Grape Expectations Read online

  Sun filtered through the vines highlighting pickers in a honeyed haze. Mist, part of the secret of the unique Saussignac botrytis which creates these sweet wines from heaven, was painted in golden airbrush strokes over the scene. All was quiet save for a few bird calls and chatter between pickers. Bernard greeted us warmly and gave us a succinct lesson which I endeavoured to translate as succinctly for our friends. He handed round harvest secateurs and baskets with a brief warning about taking care. A few minutes later he passed by my basket and removed a bunch whose botrytis was less developed than the rest. Without saying a word he had set the level for me.

  Cillian quickly copped on, removing grapes that were a bit green or the ones that had gone too far. Juliette nicked her finger but after a plaster and a kiss was back picking more eagerly than before. The magic and excitement of harvest time spread a unique energy through us. Even Sophia gathered some bunches, while Ellie looked on from her all-terrain buggy. 'Les enfants are often the best at picking Saussignac,' said Myriam. 'Their senses are much finer than ours.' Back in the chai, Bernard passed round cups of juice as it came out of the press. It was thick as honey and as sweet but with layers of flavour: apricot, almond and orange. Standing in the winery surrounded by the noises and smells of harvest I felt joy and excitement mingled with a little fear. Making wine, for all the hard work, created a deep resonance inside me. I was spellbound. We had witnessed our first harvest of the miraculous Saussignac wine.

  When the O'Briens left, we tackled the Christmas sales campaign with vigour. It seemed impossible but within a few weeks Sean had provisional approval from the authorities, our labels ready to print and a shipper lined up.

  We sent personal emails to our friends and former colleagues, not expecting to sell more than twenty cases. We watched the orders come in through our new website with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. We passed the twenty-case mark overnight. By the deadline we had 115 orders and more promised including an order for corporate Christmas gifts from a close friend.

  Sean contacted the shipper to let them know we would be sending three pallets. He emailed back to say the customs official would not accept the shipment. We were horrified. The official had given Sean the go-ahead as long as we prepaid the taxes before the shipment left our property. What had gone wrong? Sean called our customs contact on the speaker phone.

  'We gave you the go-ahead for this delivery because it was a shipment to friends, not 1,800 bottles,' said the official.

  I felt a rush of nausea but Sean remained calm.

  'You are right. When I spoke to you I estimated three to six hundred bottles, which was what we were expecting, but we have been amazed at the response.'

  'Are you sure this was an email offer to friends? You didn't have any advertising in a newspaper or magazine?'

  'No, this was an email to friends and colleagues.'

  'We'll let you do it this time,' he said. 'For next time you will have to have completed your registration and have your tax representative approved.'

  I danced a jig around our rustic temporary office in the boiler room, while the customs official explained the concept of a tax representative: an administrative project for another day.

  Overnight the weather changed to freezing. The 1,800 bottles had to be lovingly washed in icy water before being 'dressed'. With frozen fingers we revelled in the exhilaration of our first order and the rich aromas of wine and oak that surrounded us in our ancient barn.

  After washing, the wine moved to capsuling, fixing the metal cap over the top of the bottle to cover the cork. To seal the capsule, the bottle is fed into an exceptionally noisy, rocket-shaped apparatus, called a capsuleuse. The right amount of pressure must be applied: too little pressure and the capsule comes out like a skirt, frilly and ruffled at the base; too much pressure and the top of the capsule is pierced. After a few hours of practice Sean was an expert and the capsules were smooth. Ellie was remarkably good-natured despite the noise, wrapped in five layers of blankets in her buggy, calmly watching the progress.

  For days we listened to U2 and labelled cases with familiar addresses feeling cold, happy and homesick at the same time. The order represented a critical start for our wine business. When the transporter collected we felt inordinately proud; we hadn't made the wine but it came from our vineyard.

  The vines changed colour. Their leaves fell. At night we froze despite still being huddled together in one room. I struggled on with the renovations, learning to wield a screwdriver and a paint roller like a pro. The local building supplies man greeted me with glee whenever I appeared. My hands were calloused. I wore the same paint-splattered working clothes for weeks on end. It was a shock change from our city lives of business suits, cappuccinos and heated offices.

  Early December we were wracked with coughing, vomiting and fevers. I could barely drag myself out of bed to attend to Sean and our sick daughters. There was a mountain of washing and we didn't have a tumble dryer. Phil Collins' lyrics about the roof leaking and the wind howling kept rolling around in my head. After doing another round of nursing I went to see our local doctor in desperation. I needed to be well to care for everyone.

  'There is a mild chest infection but you can fight it off yourself with a week of rest,' he said.

  'I want an antibiotic. Someone has to look after the sick children.'

  'Isn't there someone who can help you? Your belle-mère?'

  I explained that there was no mother-in-law and there would be no rest.

  Minutes later I walked into the pharmacy armed with my prescription. With two young children, I was already well known to them. A large promotion stand at the entrance announced the launch of a new deodorant with 48-hour effectiveness. I giggled despite my throbbing headache. Who would advertise not washing every day? To my 'cleanliness next to Godliness' upbringing it was incomprehensible. Little did I know that a week later, when the real cold of winter set in, I would be back for some of my own. Our erratic heating system couldn't match the deep freeze. Bathing every two days was as much as I could stand. I left the pharmacy armed with my medicine and returned to my sick household.

  Just when it seemed it would never end, we woke up feeling well, the sun was shining and a huge rainbow hung over the Dordogne valley. We ate our favourite lunch of baguette and Brie and stared at the view. Ellie smiled benevolently from her high chair and Sophia tucked in with relish. Food never tasted so good and we revelled in the magic of feeling well.

  I could not fault our new community. People were generous and warm. Bernard Barse did the electrical work for our new kitchen as a gift. Even the notorious French civil servants were friendly and helpful. Sophia started singing in French, proving our worries about her settling in unfounded. I agonised about our precarious financial future but the success of the Christmas offer filled me with hope. Ellie started crawling and putting her tiny hands into my paint and other undesirable substances. Meanwhile Sean's thoughts turned in earnest to the vineyard: a place bristling with unknown danger.

  Chapter 4

  Six Tons of Chicken Poo and No 'Épandeur'

  Sean commissioned a soil analysis so we could gauge the state of the vineyard. The soil consultant took us through the diagnostic, explaining that, in his opinion, the vineyard needed a serious fertility boost.

  'By my calculations you need six tons of fertiliser. It must be ordered and spread as soon as possible,' he declared.

  I asked how long it would take to spread that amount of fertiliser.

  'For Sean, since he's new to it, about three days but rain is forecast in three days so you must do it now.'

  Since the fertiliser was not ordered, this seemed optimistic.

  Sean shelved his other plans for the day and went out to investigate the machinery in the hangar. The 'hangar' was a rusted corrugated iron lean-to around the side of the pressoir where old agricultural equipment that we had acquired with the farm was stored. He found a fertiliser spreader and connected it to the tractor only to discove
r it was broken. In the intervening hour I got an express order of organic fertiliser delivered. Now we were the proud owners of 6 tons of compressed chicken manure with no way to spread it.

  Sean postulated that we could spread the poo using our back packs with some minor adjustments. It involved piercing holes into the bottom of the packs and running tubes from the holes, then filling the packs with extremely noxious material and walking up and down each side of each vineyard row aiming the issue from the tubes at the base of the vines. I carefully explained with the aid of calculations related to the weight, distance and smell why we should reject this notion out of hand. I was beginning to doubt whether my husband's sense of practicality was a match for farming. We moved on to the next option, to repair the spreader, and decided it would take too long and probably be more costly than buying another one.

  'Phone around to find out prices for a new one then,' said Sean.

  'What is it called and where would I get one?' I replied, reaching for the phone.

  'I don't know. You'll have to phone Jamie.'

  A few minutes later, thanks to our lifesaver Jamie, I had what I thought was the name – an 'epondre anglais'. I didn't know exactly what it meant – pondre is to lay eggs, I knew that, which seemed a little strange – but I had the numbers for three places that supplied them. I called the list ending off with Monsieur Bonny, who was rapidly becoming our local mechanical genius.

  Monsieur Bonny had one of the happiest, friendliest faces I had ever encountered. He was a small fellow with boundless energy. In his late fifties, although he didn't look it, he had been working as a mechanic in his family workshop in Coutures since he was thirteen years old. He had a wonderful, strong Dordogne accent. Maintenant, justement and other similar words ending in 'ent' or 'ant' become 'ain' and take on the most beautiful sing-song ring when he says them. Besoin, the word for need, also ends more softly, sounding more like 'beswain'. We made his acquaintance soon after moving in and had been regular visitors to his workshop ever since.

  Monsieur Bonny explained that it was an épandeur d'engrais, a fertiliser spreader, and nothing to do with English or laying eggs. Several machinery sales people in the Dordogne were having a good laugh on me. Monsieur Bonny had a second hand one that would be perfect for us. A few hours later Sean was spreading chicken manure as fast as he could. Ellie and I watched from the kitchen window laughing as he and the strange machine with its awkward wagging tail sped up and down the rows leaving a smelly trail in their wake.

  Sean was getting neurotic about machinery. He smashed the back window of the tractor with the fertiliser spreader. Days later he drove under a tree and dislodged the exhaust. His number of visits to Monsieur Bonny in Coutures was travelling in the opposite direction to our bank balance. Soon Sean was back with Monsieur Bonny buying electric secateurs in preparation for the pruning season. This automatic pruning apparatus could take your finger off in a second. I eyed them warily, relieved that he would be wielding them and not me.

  Sean had learnt the basics of pruning on the vines in our back garden in Dublin: now he had to prune 25,000 of them. Pruning is one of the most important jobs in the vineyard and physically demanding. Jamie spent the afternoon with Sean helping him get familiar with this new task.

  While Sean learnt the practical details of pruning I tried to get the plumber, the tall, dark and handsome Monsieur Lombere, to commit to a date for fitting the new shower and toilet into the broken bathroom in our house. I had been waiting for months for him to do the promised work. We had family arriving for Christmas and I was agitated. When I signed his formal devis for the work – a quotation that becomes binding on both parties once signed – I'd included the statement that the work had to be completed before the end of November, which was now a sniff away. The charming but unresponsive Monsieur Lombere was taking no heed. I explained my worries to Jamie when he came up from the vineyard, showing him the name of the plumber as I had written it down when a friend in the village gave me the number. Jamie cracked up. 'Mr Lambert!' he said, writing down the correct spelling. 'I'll call him for you. He's doing all the renovation work at our place.' I went red, feeling like the village idiot. Despite years of classes I still had no clue about French spelling and pronunciation.

  Jamie's powers of persuasion were epic. Within hours, Monsieur Lambert called to say Jean-Marc would start the bathroom on Monday. He arrived on cue: a muscular fellow with a clean-shaven head and an upbeat attitude that remained even when he had to look into the bowels of old toilets. I showed him the renovation target. The bathroom had bright multi-coloured mosaic tiles on the floor, pink-flowered tiles on the walls, a broken basin, a broken toilet and a black depression in the wall where a shower had once been. I asked him what the white box behind the broken toilet was.

  'It's a broyeur. A broyeur is a chopper that minces the waste into a smooth mixture so that it can travel down a small waste water pipe instead of a large sewage pipe.'

  I interrogated him about whether this was acceptable sanitary practice and he assured me it was. The only alternative was to rebuild the main wall of the house so we could replace the small pipe with a large sewage pipe. The wall was close to a metre thick and three hundred years old.

  'You will have to use a broyeur in your new bathroom,' he concluded. 'You can use this one, it works perfectly.'

  He flushed the broken toilet and I heard the signature chopping sound of the broyeur. I was horrified by the whole idea but reluctantly accepted his suggestion, although I had a feeling it would be trouble.

  A few days later, after the new floor tiles were installed by our tiler, Jean-Marc reappeared to fit the new bathroom. I had worked until past midnight the night before removing the old pink flower wall tiles from the shower area. I was adamant that such an unskilled job had to be done by me to save money. The tile removal took much longer than anticipated but there was no way I was going to be the reason for a delay in the work after the pressure we had put on Lambert. I planned to cunningly paint the rest of the tiles with a tile primer followed by a coat of cream paint. Removing more of them was out of the question.

  When we bought the new shower tray Sean and I struggled to move it a few feet so I told Jean-Marc to let us know when he needed some help to get it upstairs. Before I knew it he had the tray upstairs without a murmur. Within a day he had finished the new bathroom. The following day our tiler tiled the shower walls while I painted the primer over the remaining pink flowers.

  Once my final coat was complete it was a total transformation. The bathroom was gleaming cream, white, glass and chrome. Between my paintwork on the wall tiles, the new floor and Jean-Marc's fitting of the bathroom components that I had searched Bordeaux for, it looked like something that would happily pass in a stylish boutique hotel. Jean-Marc stopped by to fit the last element: the taps on the shower.

  'It's very pretty,' I said.

  'Ça fonctionne,' declared Jean-Marc, making it clear that in the world of plumbing, function was far more important than form.

  Sean got on with the pruning, key to the health of the vine and to excellent grapes. The vines looked like scraggly bundles of dead twigs attached to small tree trunks. The first step was to prune each vine from this unruly state down to one or two carefully selected canes that would be the bearers of next year's bounty. Canes are the young branches that grow from the main trunk of the vine. There are many and selecting the right ones for the following year is a skilled job requiring concentration, judgement and stamina. Sean lost weight, gained muscle and looked healthier despite the harsh weather. In their hibernating state the vines were becoming his friends.

  When we arrived, the farm was a large chunk of land distinguished by obvious markers like buildings and tracks. Now it was becoming familiar, each part of the vineyard had a name and a personality. In front of the house looking down into the Dordogne valley was the merlot vineyard we called Lower Garrigue. Running away from the pressoir, the part of the winery where the grapes are pressed at
harvest time, were the vineyards we called Hillside, consisting of young sauvignon blanc, ancient sémillon and merlot. Beyond Lower Garrigue heading down to the valley floor were a set of vineyards called Lenvège which originally belonged to the Château Les Tours de Lenvège, a half-kilometre from us.

  The original medieval tower of Les Tours de Lenvège was built in the twelfth century for protection. It contrasted dramatically with the main château in the village built in the late seventeenth century in a more decorative style. Our farm was the look-out. This was particularly important during the period of English rule of Aquitaine, and also in the wars of religion when the powerful merchants of Bergerac were Protestant but most of the surrounding villages, like ours, were Catholic. We were slowly getting to know our new place.