Virgile's Vineyard (20 page)

Some were so enamoured that they now want to buy houses of their own here. One or two, indeed, want to buy
my
house here but I think I have convinced them that it is not for sale. I have yet to work out how I shall find either the time or the money, after this year, to keep it going in the manner which it deserves but it is emphatically not for sale.

So yes, the last of my guests have finally gone. The last of the breakages is replaced and the depleted foodstores are replenished. At least, they will be, as soon as I have driven home from the Wednesday morning Clermont l'Hérault market.

I ought to be speeding straight back with the more perishable purchases but it seems ages since I last saw Virgile, so I decide to make the small diversion to Saint Saturnin, to ask him when the long-awaited assault on the grape harvest might be likely to start. He asked me to be on stand-by for active service from the end of the month but I've not heard from him since.

The familiar white Mercedes van is parked in its usual place beside the church but the
cave
is locked and there is no answer to my knock at the door of his flat. Pius spots me from the Le Pressoir terrace and beckons me over for a briefing.

‘He's ill,' he says with a frown. ‘Taken to his bed with a fever. A virus, he says, but more like simple exhaustion, if you ask me. Well, you know as well as I do the hours he's been working.'

‘I couldn't make him hear,' I explain.

‘He doesn't want to see anyone,' says Pius, shaking his head.

‘But what about the
vendange
?' I ask, in the hope of reassurance.

‘I'd say, it doesn't look very promising,' is Pius's grim-faced reply.

‘This is the most important decision of the year,' said Virgile, when he finally called me from his sickbed. ‘To start or not to start the
vendange
.' He was still feeling feverish but he had managed to drag himself out to do a round of the vines, to monitor the state of play. ‘I've taken some sample pickings,' he explained, ‘to check on the sugar levels. I reckon I should be starting on Monday. The trouble is, there's so much preparation that I ought to be doing in the
cave
.'

‘You'll manage,' I tried to reassure him. ‘You always do. Much better to get some rest.'

‘At least it should stay fine,' he consoled himself through the muffling of his duvet. ‘Set fair until the next new moon, I hope, around the middle of the month. So we've a bit of time to play with. You know, I didn't even start until that time last year but everything's so much more advanced … I really must get the equipment sterilized.'

‘Get some rest,' I urged him again. ‘But is there anything I can bring you? Some grapes, perhaps?'

‘Very funny,' he said. ‘I'll see you on Monday.'

But when Monday came, Virgile had only half his team available. A couple of Polish girls who helped him last year had telephoned to say that their train from Warsaw was going to take them three days and Régine had defected at the last minute to his friend Olivier at Mas Jullien. So, pragmatically, he persuaded himself that a further delay would do no harm and said he would call me as soon as he was ready to push the button. By Friday, I was beginning to wonder what else could have gone wrong, but it was only when he finally rang on Sunday to say that my phone had been out of order for half the week that I realized I had missed the first three days.

He sounded far too excited by the quality of the harvest to mind about my absent pair of hands. He had started on Thursday with his earliest ripening variety, the Grenache Noir, then followed with the Syrah from Jonquières on Friday and his Cinsault down at Nébian on Saturday.

‘The grapes are so healthy,' he marvelled. ‘Such concentrated sugar. Amazing potential alcohols! Well, thirteen and a half for Syrah, that's not so unusual. But fifteen for the Grenache and, you'll never believe it, twenty for the Cinsault! That's not wine,' he laughed, ‘it's
confiture
! The kind of vintage you dream about!'

So I could hardly wait to be part of a dream.

There is, however, nothing more likely to ensure the return of a sharp sense of reality than a Monday morning bent double, rummaging amongst the greenery for the grapes and cursing the fact that the Saint Saturnin Syrah is the one
parcelle
where Virgile decided to take a chance and go easy on the leaf-and-bunch-thinning. It is not so bad for the Polish girls, Magda and Margherita. They are short enough not to have to stoop so much and anyway, the others have all had three days to acclimatize. Even Arnaud, the lanky young electrician, still waiting for the ‘real job', bows uncomplainingly to his task. But for me, as the morning advances, an all-consuming craving to stretch myself anywhere flat on my back – even in the stoniest space between the vines – eclipses even my hunger pangs.

‘And all for just three glasses per vine,' I keep thinking.

The bunches have been collected in small plastic crates – only about thirty centimetres deep to avoid putting too much pressure on the grapes – and Virgile wants to take a trailer-load back to base at midday.

‘Please, please let me be picked for trailer-loading duties,' I think to myself, as I try to catch Virgile's eye with a surge of what I hope will be convincingly muscular-looking grape-snipping. ‘I don't care how heavy the crates are – anything for a change of posture.'

But Virgile already knows the sinewy zeal that Arnaud will bring to the task and I am condemned to carry on crouching until lunchtime.

Tiring as the work is, there is never a moment's slackening of the team's attention to detail. Even when Virgile absents himself briefly for a spot of troubleshooting elsewhere, a lingering sense of his quiet, perfectionist authority somehow keeps everyone motivated.

‘Did you ever see such healthy grapes?' enthuses Florent, an incongruously stylish journalist friend of Virgile's younger brother, who is ‘between newspapers' but clearly needs a regular income to finance the expensively cut, floppy-fringed hairstyle that refuses to stay out of his eyes as he bends for the next bunch.

‘Not where I am,' grumbles Gérard, the final member of the team, a neurotic-looking Northerner of indeterminate age who, as far as I can gather, has come to live with his mother in the Languedoc in the hope of forgetting a broken marriage. ‘Just my luck to chose a row with so many rotten grapes,' he whines, as if nature were conspiring with his former wife to make his misery complete.

‘Careful,' says Virgile, intervening. ‘Most of those grapes you're cutting out from those bunches are just a bit dry. It's only actual rot that needs to go.' Unseen by Virgile, Gérard pulls a face, half-despairing, half-mutinous. I know how he feels – the two conditions look so similar.

As if to rub salt in our weary wounds, we seem to be surrounded by neighbouring growers with huge mechanical harvesting machines, which are busy piling effortlessly indiscriminate mountains of grapes into enormous open trailers. No fastidious grape selection over there.

‘All destined for my friends at the co-op,' says Virgile, with a wink, as he reads my thoughts. ‘Actually, I've decided it's the only option for my unwanted Grenache Blanc. It's going to be machine-picked tomorrow and taken down to Gignac, where at least I know the co-op won't make a fuss if I change my mind next year. But I still wish I didn't have to do it mechanically. It isn't just a question of picking perfect grapes,' he explains, as he shows me some bedraggled stalks from which a neighbour's fruit has just been rudely ripped. ‘You see what it does to the vine. Leaves it confused, thinking there's something still to be fed, instead of building up energy for the winter. But talking of food …'

Saint Saturnin's clock has now twice gladdened our hearts with a twelfth stroke.

We return to the flat to find Virgile's once fastidiously tidy kitchen looking as if it has been vandalized. More dishes than I thought he possessed are piled high on every surface. Domesticity is obviously alien to the Polish girls, who are ‘camping' in the allegedly uninhabitable accommodation above the
cave
(the height of luxury, they say, after last year's tent). Domestic order is presumably equally foreign to Florent, who has spent the last few nights even closer to the chaos, on the sofabed. But at least he can cook. Admittedly, seven ravenous grapepickers who have been hard at work since 7.45 may not be the most exacting gastronomes but awesome quantities of Florent's hastily assembled pasta dish seem to disappear within minutes of being served.

Such conversation as is managed between mouthfuls lurches around in a confusing mix of languages. Margherita speaks no French, almost no English but excellent German, so Gérard uses his reasonable German to monopolize Margherita in a way that he fondly imagines is highly seductive. Magda – visibly delighted to be free of Gérard's attentions – speaks little French, no German but passable English. Consequently, to communicate with the Polish girls at all, Virgile has been forced to reveal more competence in my language than he would ever admit to me before – and he seems to be rather enjoying it. Meanwhile, Florent and Arnaud speak only French and they speak it even to those who plainly do not understand.

The afternoon picking is essentially ‘more of the same'. It finishes around five o'clock, when everyone disperses except Virgile, Arnaud and myself who then try to summon up the energy for what Virgile, with his new-found delight in the English language, describes as ‘
zuh rrrreal worrrrk'
.

The equivalent of four trailer-loads of Syrah grapes, all waiting in tall stacks of plastic crates, now have to be heaved into the gaping mouth of the
érafloir
– the formidable-looking destemming machine, currently occupying most of the usable space in the middle of the
cave
. A huge hose pipe, about fifteen centimetres in diameter, stretches from this to the top of an empty fibreglass
cuve
.

‘It's a very clever machine,' shouts Virgile, reverting more comprehensibly to French above the rattle of machinery. ‘It removes the stalks and lightly breaks the skins, without crushing the pips, which would make the wine bitter.'

The machine is spewing the stalks into a larger crate at the back, leaving just the juice and skins and pips to shoot up the pipe.

‘Remember, the juice itself is white,' explains Virgile. ‘Very few red grapes have red juice. As I explained for my pink Carthagène, it's contact with the skins that gives a wine its colour.'

He leaves the
érafloir
and dashes up a ladder to pour a carefully measured quantity of colourless liquid into the top of the fast-filling
cuve
.

‘You won't be able to taste this,' he promises. ‘It's sulphur dioxide. The amount I use is way below the permitted maximum, even for organic wines. But it's absolutely essential for disinfection. It prevents oxidation and kills the bacteria, which would otherwise kill the fermentation.'

He jumps nimbly down again for a further check on progress.

‘Are you two sleeping over there?' he jokes, as he whisks away a brimming crate of stalks and substitutes an empty one.

However, far from slumbering, Arnaud has been tirelessly feeding the insatiable mouth of the
érafloir
with roughly three crates of grapes to every one of mine.

Lack of space forces us to work with the double doors wide open and our combined activities have quickly been adopted as something of a spectator sport – not only for the early diners on Le Pressoir's terrace but also for numerous would-be wine-makers in the village. Stéphane, for instance, the son of Serge, the owner of most of Virgile's Saint Saturnin vines, is familiar enough with grape growing. He grows them on other family land but he delivers them all to the co-operative, which is where he says goodbye to them.

‘I'm thinking of breaking away myself,' he keeps telling anyone who will listen. ‘Maybe next year …'

But as Virgile's whisper cynically explains, the co-operative has a vested interest in ensuring that its growers learn as little as possible about wine-making.

‘Dad says your Grenache is already fermenting,' says Stéphane in amazement.

‘Well, yes,' says Virgile, confirming the most natural thing in the world.

‘But what did you do to start it?' asks the only man in Saint Saturnin who seems to know less about wine-making than I do.

‘Nothing,' laughs Virgile. ‘No magic, no spells and no prayers. The only strange thing would be if it didn't start. Have a look at the Syrah in those crates. You see a slight bloom on the skin? Well, those are the yeasts. They're alive, and as they come into contact with the juice, they feed on the sugar content, which enables them to multiply, whilst converting the sugar into alcohol.'

Stéphane scratches his head incredulously. ‘Maybe the year after next,' he seems to be thinking.

When eventually the last of the crates has been emptied into the
érafloir
, Virgile puts Arnaud on clearing-up duties and asks me to clamber up the ladder to join him on the ‘roof' of the pair of newly refurbished concrete tanks. He unclamps one of the wide circular trapdoors and shows me the fermenting Grenache down below.

‘Have a smell,' he says, as I wriggle forwards in the metre-high gap between
cuve
-top and ceiling. But then I recoil so fast from the sharp prick of gas that I bang my head on a beam. ‘Carbon dioxide,' he says, ‘the other by-product of the fermentation process, replacing all the oxygen. Fall in and you're dead!' he adds encouragingly.

A crab-like shuffle back towards the ladder strikes me as the most health-enhancing strategy at this point but Virgile quickly dispels any such thoughts.

‘You're going to do a
remontage
,' he announces. ‘Pumping the juice from the bottom back up to the top. How do you say?
Teck zees owe-zuh
.'

He looks very pleased with himself as he thrusts a hose into my hand and disappears down the ladder.

‘
Verrrry carrrre-fool … I sweetch on zuh pomp
.'

As the pump whirrs into action, the juice from the tap down below starts gushing out at my end to water the surface of the mixture that is brewing in the darkness of the vat beneath me. After Virgile's words of warning, I dare not lean in too far to see what effect I am having. However, he explains that the object of the exercise is to introduce more oxygen and mix the contents thoroughly, otherwise all the fermentation activity will be concentrated in the semi-solid ‘cap' at the top.

I have to crouch there waggling the heavy hose for half an hour to ensure an even distribution. The continuing procession of spectators acknowledges me tentatively, as if anyone passing his evening wedged between a concrete tank and a ceiling must be a little mad.

‘
C'est qui là-haut?
' asks one of them.

‘
C'est Patrick
,' explains Virgile.

‘
C'est qui ça?
'

‘
Un ami anglais
.'

‘
Ah bon
,' says the questioner, having all the explanation he needs.

To relieve the monotony, Virgile passes me up a tasting sample of the slightly effervescent half-juice, half-wine that we are pumping and follows it with some of the Syrah that we picked today.

‘Look how red it is already!' he exclaims with delight.

‘I'll have to take your word for it,' I answer from my shadowy niche, but the taste is so intensely, deliciously fruity, it seems almost a shame to let the yeasts do their work.