Virgile's Vineyard (3 page)

‘It'll be time for the tree to flower again, if you carry on at that rate,' he laughed, as he spread the blankets on the ground and started shaking the branches with all his might.

The effect was like a hailstorm battering my head, with the coldest and wettest olives finding their way straight down the back of my neck. But it worked. In no time we had enough to fill my bucket many times over and few enough left on the trees to be quietly forgotten.

‘Women's work,' announced Mme Gros, appearing from nowhere. ‘Always was, olive-picking. Not the young women, though. Never the under-forties. Made the trees infertile.'

Yet for all her conspicuous qualifications on grounds of age and sex, she seemed quite content to confine herself to folklore and set off home, leaving the menfolk to their untraditional labours.

We managed about twenty kilos before the rain forced a retreat and at first that seemed quite gratifying. This morning, however, I feel enormously self-conscious, skulking into the olive oil co-operative with my six bulging carrier bags. The tiny forecourt is besieged by vans and hatchbacks piled to their roofs with crates of shiny, ripe black olives and I am convinced that mine look much more shrivelled than everybody else's. But a brisk young man with a giant set of scales passes them all as perfectly acceptable. And there appears to be no minimum load – as long as you bring six or seven kilos, enough for a litre of oil, you are in. So suddenly, momentously, I find I'm a fully paid-up member of the region's oil-producing community.

*

Luckily, today is Manu's day for taking Mme Gros to have her distinctively tight perm made tighter still, so I do not have to explain the turquoise open-top BMW that has just roared recklessly up over the potholes of my drive; nor the flamboyant apparition in canary-yellow silk that is waving me into the passenger seat.

‘You'll be used to my style of driving by the end of the year.' Krystina narrowly misses the box where the postman leaves my mail at the bottom of the drive, as the morning's lesson begins. ‘The date you want to remember is 550 BC. Well, thereabouts anyway. The first Greek colony in the Languedoc. Down on the coast at Agde. Soon be there,' she reassures me, driving heedlessly through a red light. ‘Sub-colony of Massilia – that's Marseille to you, of course – founded fifty years earlier by a bunch of sea-faring adventurers from Phocaea, on the coast of Asia Minor …'

Krystina's momentary concentration on the challenges of cornering sharply, with no perceptible reduction in speed, allows me a terrified ‘Why did they come to the Languedoc?'

‘In those days, nobody sailed across the Mediterranean. Journeys were always charted round the edges. They needed lots of safe anchorages and Agde offered one of them.'

This seems clear enough as she says it but harder to understand when we actually lurch to a halt in the city centre. Even in the state of shock induced by forty-five minutes as Krystina's passenger, I can see that Agde is not on the coast. The Hérault River is extremely wide at this point but it cannot be confused with the Mediterranean.

‘You've noticed the absence of sea?' she asks. ‘You'll find it about four kilometres downriver. But this is where the harbour used to be, right at the point where the Hérault met the Med. It's the coastline that's moved. Silted up. There used to be a whole chain of lagoons along the coast – bassins I think they call them here – protected by a string of outlying islands. Gave the Greeks wonderfully sheltered sailing, from the Rhône to the Pyrenees. But they silted up as well, turning the islands into much more continuous landmasses, encircling the lagoons …'

I seem to have wandered into the geography class by mistake. My head is spinning and I propose a therapeutic coffee in the centre historique, having noted that cars – and most especially Krystina's – are excluded. But before we have much chance to explore, a sudden shower steers us into a garish, formica-filled brasserie called the Agathe.

‘It's the old Greek name for Agde,' says the beaming, Brylcremed patron. ‘Means good or beautiful in Greek,' he explains as he casts a proprietorial look at his chipped red tables and cracked black leatherette seating. ‘But of course, you won't find any trace of Greek remains in modern Agde,' he adds complacently, as if he were discussing the successful eradication of a contagious disease.

‘Nor much justification for the name,' I grumble to Krystina.

‘Don't worry, I'll soon be taking you to one of the most beautiful sights in the Languedoc,' she assures me.

‘Can't be soon enough,' I think to myself, as I watch the rain trickling down the greasy windowpane. Maybe it's just the effect of the weather and the café but somehow I can't imagine Agde looking much less lugubrious in the sunshine. It must be the ubiquitous dark grey stone. The ochre-painted houses down by the river were pleasant enough but, up here in the oldest part of town, everything from the gloomy-looking market hall to the rather sinister black fortified cathedral shows the same peculiar tendency to emulate some forbidding, soot-stained northern mining town.

‘Only to be expected,' says Krystina, as we dash back to the car, ‘if you set yourself up beside an extinct volcano and use the recycled lava for your building blocks.'

Her exit from the car park rivals all of the manufacturer's published acceleration statistics. We are apparently now in a hurry because she has booked us a restaurant on the sea front at Cap d'Agde for twelve o'clock.

‘Midi is so much easier to say than half past,' she laughs gaily, then returns to the Agde colonists to prove that her history is better than her French. ‘It was the Phocaeans who introduced the first wine. Brought their own to begin with. About ten million litres a year, to judge by the amphoras shipwrecked off the coast …'

Their consumption rates sound even more impressive than Manu's but Krystina hastily explains that it wasn't all for themselves.

‘Wine proved a great success with the locals, you see. And very soon the Greeks were planting the Languedoc's first cultivated vines and making the first local wines. Same with the olive trees, because olive oil wasn't just the cornerstone of their cuisine, they also needed it for lighting, medicine, important religious observances, you name it. Absolutely vital. If a Greek wanted to cripple an enemy, he simply cut down his olive trees.'

‘It's so hard to imagine the Languedoc landscape without its vines and olive trees,' I manage to interject.

‘Not half as difficult as imagining the kind of wine these people drank,' Krystina says, deftly reasserting her monopoly. ‘I mean, straightforward fermented grape juice was only a starting point for the most unappetizing selection of cocktails. They added anything from honey, herbs and spices to salt, vinegar, flour, pitch and marble-dust. Even seawater. Anything to disguise the shortcomings of the basic product!'

Cap d'Agde is a 1960s purpose-built resort, a brave attempt to enliven vast tracts of empty lava flow with eight marinas, a hundred thousand beds and countless possibilities for entertainment and refreshment. In summer, that is. In January the floating gin palaces are all deserted, the bedrooms firmly shuttered and every catering outlet serving sustenance fit for consumption apparently closed until the spring – leaving only the one on which we have just for ever turned our backs. I am not sure which was worse: the slimy terrine de crevettes or the wilting lettuce that accompanied it; the over-cooked sole or the vinegary sauce in which it was swimming. The only consolation is that the wretchedness of the meal extinguished any possibility of the romantic tête-à-tête that I suspect Krystina had in mind.

‘Cheer up!' she says, with a sudden slipping of an arm through mine to make up for lost time. ‘You'll soon see why I brought you here.'

The treat that she has been saving for me turns out to be a museum – a deeply unpromising exhibition devoted to the flotsam and jetsam of the river delta. My arm still clamped to Krystina's, I shuffle past an extensive collection of rusty anchors and barnacled amphora fragments, listening to her commentary. Until we turn a corner.

‘Still wondering why we came?' she whispers, suddenly hushed.

At the other end of the room, spotlit in its glass case, is one of the most beautiful statues in the whole of France, perhaps the world. It is a figure of a Greek youth, just fractionally under life size – a battered bronze, fished from the Hérault in 1964 – its naked physical perfection somehow movingly heightened by the water's brutal amputation of its hands and feet. We circle it in silence for some time.

‘Gorgeous, isn't he?' whispers Krystina, breaking the spell. ‘They call him the Ephèbe – from around the third century BC, experts say. A posthumous son of Alexander the Great, perhaps. Call me sentimental,' she laughs as she tightens her grip on my arm, ‘but I'll always put him a couple of hundred years earlier. For me, he's the hero who started the history of Languedoc wine.'

*

‘You mean, you went to Agde and you didn't have any Picpoul de Pinet?' said Manu, more scandalized than I've ever seen him. ‘When the vineyard's practically next door! The situation must be rectified at once!'

What he really meant was that my exertions in the olive grove had resulted in considerably fewer cellar crawls than he was hoping for. There was still a huge amount of work to be done but I felt my good conduct had earned me at least a day's release.

‘Let me guess,' I said, as I joined him in the van, ‘Picpoul is the name of some exceptionally obscure grape?'

‘Indeed it is – you're learning fast,' said Manu. ‘And Pinet's one of just a handful of villages entitled to make the wine. It's the only Coteaux du Languedoc made from a single grape variety and it's pretty special, as you'll see.'

The specialness, Manu insisted, could only be considered in the presence of a substantial platter of fruits de mer, for which, he assured me, Picpoul was the only imaginable accompaniment. With this in mind, he had taken the precaution of booking a table for two in my name at his favourite waterside restaurant in Bouzigues, an attractive little port on the Bassin de Thau, renowned for the oysters and mussels that are farmed in the waters of the lagoon.

Our table is the last remaining on a crowded, harbour-front terrace – a crush that, I suspect, owes more to the unexpected warmth of the afternoon sunshine than to any expected excellence in the oysters. I peel off as many layers of clothing as decency allows, while Manu swelters in his habitual blue dungarees. They are the regulation dress of every self-respecting cartoon ouvrier but favoured in his case, I suspect, as a purely practical recognition of the fact that he has no perceptible waistline to offer support to more conventional trousering. And little by way of shoulders for braces either.

Manu is, however, less conventional in the choice of headgear covering his sparse grey hair. Blithely ignoring the weight of tradition that should have insisted on a flat black cap or even a beret, he touches instead a slightly faded red baseball cap by way of greeting to our sour-faced waitress.

‘No more tielle,' she announces with grim satisfaction.

‘What's tielle?' I ask.

‘It's the speciality. But there's none left,' she confirms, as she gestures bleakly towards the rest of her busy terrace. ‘It's January. The sun's appeared. Everyone's come to sit in it. No more tielle.'

Thankful that we haven't caught her on a day when rain might have dampened her spirits further, we order the fruits de mer.

‘It'll make a change from the wife's food,' says Manu, pulling a face. ‘You thought every French woman could cook, didn't you? Well, it was just my luck to marry the exception.'

Although spared any firsthand experience, I do have some sense of Manu's ill fortune, just from the dank aroma of her potage de légumes that regularly drifts across from the other side of the stream.

‘Don't worry,' says Manu, reading my thoughts as the wine arrives. ‘She's not likely to invite you.'

We have ordered some Picpoul, of course, but Manu – a braver man than I and impervious to the waitress's murderous look – rejects the first bottle that is brought to us.

‘A good Picpoul', he expounds authoritatively, ‘should be crisp and full at the same time. That's how the grape got its name: “pic” as in “picquer” – to prick – and “poul” as in “poul”.' (A blank look from me.) ‘An old Occitan word meaning soft and rounded,' he elaborates, as if he thought everyone fluent in the medieval language of the troubadour poets. (A more disbelieving look now, as I wonder what dusty volume on the family bookshelves can have been the source of this unexpected, last-minute learning.) But the closet etymologist soon gives way to the more familiar, bibulous incarnation, when a second and then a third bottle measures up to his expectations.

The clean, fresh, pleasantly citric style of the wine is indeed such a perfect accompaniment to our towering mountain of seafood that it is easy to imagine that the grape variety and indeed the whole style of wine-making here must have been deliberately chosen to suit the local produce. But a quick visit to a little harbour-side museum after lunch reveals that, while Picpoul has been grown here for about two thousand years, oyster-farming was not introduced until the mid-1800s. What's more, those early efforts must have been fairly unrewarding, as there was apparently only one oyster fisherman operating in Bouzigues at the end of that century. Today, however, the dark silhouettes of hundreds of wooden frames or ‘tables' stretch out in neat rows towards the opposite shore. Each of them supports a thousand ropes and hundreds of shellfish cling to every rope in various states of maturity.

Unfortunately, I see rather more of these oyster tables than I really need to, as Manu struggles to sustain the illusion that he knows precisely where to find the maker of our excellent lunchtime Picpoul. An increasingly flustered exploration of most of the territory within a few kilometres of the lagoon eventually yields a view that faintly resembles the artist's impression of waterside vines, which we remember from the label. And a blast on Manu's horn soon produces a studious-looking young woman in a tracksuit and trainers, who politely confirms that we have indeed located the Domaine Félines Jourdan.