here to count as an insider.

‘Et le pauvre Manu?' she asked, when she brought me the coffee. ‘Comment va-t-il?'

Again I had the eerie impression that someone must have pinned a note of my address to the back of my jacket. Was I really the first stranger they had seen all winter?

‘Manu's my cousin,' Babette explained, as she lit a new cigarette with the stub of the old and left the latter smouldering in my ashtray. ‘He said you'd be down before long. By rights, he ought to be my best customer. But guess-who placed the café out of bounds. I'm supposed to inform on him, if he comes here on his own, but I sometimes smuggle him in and out the back way!'

She offered me a well-thumbed copy of the local newspaper and returned to the bar to embrace another wave of thirsty labourers. I had been wondering whether tomorrow's weather forecast might augur well for a first assault on my olive jungle but I didn't think I could face the gothic horrors predicted on the back page. I was just immersing myself in a more comforting report of a local onion-growing competition, when a new female voice intruded from a half-hidden corner behind the billiard table.

‘I can see that you've been wondering whether I'm English,' it said.

I was, in fact, wondering nothing of the sort. What I am wondering is how much henna it must have taken to produce the mass of vividly auburn curls bearing down on my table. I suspect, however, that, beneath the expensive cut of an intimidating black trouser suit, she is neither as young nor as slender as she would like to be.

‘Krystina,' she booms, above the clank of her costume jewellery. ‘With a K and a Y. I live at the château. Bought it with my divorce money. Don't worry, I know who you are,' she assures me, as she draws a chair rather closer to mine than an acquaintance of this brevity would normally justify. ‘Steeped in history, of course, the château. Which I love. Used to teach it, you see. History. Before I married my serial philanderer. So it feels like I'm getting back to my roots …'

The torrent of self-explanation continues in these conditions of unlooked-for proximity for another minute or two. When I finally have an opportunity to turn the monologue into something closer to conversation, all I can think of to ask is a rather pedestrian ‘How much do you know about the history of the Languedoc?' Then I foolishly add that I'm terribly keen to learn all about the region's wine-making history. Not that I'm uninterested, of course, but I really should have foreseen how avidly the merest flicker of enthusiasm would be pounced on.

‘I don't even know when it started,' I fumble. ‘Under the Romans, I've always assumed …'

‘Wrong!' My history mistress unexpectedly slaps a hand on mine. ‘I shall have to take you to Agde to meet my favourite Greek boy. Tuesday would be a good day for me. I'll come up for you at nine. Don't worry, I know where you are. In fact, would you like a lift now? It's raining, I see.'

The rain is actually extremely heavy but I suspect I am in enough trouble already, so I extricate my hand and insist on walking home. However, by the time I arrive it is nearly midday and my soggy baguette has lost most of its appeal.

Maybe I should just drive back to the café for lunch.

*

‘Does it ever snow?' I ask Manu. It has been bitterly cold since I arrived and there were icicles on the plants beside the terrace fountain this morning.

‘Here?' says Manu, as a shorthand for ‘Don't you northerners understand anything?'

We are returning from an expedition to purchase the terrifying quantity of tools that Manu assured me would be indispensable, if I were to have any hope of reclaiming the olive trees. He goes hunting with the manager of the local DIY hypermarket (a great leveller, la chasse) and he promised that his networking skills would guarantee me massive discounts. But my credit-card limit has nonetheless suffered a serious assault and somehow Manu's insistence that I buy everything at the top end of the market encourages a sense that many of the more luxurious items in the back of his van are also destined for active service on a neighbouring property.

‘Well, maybe it snows once every fifteen years,' he continues. ‘Like 1986, for instance. You wouldn't believe it. Completely snowed in, we were. I mean, completely. Up to the windows. For three days it was like living in an igloo. But that must be, what? Fifteen years ago now.'

Making us just about due for another of nature's specials, I calculate, as a car coming towards us from the heights of the Larzac plain passes with snow spilling off its roof. Not quite my vision of life in the balmy south.

‘But is there any danger for the vines?' I ask.

‘Not in the Languedoc,' says Manu. ‘It very rarely goes below minus five down here and you'd need something like minus eighteen to damage a vine.'

‘I've heard the Russians bury theirs.'

‘Unnatural!' snorts Manu, as if at some scandalous depravity. But then an unfortunate flash of free association reminds him of some rather special vodka, stashed away in his cellar, which I really have to sample before lunch.

*

This morning I made a start on the liberation of the olive trees. Manu's preferred models of strimmer and chainsaw have been put into action and I feel unexpectedly exhilarated. All my previous urban gardening efforts in England now seem depressingly mean and pointless: paltry struggles to create tiny patches of passably abundant life where none would naturally belong. Here, the opposite adventure of taming twelve acres of nature's super-abundance seems infinitely more exciting.

Unfortunately, however, it also seems infinitely more infinite. It is not simply a matter of everything being overgrown. There is, for instance, also the little matter of water. The house is called ‘Les Sources' in honour of the natural springs that Uncle Milo ‘captured' to provide the sole supply of water. After so many months of abandonment, it is amazing that the taps are still running – still more so that the water is the best I have ever tasted. Yet elsewhere nature has started to reassert itself. The spring that is routed through the courtyard fountain flows on into a deep freshwater pool farther down the hillside. Memories of clear, refreshing swimming there on my early visits have successfully put me off bright blue, chlorinated rectangles for life. However, today it has all the murky greenness of a forgotten village pond. Another spring that once fed a little brook running down through the orchard to the river has silted up, leaving the apple trees paddling in a bog.

There is enough work here for a lifetime, never mind a year. However, by lunchtime, protesting muscles in every part of my body were demanding some respite from the morning's unfamiliar impositions. So I generously agreed to treat them to lunch at a little village restaurant called Le Pressoir, which I spotted in Saint Saturnin when we were coming back from Montpeyroux. Some homemade chicken liver paté and tender lamb chops grilled on a fire made from gnarled old vine-stocks had revived me just enough to face the afternoon shift. However, hobbling back to the car, I spotted an intriguing, freshly chalked legend above a set of peeling double doors on the other side of the square.

‘Virgile Joly – Cave Particulière – Depuis 2000,' it said.

And in the second week of January 2001, how could I fail to be impressed? So, for all my good intentions on the olive terraces, I tried a tentative knock.

A cheerful ‘Come in, if you can squeeze in!' is the immediate response, because Virgile Joly's cave proves to be as minute as it is recent. Though little bigger than a lockup garage it is packed with far more equipment than anyone would have thought possible in such a confined space. Some of it looks conspicuously new, like his dozen or so wooden barrels and the four tall, fibreglass fermentation tanks, or ‘cuves' as he calls them; the rest, including a variety of strange machinery with unidentifiable roles in the wine-making process, looks much more obviously second- or third-hand. Everything, however, is impeccably tidily ordered. Indeed, my arrival has clearly interrupted a fastidious scrubbing of the concrete floor, but Virgile still seems only too happy to lean on his broom for a chat.

‘Last year was my first vintage,' he explains enthusiastically, in precise, well-educated French with just an occasional southern twang. (He is well-spoken, well-dressed, well-groomed and, seemingly, well under thirty.) ‘Not the first vintage I'd worked on. I'd already been helping other people for nine or ten years. But the first with my own vines. Why don't you come and have a look at them?'

I climb into his elderly but spotless white Mercedes van and we drive a few kilometres outside the village to a spot where rows of vines appear to stretch as far as I can see across the gently sloping plain.

‘This is my Carignan,' he explains, pointing to one expanse of vines. ‘And here's my Syrah,' he continues, pointing to another apparently identical patch. ‘Then over there, I've got some Grenache Noir.'

‘Does that mean that you make three different wines?' (I realize I shall simply have to get used to some unfamiliar grapes down here: no sign yet of my old friends, Cabernet and Chardonnay.)

‘Not at all. I mix them. In fact, for Coteaux du Languedoc, you're obliged to mix at least two varieties, or cépages, as we call them.'

‘You mix them after you've made the wines?'

‘No, before. Some people make the assemblage afterwards but – well, you've seen my cellar – I don't really have room to keep them separate. And, in any case, I think you get a more complex wine, if the grapes ferment together.'

‘And these vines – you bought them only last year?'

‘They're rented. It'll be a while before I can afford to buy anything. But yes, it was only last March that I got hold of them – just in time to give them a hasty prune.' He laughs at the memory. ‘The only piece of equipment I had was a pair of secateurs. Everything else, including the cellar, came later, as I persuaded the bank manager to lend me a little bit more for the necessities of each new season. The trouble is, I can't get it all in. I'm going to have to move the wine press out to make room for a bottling machine that I'm borrowing.'

‘You mean, the wine's ready for bottling already?'

‘One of them will be soon, yes. Shall we go and taste it?'

I fail to take in all the technicalities but, back in the cave, Virgile explains that he has deliberately made one style of wine for early, relatively easy drinking and another for bottling sometime next year, which he hopes will be more complex. He reaches for two of the most serious-looking goblets that I've seen in a long time and, with the aid of a large glass pipette, draws a sample of the first wine from one of the barrels.

‘I feel very shy about these tastings,' he confesses, his ruddy cheeks turning a little redder still. ‘Especially when they're not yet ready.'

‘Does wine-making run in the family?' I ask to distract him.

‘My grandfather was a vigneron in the Vaucluse. Still is. But I came over here to study oenology at Montpellier. And then I worked for a lot of different people, both here in the Languedoc and in Chile. I could have set myself up anywhere really and I must say I was pretty tempted by Chile. So much less red tape than France. But nowhere else,' he says with evident feeling, ‘has this landscape. Or this diversity of wines.'

We move on to wine number two. The first was already deliciously full and spicy but the second, drawn directly from one of the fermentation tanks, promises even more. I make a mental note to ask another day how he achieves the difference. Then suddenly, as I look around the tiny cave, it strikes me that here, perhaps, is an operation small enough in scale for me to be able to grasp what on earth it is that a vigneron does between one harvest and the next. When I hint as much to Virgile, he declares himself only too willing to instruct me. Indeed, his insistence that I should ‘shadow' his operations over the coming year is almost as determined as Manu's resolve to play the chaperon. Not to mention Krystina's apparently obdurate designs on me.

Shall I ever be able to keep them all happy?

*

‘You realize, of course, that what you have here are Lucques?' said Manu last week, when he first came over to inspect my progress in the olive grove. ‘The finest olives in the Languedoc. You see those kind of crescent shapes? Unmistakable Lucques, those are. Ideal up here, of course, as your uncle realized. They don't mind the cold but they hate the drought. Probably got a bit thirsty, here on their own last summer, though. Otherwise they'd be a lot plumper … And of course, you really should have picked them in October. When they were green …'

Until a couple of days before this, I had always assumed that there were green olive trees and black olive trees, just as there were green and black grapes. Mercifully, however, a chance conversation overheard in the village shop had brought enlightenment and, thanks to Nathalie the shopkeeper, I now knew that black olives were simply green olives left to ripen longer on the tree.

‘You see, Lucques are really green olives,' Manu continued, unaware of how easily I could have made a fool of myself at this critical moment. ‘For the table. But I suppose you could always go for oil. Given that you've got black olives. And that you've missed the boat for the table. Although there again, you really should have picked them in December …'

I took a small sample branch into Clermont L'Hérault's highly regarded olive oil co-operative – luckily only about twenty minutes' drive away in the direction of the coast – half hoping that the experts would tell me I had missed the boat for oil as well. But unfortunately I was still in time. So I felt I had to ignore the cold and drizzle and make a start but it seemed to take me most of the morning to fill less than half a bucket. My fingers were numb from the chill north wind and I was almost past caring what happened to my crop when Manu arrived with a bundle of blankets under his arm.