Virgile's Vineyard Read Free

He smiles as he pours us a dark, purple-tinged sample of the latest vintage. ‘I simply didn’t have the money to replant. It was 1989. I’d just finished my oenology studies at Montpellier …’ (I was right: he is indeed still young, despite his receding hairline.) ‘The vines that my father used to cultivate for the co-operative were about fifty years old, and I pruned them hard and harvested late. All of which helped to give me low, concentrated yields.’
    Manu drains his glass with an expression of exaggerated concentration, apparently weighing up the wisdom of giving this young upstart the benefit of the doubt.
    â€˜But I had far more Carignan than anything else,’ Sylvain continues. ‘So I had to sell it on its own. Which meant it couldn’t be Coteaux du Languedoc.’
    â€˜C’est pas vrai! You mean, they’ve criminalized Carignan as well as Aramon?’ asks Manu, sensing a fellow-feeling with this young man after all and magnanimously extending a reconciliatory glass for a refill.
    â€˜It can’t be more than fifty per cent of the blend, monsieur. So most of mine ended up as humble vin de pays.’
    â€˜Even though it’s grown on Coteaux du Languedoc land?’ I ask.
    â€˜Precisely. You see, the bureaucrats didn’t think the wine-buying public would get sufficient mental stimulus from just the one complicated system. So they carved up the map a second time, into hundreds of different vins de pays. A completely different set of names, running parallel with the first. The same land but different names and different conditions. Less restrictive but less prestigious.’
    â€˜Some of them seem to command pretty prestigious prices,’ I say, remembering the New Year extravagance that started all this.
    â€˜Nowadays, maybe. But in 1990 I could hardly give my Carignan away. Except to passing tourists who were too ignorant about names and grape varieties to be prejudiced.’
    I take this as my cue to enquire whether there is any to spare for a passing local today. The telephone has hardly stopped ringing while we have been with him and I am not particularly optimistic but he says he could manage a case. And then we leave him to take a call from yet another hopeful, wanting to reserve an allocation of something he probably once spurned.
    *
    The village appears to be farther from the house than I thought and I suspect this morning’s expedition may well be the first and last time that I walk down in search of breakfast croissants. With most of my belongings at last unpacked and sufficient fallen branches cut into fire-sized pieces to keep me warm for the next few days, I felt it was time for a proper exploration on foot. But I soon realized that what is probably less than a kilometre as the crow flies must be much more than two by the dilapidated tarmac lane that follows the contours round the hill between the vines and the olive trees.
    The vines were, of course, completely bare at this time of year – some neatly pruned, others still a ragged tangle – but the delicate, silvery grey foliage of the olive trees gently counterpointed the starkness of the rugged, fir-clad hills immediately behind me to the north. And somehow, the thought that this must be about the highest altitude that vines and olives can tolerate made these defining features of the Mediterranean seem all the more precious.
    Halfway to the village and far from any home, an elderly couple were working in a tiny, terraced olive grove rising steeply beside the lane. Each appeared equally impervious to the cold. The woman’s dress was covered only by a thin nylon overall wrapped tightly round her frail-looking figure. The husband was jacketless in a woollen shirt, with braces supporting well-worn corduroy trousers which hung loosely off his waist, as though they once belonged to some plumper younger brother. They paused as soon as they saw me, apparently grateful