Virgile's Vineyard (5 page)

‘Like new moons and full moons, that kind of thing?' I ask disbelievingly.

‘Not so much that as the movement of the moon in relation to the rest of the zodiac. You see, the calendar divides the year into four different categories, each of them earmarked as favouring one of a plant's four key elements: the roots, the leaves, the flowers and the fruits. And if we're doing anything that relates to the wine itself, we try to do it in a fruit period.'

All this sounds a great deal wackier than the weather worries but, before I can betray too much scepticism, Virgile dials a number for a telephonic weather forecast.

‘Not good,' he sighs, as he puts the receiver back, looking even more depressed. ‘Maybe in a couple of days' time.'

‘But won't that be a flower day?'

‘Too bad,' he says. ‘The wine won't wait. And the weather's more important. I'll call you when the skies are clear.'

On Sunday morning I was woken by the unrelenting ringing of a telephone.

‘
Bonjour, c'est Virgile
,' said the handset, as I fumbled in the dark for the light switch. ‘The weather's changed. We need to rack the wine as soon as possible. Can you come straightaway?'

By the time I arrived, he was already busy with a bucket of soda solution, methodically sterilizing everything that he was about to use, from the empty fermentation
cuve
to his ancient, second-hand pump. Then the whole operation was carefully repeated with citric acid. Finally the tap on the tank that needed to be emptied could be turned. The deep purple liquid gushed out into a large plastic tub. The pump swung into juddery action and the frothing wine surged up a pipe to its new resting-place.

‘Now this is the really vital bit,' he said, as he dashed over to stir some minutely measured sulphur dioxide into the foaming tub.

‘Not very organic,' I ventured.

‘But absolutely indispensable,' he explained. ‘Even the Greeks used it as a preservative. It fights bacteria. Prevents oxidation. Without it, you simply couldn't make wine. But the big question is …' He bit his lip as he watched the level rising in the receiving
cuve
. ‘Have I left it all too late? Has the wine already been tainted by the lees? '

As soon as the transfer was complete, he opened the big circular door in the now empty tank. He put his head inside, lingered a moment and re-emerged, smiling shyly. The wine was not only sound but … dare he say it … really promising.

Virgile was happy.

*

The whole of the south-facing end of Les Sources's dining room – from terracotta floor to stone, Romanesque-arched ceiling – is magnificently glazed. An obvious enough idea, perhaps, if you have a view like Uncle Milo's but the masterstroke here was to project the bare stone walls and vaulting of the interior for a foot or so beyond the glass. It makes the window seem to disappear, as inside and outside worlds merge together. More cleverly still, it isolates the room from the extremes of the elements. It will no doubt offer vital shade in summer but, on winter days like these, it is only the rarest and strongest of southerly winds that ever makes the raindrops obscure the glass. It is, of course, impossible to curtain but even dark February nights feel detached and snug, as the warmth of candlelight is reflected back on itself.

On a bright February morning, however, there is no escaping the cruelly panoramic view of all the work that is waiting to be done on the land. Throughout my breakfast, for instance, I tried to ignore the remaining black olives that were obstinately, tauntingly clinging to the tree in front of the window. But in the end, I reluctantly accepted the fact that there is nothing like a glistening, ripe black olive to catch the morning sunlight. And nothing more certain to rob me of inner peace until the survivors were finally picked for the table. Whatever Manu said, if the black Lucques make such a good oil, I couldn't believe they could be altogether bad for eating.

I took a confident bite to test my theory, gasped with amazement and went straight to the terrace fountain for some water to take away the appallingly acrid taste. Something seemed to be seriously wrong. Perhaps this was what happened when you left them too long on the tree? I needed some advice but I wasn't going to ask Manu and expose myself to another long-suffering ‘What did I tell you?' So I nipped down for a quick word with the aged roadside double-act that regular passing pleasantries have revealed to be M. and Mme Vargas.

They were working as usual on the steeply-banked terraces beside the lane leading to the village. They live, so they tell me, just inside the medieval gateway, in one of the main street's tall narrow houses, and normally they bring all their tools out here in a wheelbarrow. Today, however, the
brouette
was full of horse manure, so the tools had travelled in Mme Vargas's two-wheeled shopping trolley.

‘You didn't just eat the olives straight off the tree?' they asked in characteristically unified astonishment, as they took a break from fertilizing and hobbled down to shake my hand. ‘What you have to do is, you put them in an old pillow-case for a couple of weeks, with plenty of rough salt …' Even these more extended utterances were somehow managed in more or less synchronized harmony. ‘Give it a good shake every time you pass to drain the bitterness away. Then soak them in some oil – maybe some herbs …'

Any remaining stages in the Vargases' recipe (happily, a stiff-jointed gesture of finality suggested that there might in fact have been none) were drowned by the roar of a car being driven far too fast around the corner towards us. The Vargases' body language changed as fast as their infirmity allowed to that of mortal terror but the vehicle swerved to avoid us all with only a handful of the roadside vines destroyed.

‘Krystina. With a K and a Y,' the driver introduced herself to the trembling Vargases. ‘Oh, don't worry, I know the grower,' she continued breezily, as she turned the BMW on the now flattened corner of the vineyard. ‘I'll settle up with him tomorrow. But you seem to have forgotten about our date in Narbonne,' she rounded on me, with an imperious opening of the passenger door.

‘Key date for today: 118 BC. Foundation of Narbo,' another quick-fire disquisition began, as the Vargases disappeared in the dust cloud thrown up by our back tyres. ‘Important port and capital of the Roman Province of Narbonensis – that's all of modern Languedoc to you, with a good bit of Provence thrown in. Anyway, the surrounding area saw such a rapid explosion of vines and olive trees, people used to think there'd been a climatic upheaval. Planting rights all reserved to the Romans, of course. Mostly veterans of the Legions …'

As the fusillade of facts continued, I caught fleeting glimpses of signposts to what Krystina informed me were other places founded by the Romans: Lodève, our nearest local market town, followed by Pézenas and Béziers. Then finally her convertible reached the coastal motorway.

‘You don't think we should put the roof up?' I suggested tentatively, as an elegant Gucci sling-back settled into some serious speeding.

‘What, and waste all this sunshine?' she laughed, too pre-occupied with angling her cheekbones at the sun to notice the illuminated warning about violent winds. Or for that matter, the non-illuminated sign that told us we were following the Roman Via Domitia. But of course, she knew all about the latter.

‘Also founded in 118 BC,' she shouted above the wind and the noise of the traffic. ‘Vital trade and communication route, running all the way from the Rhône to the Pyrenees, linking Italy to Spain.'

‘Taking wine to the Legions?' was all I could manage as I struggled for breath against the constant buffeting.

‘Absolutely. But it wasn't just a matter of quenching the military thirst,' she answered, completely unperturbed by the elements, indeed exalting in the sweep of the wind through her improbably red hair. ‘Wine was also an important trading commodity, used almost as much like a currency as precious metals. Not that the Romans weren't keen on drinking it. Even slaves were given about five litres a week for strength. Except when they were sick, when their rations were halved. The only Romans who didn't do well on wine were the women. Distinctly frowned on for them, it was …'

I was almost tearful with relief when Krystina took the motorway exit for Narbonne East. However, just as we seemed to be slowing down to enter the reassuring haven of a city centre car park, she made a violent last-minute turn to the right and accelerated out of town again.

‘I've changed my mind,' she announced, cutting ruthlessly through the petrified pedestrians in the bicycles-only square in front of the town hall. ‘Nothing of substance left in Narbonne. I should have taken you to Nîmes for the Maison Carré and the Arena.'

She relented only a fraction to allow me a glimpse of the few square metres of well worn Via Domitia cobbles, uncovered in the middle of the square, then tore out of town towards an open road between vineyards and olive groves.

‘At least the Roman landscape survived,' she consoled me as she finally performed an emergency stop in a deserted car park, deep in the countryside.

Ahead of us, impervious to the gale, was a curious, ultra-modern construction, built on concrete stilts, with huge, wing-like roof structures arching over what looked like an abandoned building site on either side.

‘
Amphoralis
,' announced Krystina, with a sweeping gesture to encapsulate the totality but leaving me none the wiser. ‘Amphoras were the most popular vessels for making, storing and transporting both oil and wine until wooden barrels appeared around the first century
AD
. So the more the Romans planted vines and olive trees, the more they needed local potteries. And this was one of the biggest,' she added.

I looked bemusedly at the uncompromisingly contemporary building that we were about to enter.

‘THIS,' she barked and pointed impatiently at the confusion of seemingly half-finished walls and ditches, stretching on either side of us between the tips of those extraordinary roof wings. ‘It's an archaeological dig, for heaven's sake,' she sighed despairingly, as she led me into the Amphoralis Museum.

‘Amphoras had one great advantage over barrels,' she continued in better humour, once inside. ‘They kept on breaking, leaving lots of archaeological evidence wherever you took them – proving, for instance, that the Romans transported Languedoc wines as far afield as Britain and Egypt …'

She was just advancing on a map that would illustrate her thesis when the whole museum was engulfed by the world from which her advantageous marriage and subsequent divorce were supposed to have delivered her. A coach had disgorged a swarm of teenage schoolchildren.

‘Presumably Rome itself was self-sufficient?' I asked, as we were jostled straight past the map.

‘Normally. Except in
AD
79,' shouted Krystina above the clamour. ‘The Pompeii vineyards were devastated by Vesuvius, so they embarked on a massive emergency planting campaign in the Languedoc, to make up for the shortages. But that then led to a glut, so Emperor Domitian decreed that half the vines had to be ripped out again. You'll see the same thing in later centuries,' she persisted, quite scandalized at the lack of discipline all around us.

‘Do the amphoras tell us anything about the wines?' I prompted, in my best placatory manner.

‘Not a lot,' she continued, shouting as a wave of adolescent laughter threatened to drown her out completely. ‘We know they coated the insides with pitch to make them watertight, which can't have done much for the flavour. But maybe no worse than all their other additives and colourings.'

‘Like the Greeks?' I prompted again, with a sense that, for Krystina, there was only one thing worse than unruly schoolchildren and that was unruly French-speaking schoolchildren.

‘Like the Greeks,' she bellowed. ‘With the same taste for strong, sweet wines, often drying the grapes for extra concentration.'

‘Do we know the grape varieties?'

‘Not unless you're familiar with the “soot grape”.'

A violent turn on a Gucci heel made me wary of the anger that might soon be vented on an innocent accelerator pedal, but as soon as we are back in the relative peace of the car, she acknowledges more moderately that a wine made exclusively from another favourite Roman grape can be sampled on the route back home. So a little north of Pézenas, we double back sharply to our left, in search of Clairette du Languedoc.

The modestly proportioned courtyard of the eighteenth-century Château la Condamine Bertrand is full of windswept activity when we arrive. The owner, Bernard Jany, is manoeuvring a miniature forklift truck, loaded high with somebody's substantial purchase, while his son, Charles-André, cleans up after the day's activities in their crowded
cave
. It therefore falls to the charming young son-in-law, Bruno Andreu, the man in charge of public relations and sales, to deal with Krystina's brusque demand for a tasting.

He starts to tell us how it was his father-in-law's aunt, Marie-Rose Bertrand, who single-handedly secured the Clairette du Languedoc
appellation
in 1948, long before the rest of the Coteaux in the 1980s, but then he notices the restless drumming of Krystina's heavily ringed fingers on the tasting counter. (She succeeded, under the duress of the car journey, in extracting a full confession about my sorties with Manu and her only reason for coming here was to score the necessary point against a rival. She is therefore impatient to leave as soon as the opposition can be considered bested.) So, sensing a short attention span, Bruno loses no time in pouring a delicious, crisp, fruity white, bearing no resemblance whatever to the oxidized, adulterated Clairette, beloved of Krystina's Romans. He then rapidly follows it with a sweeter, honeyed style, from the same variety.

‘You can't make a living these days from Clairette alone,' he says. ‘The
domaine
's been in the family since 1792 but the present generation's made so many steps forward.'

He gestures towards the dozen or so different wines on a display-shelf behind him but we have already hit Krystina's boredom threshold. She extracts a wodge of banknotes, asks him to deliver whatever he thinks best to the château and battles her way back through the continuing tempest to the BMW.

Once on the road, it rapidly becomes clear that Krystina's reluctance to linger sprang partly from the notion that our respective days might each be rendered perfect by an intimate
soirée à deux
at the château. In so far as it is possible both to snuggle and drive down narrow avenues of plane trees at 150 kilometres per hour, Krystina snuggles. As her hand confuses my thigh with the gear stick rather more often than can easily be explained in an automatic car, I try desperately to come up with an alibi. The best I have concocted, as we approach the village, is an urgent domestic inspection for possible storm damage and Krystina is unimpressed.