Virgile's Vineyard (29 page)

‘I do keep a bit back for friends,' he admits. ‘And for my
bon viveur
builder. And for those picnics, when everyone says, we'll bring the food, you bring the wine!'

No doubt he knows that I know that almost everyone in the region regards him as the best but he says all this with a total lack of self-congratulation. He is altogether more good-humoured than I had expected and yet the natural expression into which his strongly chiselled features periodically relax is one of uncompromising determination.

Everything around us is spotless. Even the assortment of overalls hanging neatly on a row of pegs looks pristine. A large, well-scrubbed worktable is empty except for a wooden case of wine, stamped ‘Domaine de Trévallon'.

‘I started my training over there,' Laurent explains, ‘in Provence. Then with that name behind me, I managed stints with Chave in the Rhône and Comtes Lafon in Burgundy as well.' (David Pugh recounted how much interest this pedigree managed to generate, before the first vintage – the 1992 – had even flowered.) ‘But you've not come to listen to my life story,' he laughs, as he heads for the stairs to his subterranean cellars. Then he checks himself halfway down to ask one of the year's more superfluous questions. ‘You
would
like to taste?' he verifies.

‘Excavated by me and my father. And absolutely essential in this climate,' he says, as we emerge in the first of several smoothly plastered, well-lit chambers below, where long rows of expensive-looking barrels stretch, apparently indistinguishably, ahead of us. ‘We make just the two wines,' he explains, as he heads unerringly for the cask that he has in mind. ‘White and red. You'll find some places founding all their reputation on some minute quantity of whatever they regard as their top
cuvée
, putting all their effort into that and neglecting the rest. Well, here everything we make is the best!'

So far my direction-changing New Year bottle of red has remained my only taste of La Grange des Pères. The white, with which Laurent is deftly filling a large pipette, is completely unknown to me. I watch him share it between two glasses, before thoughtfully sniffing his own. The piercing dark eyes under his intensely black eyebrows register approval. I taste it myself. It is only a couple of months old but already surprisingly complex – indeed, I have seldom felt more disappointed to be offered a spittoon, in this case a red bucket – yet he tells me that it has not even started its malolactic fermentation.

‘Maybe in the spring, maybe in the summer,' he speculates. Unlike Virgile, he seems utterly relaxed on the subject.

‘We made this first in 1995. It's normally eighty per cent Roussanne, ten per cent Marsanne – both traditional Rhône grapes – with ten per cent Burgundian Chardonnay. But this year we had almost no Chardonnay. It's the first variety to ripen, and last spring, when there was little else going, some hungry wild boar simply scoffed the lot,' he laughed, again utterly relaxed at the thwarting of his plans.

The white from the 2000 harvest has completed its malolactic and is consequently richer, more complete, more ‘winey', in fact, just as Virgile said. Like the 2001, it is still in barrel and Laurent explains that all his whites are matured in this way for two full years. Indeed, they are even fermented in the barrels as well. Yet, remarkably, they smell and taste only very subtly of oak.

‘Is that because it's such a long, slow process?' I ask. ‘Is that the secret?'

‘There are no secrets,' he says with a smile, as we move to another vault where the reds are resting.

Here the individual varieties – roughly forty per cent Syrah, forty Mourvèdre and twenty Cabernet Sauvignon – are kept in separate barrels until just before bottling. Laurent takes me through each of the 2000s. The 2001s are untastable, he says, having just begun their ‘malos', but the 1999 vintage has just been blended for imminent bottling and we can quickly taste that as well.

‘But there's not much time before dark, if you want to see the vines,' he gently hurries me.

Reluctantly I follow his example and empty the remains of my sample back into the barrel, but once upstairs, it seems there is just enough time for the 1999 white, which is also waiting for bottling in one of the stainless steel
cuves
. It has a power and persistence that seem to eclipse even the reds but there is no time to consider further. Laurent is turning out the lights.

‘You weren't thinking of going in that, were you?' he laughs at the sight of my modest Renault. ‘Assuming, that is, you were hoping to drive it home again.'

I clamber obediently into his four-wheel drive.

‘The family land down here in the valley wasn't suitable for vines,' he explains, as we climb a winding road into the hills. ‘At least, not for quality vines. My father had farmed it for the co-op but we ripped everything up, planting grain instead. We searched for a year before we found what we needed,' he continues, abruptly abandoning the road for a steep and rugged track, which he tells me they carved through the limestone with dynamite and bulldozers. (He was right, of course, there are potholes and ditches on this ascent in which the Renault might almost have disappeared.)

‘Incredibly infertile,' he beams contentedly, as we emerge on to the spectacularly barren-looking plateau at the top. ‘We found a few vestiges of nineteenth-century vines and olive trees, but basically nothing but scrub had grown up here for well over a hundred years.'

The land is also incredibly stony, the density of the round white pebbles looking almost snow-like in the pink evening light. There is not another vineyard in sight. The sense of quiet and isolation seems very nearly tangible.

‘It must be the highest in the area,' I suggest in hushed, almost reverent tones.

‘Nearly three hundred metres,' confirms Laurent more matter-of-factly. ‘You can make out the Pyrenees in better light. But you see that hill over there? That's where the famous Robert Mondavi was hoping to buy.'

The Mondavi story is one that has been on a lot of lips this year. The local socialist mayor had agreed to let the Californian wine-maker acquire and clear about fifty hectares of woodland in return for much-needed support for the underfunded, underachieving village co-operative and the deal had bitterly divided opinion. Many, including Laurent Vaillé himself, argued that Mondavi's arrival would give the Languedoc invaluable publicity, which it could never afford by itself. Others, like the Guiberts at Daumas Gassac, thought it inexcusable to destroy a forest when there were plenty of perfectly good vineyards for sale around the region – ignoring, of course, American efficiency's insistence that everything should be conveniently contiguous. In the end, the newly elected Communist Mayor of Aniane simply reversed the deal – as he had always pledged to do in his election campaign – and Mondavi, unamused, was reported to be severing every last link with France. The co-operative would be unlikely to find another saviour.

The sense of bareness up here is perhaps exaggerated by the fact that all the vines appear to be grown exceptionally close to the ground. Unlike Virgile's and every other vineyard that I have seen this year, they have no central trunk. Laurent believes the method must once have been traditional in the region because it can be found in the very oldest vineyards.

‘Is that the secret?' I ask him, but he merely smiles and assures me once again that there are none.

Looking closer, I see that he has already started his pruning – a painful kneeling operation, I imagine, at the height of those vines.

‘I started at the end of November,' he confirms. ‘I'd been doing so much work in the
cave
, I just had to get out of doors! It always lifts my spirits, to come up here. Same with my brother.' He points to a tractor doing a pre-prune in the distance. ‘He always prefers to work in the fields.'

‘I didn't know you had a brother,' I say. Most people have talked about La Grange des Pères as if it were Laurent and Laurent alone, and he is clearly the public face for what little public contact there is.

‘People say I hide him because he knows the secrets,' he laughs. ‘But it's like I told you, there really are no secrets.' He laughs again at people's unwillingness to believe him.

But I don't believe him either. Over an hour after we left the
cave
, I can still taste that 1999 white as vividly as when it first touched my tongue.

*

‘Count on me,' Virgile had said.

I was in fact counting first on his friend Luc. Putting February's irritations behind me, I had commissioned him to procure me a Christmas truffle back in November, but last week he reluctantly admitted there was not so much as a whiff in the whole of the region. Everyone, it seemed – even Manu, presumably – was paying the price of a hot, dry August.

‘Don't worry about Luc,' Virgile promised me. ‘My family's full of truffle hunters. There's never a shortage in the Vaucluse.'

But now it is Christmas Eve, and for the first year that any of them can remember, the combined expertise of the Jolys has failed to unearth a single specimen even for their private consumption. His mother is making do with dried
cèpes
, he tells me.

I am wondering what alternative compromises may have occurred to Sarah and the other houseguests who have volunteered to cook my unfamiliar capon. (In the excitement of the Saturday morning market, it struck me as a more authentically ‘local' choice than turkey for tonight's dinner.) But at Virgile's suggestion, I have delegated Christmas decoration duties as well so that I can join him for a final tasting of the new wines before we both drive up to sample this ‘austerity-cookbook'
chapon sans truffe
.

We are working our way through the various
cuvées
that I have been privileged this year to follow from grape to glass – or rather from pruning cut to bud and thence to leaf and flower and grape … and only finally to glass.

The Cinsault is light and amiable; the Syrah (the two different
cuves
now blended) is dark and concentrated but relatively severe; the Carignan (similarly blended) is gutsy and spicy; and the Grenache – despite the recent traumas – perhaps the most fruitily engaging of all. The mixed
vin de presse
, on the other hand, is predictably bitter on the finish but it may yet be useful in the final blend. Then lastly there is the special Nébian Cinsault: the sweetly concentrated, utterly irresistible ‘
confiture'
. Virgile is now very excited about this. Two years in wood, he believes, will make it even more impressive, and although the style will only be achievable in exceptional years, he is resolved from this point on to target everything he does at Nébian towards the possibility.

‘It's a bit early to say for certain,' says Virgile, ‘but a lot of people think this is going to be the best vintage since the Languedoc got serious.'

‘I was really lucky then … But you haven't yet started your pruning?' I ask, with a curious sense of reluctance to broach the subject. I suppose it was pruning time when we first met and to ask the question is to acknowledge that the year has nearly run its course.

‘I prefer to leave it until after Christmas, when the sap will be rising,' he says. ‘Apart from being too busy. The last of the
malos
have finished, you see – even the Grenache – so I've been doing the final rackings. And I've also been off to the Cognac region, choosing barrels for next year. I found this incredible guy. Really small scale. Even lets you choose the particular trees that you want him to use, if you can wait two years. Which sadly I can't …'

He will be barrel-ageing all of this year's Coteaux du Languedoc over a second winter, he explains. The early bottling of the first half of last year's production was driven purely by cash flow. With Puech behind him, only the Carthagène and the proportion of the wine that has to be declassified as
vin de pays
will be released in the spring.

‘But that reminds me, I've forgotten to book the bottling lorry!' he announces to my surprise.

It is not that the thing itself is unfamiliar. Only the other day, when I visited Daumas Gassac, one of these giant bottling factories on juggernaut wheels was making short work of their 2001 white. I just hadn't expected Virgile to be filling Saint Saturnin's square with one of them next year. Times have changed more quickly than I would have thought possible in January.

*

‘Don't I get a kiss, then?' asks Babette, as a lungful of cigarette smoke blows past my left cheek.

I owe this eleventh-hour marker of my social progress to a lack of commerciality on her part, which must, I think, be one of the core skills acquired at café-management school. New Year's Eve is a date in the calendar when much of the village might be expected to venture forth for festive refreshment. Yet perversely this is just when Babette can be relied upon to hang up her ‘closed' sign.

She is not, however, the first to arrive at my party. Manu predictably claimed that prize but he is sadly unable to shower Babette with further cousinly kisses. This is because the hanging of the fairy lights was not an unqualified success. The lights themselves look well enough – or as well as can be expected, given his wife's refusal to pay for the replacement of the numerous defective bulbs. The trouble was that Mme Gros's preferred
emplacement
for the illuminations was higher than a man of Manu's stature should really have tried to reach, even from the top of his longest ladder. And although his fall, when it came, was partly broken by a pile of fallen branches, gathered from my little forest and waiting to be cut into Yuletide logs, they failed to prevent him from cracking his jaw.

He is thus heavily strapped and bandaged and not at all in kissing mode tonight. Indeed, the discomforts of merely eating appear to have lost him several kilos over the Christmas period. His only consolation is that the doctor's advice that he should drink everything, including wine, through a straw seems to have accelerated his already unrivalled imbibing rate.