Virgile's Vineyard (9 page)

Manu cannot believe that so many vital ‘tasting minutes' are being sacrificed to this pointless classification of the earth's crust. ‘Is your old
cave
anywhere near?' is the closest he gets to subtlety.

‘Just a bit far before lunch,' comes Pascal's hammerblow, as Manu's face crumples so fast I fear I may be about to see a grown Frenchman cry. ‘That's really why we started our shop. But I tell you what, join me for lunch in the village and we'll see how our “Terrasses Grillées” '96 is getting on.'

Manu's face brightens as rapidly as it fell. He even turns politely conversational in the back seat of Pascal's car, asking who does what in the family business.

‘I concentrate on the
cave
and shop and my father and brother look after the vines,' Pascal explains. ‘They're the important guys. It's the work in the vineyard that makes the difference. Much more than anything I might do in the cellar.' He stops outside the shop and dashes in for the wine. ‘I thought maybe two bottles,' he says as he returns, having clearly got my companion's measure.

Pascal's exaggerated pantomime of wiping the mud from his shoes at the door succeeds in extracting laughter from the theatrically pursed lips of what must surely be the region's most formidable-looking restaurant proprietress – her broad, powerful shoulders undoubtedly the envy of the village rugby team.

‘My father had no training at all,' Pascal continues, as soon as the prop-forward has taken our order and offered to decant the wine. ‘But travelling round the country for the Customs gave him an open mind, especially for grape varieties. I mean, everyone thought he was completely mad – planting Grenache, Mourvèdre and Syrah and refusing to touch Carignan. I suppose two years of study in Burgundy had much the same effect on me. Took the famous regions off their pedestals.'

The first course arrives, and with it the decanter, but Pascal makes no move to pour. Manu is so transfixed by the sight of it that he can hardly focus on his salad but it is clearly unthinkable to sample the top Moulinier
cuvée
before it has breathed a little. Pascal offers water but Manu signals with a shudder that this would be one mortification of the flesh too far.

‘For a couple of years, we took our grapes to the co-operative,' continues Pascal. ‘But all they seemed to care about was weight. There was no real incentive for low yields or high quality. So although we were signed up for twenty-five years, we broke away. We're still getting the writs but we just couldn't work that way. We wanted yields as low as fifteen for the wine we're drinking now.'

The use of the present tense is almost too much for Manu. He half chokes on his lettuce and mops a fevered brow. However, finally, with the arrival of our steaks, the glasses are filled. And in Manu's case, rapidly emptied again. As Pascal worries that his pride and joy is still not showing its best, Manu can restrain himself no longer and helps himself to a second generous pouring.

‘People ask how long this should be kept,' says Pascal. ‘But it's the one question I can't answer. We've nothing older than '94. It's too early to say. We'll just have to wait and see.'

One of our number, of course, has no intention of waiting another moment. He is already wondering whatever can have happened to the second bottle.

*

Virgile's remotest vineyard, down at Nébian, must surely be his most beautiful. It lies high on a hillside to the south of Clermont l'Hérault, overlooking picturesquely patchworked vines and fruit trees. Its sheltered situation has encouraged a few of the buds to burst already, washing just the palest hint of green across the vines, while the edges of the field are exuberantly carpeted in deep purple and pale lemon by hundreds of heavy-headed, stumpy-stalked irises.

There is, however, nothing very picturesque about the afternoon's activity. As always, Virgile the fastidious pruner has made neat piles of his cuttings but these, he has decided, will have to be gathered up and burnt. Too many of the vines were diseased to mince them up as fertilizer.

‘Only a tiny vineyard,' he assured me on the drive from Saint Saturnin, but it feels quite big enough to me as I trudge up and down the gradient, gathering armfuls of severed vine shoots to stoke the fire that he has lit at the bottom.

‘A new variety for you,' says Virgile, as we work. ‘Cinsault – mostly planted as a table grape, which is why I could rent the land so cheaply. You don't need slopes like this for table grapes. And if you don't need them, why make the extra effort? On the other hand, it's outside the Coteaux du Languedoc boundaries, so wine-makers weren't exactly falling over themselves either. Indeed, the fact that I'm using these grapes for wine obliges me to declassify a proportion as
vin de pays
. But then, I'd have to do that anyway, simply because I've got a higher percentage of Carignan than the fifty permitted for a Coteaux du Languedoc.'

All this reminds me that I wanted to pick his brains. I need to know whether April will be too late for planting vines on my own land. ‘Only for the table,' I hasten to emphasize. ‘I'm not setting up in competition.'

‘But I thought you said your uncle had some vines.'

‘He did until he diversified into sheep. He decided it was the easiest way of keeping the grass under control. But from what I've cleared so far, it looks as if his four-legged lawnmowers did a lot of damage to the vines while they were at it.'

‘You never know,' he says. ‘Vines are tough old creatures.'

‘Well, come for lunch next Sunday,' I suggest as we watch the last of the cuttings burning. ‘Then you can tell me the worst.'

*

My first breakfast in the sunshine.

I've decided to stick to the alternative bedroom in which I sought refuge from last month's storm. It opens on to a little balcony terrace and I found I loved being able to wander straight out there from my bed to enjoy the flowers on the fruit trees in the morning light. The almonds were the first, followed quickly by the apricots and plums and now the dazzling creamy white of two magnificent old cherry trees.

‘All right for some,' grumbled Mme Gros last week. A rash expression of delight from my side of the stream had undammed a bitter tide of self-reproach from hers. ‘Here we are with about a tenth of the land that you've got and I was foolish enough to let Manu cover it with vines.'

‘But everything's flowering too soon,' warned Mme Vargas yesterday, when I found her struggling with her weeding on her own, having passed the flu to her absent Albert. ‘There'll be no fruit in the whole
département
if things carry on like this.'

But early or late, who would not have been glad of the blossom this morning? The balcony is always the first part of the house to be warmed by the sun as it pushes over the wooded hills behind and this morning I installed a little breakfast table at the sunniest end.

Sitting there contentedly, asking myself why I would ever want to be anywhere else, I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to be down in Clermont l'Hérault, collecting my hard-earned olive oil from the co-operative. I quickly hung out some washing to take advantage of the weather and set off excitedly, my thoughts full of mouth-watering, dark green
extra vierge
. To everyone else, of course, my three precious litres would be indistinguishable from all the thousands of bottles and plastic jerrycans filled from exactly the same vat. But not to me.

The sense of anticipation survived the long-winded bureaucracy of the collection process. It even survived the prosaic realization that, by the time I'd paid the co-operative's handling charges, my long hours of picking in the freezing January rain would have saved me little more than fifteen pounds on the ordinary purchase price. It has, however, been slightly undermined by the discovery that the oil to which my documentation entitles me is not the highly prized, single-variety product to which my cherished Lucques will have contributed but the co-operative's rather humbler
diverses variétés
.

‘It does include some Lucques,' the co-operative's director, Mme Pagès, tries to reassure me. ‘And it is the genuine local article. Not the cheaper one we make from bought-in Spanish olives. You see, there simply aren't enough in the Hérault to satisfy demand,' she continues, as she senses my surprise. ‘Not since 1956.'

‘What happened?' I ask, sufficiently intrigued to forget my disappointment.

‘February temperatures were exceptionally high,' she elaborates. ‘The sap was rising exceptionally early. Then suddenly the thermometer plunged from plus twenty to minus twenty in just twenty-four hours, wiping out nearly every olive tree in the
département
. Most had to be cut back down to ground level. They sprouted again but it was five or six years before the new shoots bore fruit. We were the only mill that managed to stay open. Recovery was very slow, especially as so many decided to replant with vines, which were paying much better. Small wonder, I suppose, when doctors were telling people that oil was unhealthy. It was only in the early eighties that they decided it discouraged heart disease and the pendulum swung back.'

Mme Pagès speeds ahead down a spiral staircase to show me the surprisingly modest processing-room, with its mills and presses, centrifuges and conveyor belts, below the shop. Most of her 3,500 members operate on a rather different scale from mine, she is quick to emphasize, and when she tells me she has handled seven hundred tonnes this season, it's hard to imagine how the tightly packed chain of machines surrounding us ever manages to cope.

She tells me she is married to the grandson of the man who founded the co-operative in 1920, but hers is clearly no nepotistic appointment. She is passionately committed to her product, particularly the range of single-variety oils that she makes from Lucques and other exotic-sounding olives that I've never heard of.

‘I'm specially keen to develop the Ménudal,' she enthuses. ‘It would do very well up where you are and, of course, with a government grant for planting …'

‘Oh, no,' I shake my head and back away defensively towards the car, cradling my priceless oil in my arms. ‘I've got enough problems already.'

These turn out to include a dramatic change in the weather. My car is barely visible on the other side of the road, obscured by the kind of rain that I've only ever seen in films. There, of course, you know perfectly well that some supercharged fireman's hose has been invoked to drench the few square metres in front of the camera, but here it is universal and sensationally real. The road is many centimetres deep in water and I have to drive away at something slower than walking speed. Yet within a quarter of an hour, the deluge has given way to brilliant sunshine and a perfect double rainbow.

Ignoring the washing, which must now be wetter than it was when I hung it out, I unlock the front door and the first thing I hear is the electric water pump. The principal spring is pretty vigorous but it still needs some help to push the water round the house for showers and so on. Yet the pump is only activated when water is actually running in some part of the house. So why can I hear it now?

I scurry round the house to check whether I left a tap on this morning, but everything is as it should be. Except for the continuous rasping of the pump. Manu has already told me that it was never this noisy in Uncle Milo's day and I suspect it is on its last legs but that does not explain why it is in constant action right now. I go to the submarine control room and look helplessly at my baffling collection of pipes and valves, wondering whether there might be some new permutation that I could usefully try. There must be a logical answer. I just need to think it through quietly. So for want of any better inspiration, I decide to fill a kettle for some coffee. And now I learn the terrible truth: there is no water.

Impossible surely, after the morning's downpour, but yes, another tap confirms the same alarming reality. No water. Which is why the pump is struggling away – straining to replenish something somewhere in the system from a supply that appears to have dried up. The nightmare possibility that I have been pushing to the back of my mind since the day I arrived is suddenly upon me.

Ridiculously, the first thought that occurs to me is what a nuisance it will be if I can't continue to call the house Les Sources. All those change of address cards. And the carved wooden sign at the entrance … Then I remember that I won't even be able to live here without water. I'll have to go back to England. But I won't be able to throw my tenants out. So where am I to spend the rest of my sabbatical?

How could Manu have been out last night? He never goes out. It's not approved of. But yes, Mme Gros assured me, when I telephoned (and surely I only imagined the ring of delight in her regrets) her husband was going to be out until very late. ‘
Désolée
,' of course, but nothing to be done until the morning. And then as soon as I dared call this morning, after an essentially sleepless – not to mention waterless – night, I found he had gone out again. Doubly ‘
désolée'
by this stage, naturally, but it had somehow slipped her mind to give Manu my message.

‘Too busy sandbagging the source of my spring, no doubt,' I muttered bitterly to myself, as I slumped despondently at the table in the courtyard with the yellow pages, wishing that I could just call the water board like everyone else. I felt sure I needed an expert but I had no idea what kind. It didn't seem like a job for a plumber. Maybe someone down at the café would know who to ask. At the very least I could have some breakfast coffee. And get away from that irritating fountain – normally such a soothing sound, splashing down to the pool, but this morning the constant babble was simply stopping me thinking straight …

And then the penny dropped. The fountain! How could I have been so stupid? If the fountain was still flowing freely the spring could not possibly be dry. So where in Uncle Milo's labyrinth of inside and outside piping did he decide to separate the fountain supply from the one for the house?

I am still asking myself this question a couple of hours later, having conducted every empirical test with valves and taps that I could think of. Every pipe that looked as if it might be heading in a domestic direction has turned out to activate some maddeningly irrelevant sprinkler in a remote part of the garden. So, parched and caffeine-starved, I am just trying to fill the kettle from the fountain when Manu appears with an open bottle of the red peril.

‘A little liquid refreshment,' he says tactlessly, ‘while we crack the problem.' But as soon as glasses are charged, he addresses himself to the matter in hand. ‘You've looked in the little reservoir where the supply divides, I assume?'

‘Little reservoir?'

‘On the ramp beside the garage. Underneath the pile of stones.'

‘I always thought that was a pile of stones …'

‘How long have you lived here?' he laughs, uncovering a crude trapdoor beneath my uncle's curious cairn. ‘The stones are just to weight the wood down but, under here, you've got a reserve tank. Helped Milo put it in, I did,' he boasts, as he surveys the primitive structure with pride. ‘Without it, the fountain used to stop whenever you turned on a tap. But it's here that the water divides. And just as I thought, you've got a jammed ballcock.'

It was a problem for a plumber after all, if only he could have known where to look. The ballcock wedged against the rough concrete sides of Manu's rudimentary reservoir had duped the system into thinking that the house and the tank were awash with water. So it was stubbornly redirecting the entire supply to the fountain, impervious to the clamour of a desperate pump that had long since sucked the tank dry.

Or something like that. I am still not sure how the fountain could be taking priority when I thought Manu said the tank was there to compensate for the house having first call. But as he prods the ballcock into action with the bottom of his almost empty wine bottle, I am too relieved at the sudden, satisfying surge of water towards the house to bother with technicalities. All I want now is my coffee; but any such hopes are dashed by the observation that our triumph calls for ‘a little celebration'.

*

‘My vines are shooting after all,' were my first excited words when Virgile arrived for Sunday lunch.

‘But only from the roots,' was his dispiriting verdict when he saw the extent of the damage done by Uncle Milo's sheep. ‘They're alive but you'll never get any grapes. You could have a go at grafting some new vines on to the old rootstocks but it's almost as cheap, and certainly easier, to replant.'

‘And it's not too late?' I ask from the depths of my disappointment.

‘Not if you're very quick. But the trouble is, you need to get rid of the rootstocks first. Otherwise they'll infect the new vines. Much better to clear the land in the autumn and plant next spring.'

As we settle in the courtyard for a drink and the last of my precious home-grown olives, this feels like the last straw. I thought I already had cleared this part of the land when I finished hacking back the weeds and brambles. I hadn't bargained for anything more radical.

‘Maybe I can give you a hand,' offers Virgile. ‘After all, I've got a tractor now.'

‘Does that mean you've sorted out a bank?'

‘Since Friday, yes. Everything's signed and settled. And just as well too. I managed to muddle through on a shoestring last year, with just my one and a half hectares. But now with seven and a half – and all on my own – it's a slightly different proposition.'

‘I don't know how you do it,' I call from the kitchen, where lunch is now ready.

‘Most of the time, I don't know myself,' he laughs.

‘And here's me worried about a few dozen vine plants,' I say, as I carry out a dish of the local asparagus, which has just appeared in the market.

‘You're tired of the wild
asperges
, then?' asks Virgile, helping himself.

‘I don't follow.'

‘Over there,' he points. ‘Under the olive tree in front of your dining room window. I can see you've been picking pretty hard.'

I can't see anything much myself, apart from a bank of white irises. Well, nothing except some tall spindly weeds that I don't recognize. Although, now that I look more closely at their wispy little side-shoots, branching out at right angles, I suppose, yes, their tips could be considered asparagus-like. It's difficult to be certain when so many of them have been broken off … And then illumination dawns: it was here, only yesterday, at the very spot where this unacknowledged delicacy was reaching a perfection of ripeness, that Mme Gros surprised me with an offer to help me with my ‘weeding'.

*

‘Imagine getting a barrel of wine up this hill,' says Krystina, as we start the steep ascent to the ruined ramparts of the Château de Quéribus. ‘You think I'm joking, don't you? But it wasn't just the monks who liked to see some wine in their daily rations. It was considered absolutely indispensable for medieval soldiers. Even for the Brits in the Hundred Years War, when presumably they'd have stuck to beer in normal circumstances.'

‘Dutch courage?' I ask, already a little breathless.

‘Partly that and partly the fact that it was much safer to drink than water,' answers Krystina, as indefatigable as ever on the rugged uphill slog. ‘Especially during sieges. Even used it as a disinfectant.'

Halfway up the track, I feign an urgent interest in the view to get my breath back. A long line of jagged peaks stretches down the skyline, but high above us, on the most jagged of them all, the imposing stone defences of Quéribus seem to soar directly out of the cliff face. It is as if the solid, stocky polygon of the keep had been chiselled like some half-finished sculpture from the gargantuan block of stone that we are climbing.

‘We're right on the edge of the Languedoc, here,' explains Krystina, as a new surge of energy signals an early end to our rest. ‘This ridge makes a natural frontier. Go down the other side and you're into Roussillon. A different world in many ways. Still part of Spain in the seventeenth century, so it's not surprising really that Quéribus was once a border fortress for the Kings of Aragon.'

‘I thought it was a Cathar castle,' I interject, having read as much on the signpost below.

‘They're the ones who put it on the map,' she continues, ignoring my uncharacteristic display of knowledge. ‘The sieges may have been bloodier at some of their other castles – hundreds of Cathars burnt alive, that kind of thing – but this was the last stronghold to fall in 1255 …' Then, belatedly, surprise begins to register. ‘How much do you know about the Cathars?' she asks suspiciously.

‘They had a lot of castles,' I flounder unconvincingly. ‘And a lot of sieges …'

Krystina snorts dismissively. She has seen too much bluffing in the classroom to be taken in by my feeble performance this morning.

‘
Kathari
means “pure ones” in Greek,' she continues, as we approach the castle gatehouse. ‘They didn't believe this imperfect material world could be God's creation. It had to be the work of the Devil. So men's spirits – trapped here, they believed, by a Satanic ruse – could only be freed and restored to a spiritual world of purity, beauty and light through poverty, chastity and humility. All of which compared unfavourably with the laxity of a lot of the Catholic clergy. So in 1209, the Papacy launched a crusade – the Albigensian Crusade, it's always called because the heresy was particularly prevalent over in Albi. But as you can see,' she says, as we penetrate the last of the castle's complicated triple fortifications, ‘the crusade met some pretty solid defences.'

‘But were they Christians?' I congratulate myself on a few further syllables.

‘They sought to emulate Christ but denied his divinity. So, yes, it was doctrine as well as lifestyle that upset the established Church. But the conflict soon got complicated by politics. Cathar supporters like the Count of Toulouse and the Viscount of Béziers were much more interested in political control of the Languedoc so …
Merde!
'

The rare display of French marks the fact that, after negotiating the ascent in the most unsuitable high heels, Krystina has suddenly fractured one of them on the totally unchallenging flatness of the battlements at the top of the castle.

‘Who won?' I ask, as she flings both the good shoe and the bad into the abyss below.

‘In a sense, the French Crown,' she answers, tiptoeing shoeless down again. ‘The Languedoc was annexed to the royal domains in 1229. The beginning of the end for the
langue d'oc
,' she adds between winces and curses. ‘In 1539 the Occitan language was formally outlawed in official documents. Boring Parisian French extinguished the romantic, courtly tongue of the troubadours.'

She languishes theatrically against a battlement: clearly the romantic, courtly thing expected of
me
is to sweep her off her stockinged feet and carry her down to something nearer sea level; but mindful of the forces which such gallantry might unleash, I remain unchivalrously empty-armed.

*

‘She dragged you all the way to Quéribus?' marvelled Manu. ‘Practically to the Pyrenées and you didn't taste a single Corbières?' He was absolutely scandalized: I had driven from one end of the Languedoc's largest
appellation
to the other without so much as a trickle of its delectable product passing my lips. ‘This must be rectified at once!'

Undeterred by the morning's wind and rain, he scribbled a hasty note to Mme Gros with one hand and rummaged for his keys with the other. ‘If you'd come to me in the first place, you'd have tasted wines that were actually
made
in one of your Cathar castles. Two for the price of one, and half the journey time,' he assured me as we sped south.

Unfortunately, like so many of Manu's promises, this one was to be only half fulfilled. The Château de Lastours was certainly more accessible than Quéribus, being only a little farther down the coastal motorway from Narbonne. Indeed, as Manu probably intended, we arrived in time for me to buy him lunch in the château restaurant. But the Cathar connection proved to be wishful thinking.

‘Hundred per cent orthodox, I'm afraid,' says Jean-Marie Lignères, the château director. He is a thin but commanding presence behind his desk, distinguished-looking despite his jeans and pullover and somewhere, I imagine, in his fifties, with a sharp intelligence that will not take him long to see through to my companion's baser interests.

‘Maybe it was fortified
against
the Cathars?' suggests Manu to save what face he can.

‘Maybe,' concedes the director tactfully. ‘But this was primarily a resting place for merchants on the trade route into Spain. The château wines supplied the travellers' drinking requirements.'

‘As your family's excellent production supplied ours at lunchtime.' Manu's compliment only thinly obscures his appetite for further samples.

‘Oh, but this isn't a family estate. I thought, from the way you introduced yourself to my secretary …' He barely suppresses a smile. ‘Well, anyway, no, it was bought in 1970 by one of the big Marseille banks, or rather its
Comité d'Entreprise
.' He sees me looking blank. ‘A kind of works council. Every large business in France has to have one. But this one was unusually altruistic. It bought the estate to provide employment for sixty mentally handicapped people, to help them lead as full a life as possible through their work.'

‘In the vineyards?' I ask.

‘And in the
cave
. And more recently in the restaurant.'

Now I understand the strange intensity with which our lunchtime waiters concentrated on every tiniest detail. The service was perfect and yet there was something disconcertingly obsessive in the perfectionism, each piece of cutlery laid precisely parallel with the next, each row of glasses a mathematically exact diagonal. But now that I know, I find the achievement quite remarkable.

‘Everyone starts with the vines,' emphasizes M. Lignères. ‘Sorting out a relationship with nature before they try their hand at people.'

‘And they help with everything – the pruning, for example?' I ask, remembering how challenging I found my own introduction to that complicated art.

‘Most things, yes. With “normal” – for want of a better word – workers alongside. We try to make their work as varied as possible. They could, of course, perform the same mechanical action day after day but that wouldn't do much to help them reintegrate – which is our overriding aim.' He explains in parenthesis how he came to this as his first and only job, after finishing his wine studies, but has since completed a doctorate in psychology to cope with the parallel challenge. ‘You have to accept a different pace for the handicapped. But we're lucky – we've got enormous altitude variations here. The vineyards at three hundred metres ripen up to a month behind those at thirty, which gives us extra time – even with a hundred and sixty hectares.'