Saving Our Skins

by Caro Feely

  The Terre de Vins magazine described pruning as 'parfois pénible mais cruciale', meaning 'sometimes painful but crucial'. Pruning 25,000 vines at Terroir Feely took a couple of months of hard labour. Working in cold and sometimes damp conditions, Seán had to grit his teeth and get on with it, despite a sore back and a strained wrist.

  Tough as it was, though, Seán also found it a joy. When the cool winter sun poked up over Gageac hill and lit up the vines under a clear blue sky, he found a meditative rhythm, a time to commune in the silence with the frosty vineyard. In biodynamics this was a key moment to talk to the vines; they were in a state of hibernation, not concentrating on starting the new season's buds as in spring, growing canes and leaves at Formula-One speeds as in summer, or maturing fruit as in autumn. They were quiet, unoccupied, and able to listen.

  Françoise Bedel, a biodynamic champagne producer, had told me the story of how one winter she told an underperforming vineyard if it didn't buck up and produce more volume the vines would be grubbed up. The following year yields were up about 25 per cent and they weren't across the whole property. She was convinced the vines had listened.

  The agricultural workers' social services organisation, who took close to half of our income every year and sometimes a lot more, said they were alarmed by how much injury and sick-leave pruning generated. Seán grew a thick beard to protect his face from the elements. When Ellie did a skit of him that winter, she acted out a heavy-footed Neanderthal.

  Looking back at the previous year, setting aside the big fight, I felt happy and excited about the future. Biodynamics was becoming part of us, changing our thinking and keeping us motivated.

  Meanwhile, the children were growing up. Sophia started reading and learning piano. The French education system meant she already recognised some classical music and art that I didn't even know as an adult. Ellie loved music, too, and would sit on an old beer crate set up as a bench in the kitchen, creating gritty, off-the-cuff songs on her toy guitar.

  Our stereo, a sixteen-year-old purchase from our days in Johannesburg, had sung its last song back in the summer. Feeling buoyed by the response to the TV show, we bought a new hi-fi as our Christmas present to ourselves. Seán finished setting it up on New Year's Day and put on Vivaldi's Four Seasons as I said goodnight to the girls. Sophia turned to me as the music rose up the stairwell and said, 'Now that, that makes me very happy.' We went to sleep with joy in our hearts and music in our ears.

  Chapter 13

  A Taste of California

  Two months later Thierry and Isabelle picked us up pre-dawn, their sons settled with Joel, their neighbour and an eccentric winegrower, who was now sporting bright red hair rather than dreadlocks. Our girls and Dora were safely installed with Dave and Amanda on their new farm. The previous night they were so engrossed playing with Martha and Florence by the time I left that I received a desultory wave instead of the difficult farewell I had expected.

  It was Thierry's first trip outside Europe. We were all excited but he was bursting with it. The D936 had almost no traffic, little wonder given the early hour. As we descended a single-lane ramp connecting one road to another, a dark Alfa Romeo flew past on our right. The driver attempted the same thing on a large truck just ahead, but the hard shoulder narrowed and he found himself wedged between the truck and the road barrier. As the car ricocheted between the truck and the barrier, the driver struggled to keep it upright, bits ripping off with each impact, bouncing every which way; the bumper, a part of a light, a hubcap.

  'Oh la la la la la la! Des Girondins! Mais quel idiot!' yelled Thierry, navigating the flying debris. The other car was clearly marked '33'. The rivalry between the more powerful Gironde region, the home of Bordeaux wines, and the smaller Dordogne, home to Bergerac wines, was legendary. Girondins were said by the Dordognais to be arrogant, proud idiots – as we had just witnessed. Miraculously, the Alfa Romeo didn't flip and once on the other side of the bridge they pulled over to assess the damage. We had a plane to catch and since there were no injuries we were quickly on our way.

  Arriving into Los Angeles about twenty hours later, we were logged by an eyeball-scanner, grilled by the immigration officials and sniffed by vicious dogs that let out intermittent blood-curdling howls. We felt unwanted, but as we passed the security gates everything changed. We were in the land of bigger and better; of smiling customer-service agents and massive cars.

  At the car-rental office Thierry wanted a Mustang, but after a safety scare on the Toyota Camry in the US they were renting the Camry out cheap – although the safety issue had apparently been resolved – and we were skint; if we were to go ahead with the building project we would need every penny from our windfall and a lot more besides.

  'Regardez les bagnols!' Look at the cars! said Thierry as we took off, him driving, Seán navigating and me and Isabelle back-seat driving. Every car and truck on the jammed six-lane highway heading north to get on the I-5 to San Francisco was enormous; many were 4x4s with a single suited person inside. Our large family sedan felt small. Alongside the cars were monster trucks with metre-plus noses pushed way out in front to contain the engines required to pull gargantuan cargos. When we stopped to overnight at a rundown motel we still had not seen a single small car. It became a game to find one.

  The hotel breakfast was sweet muffins, pre-sweetened instant oats and sugar-coated cereals. We opted for coffee and orange juice, then hit the I-5 on the hunt for small cars and cowboys. Thierry wanted to experience what he had seen in the movies.

  Instead of cowboys out on the range, though, we saw endless green pastures void of grazing cattle. What we did see was intensive cattle farming. We began to recognise the initial sign: a terrible smell. A couple of kilometres later cattle would be jammed into a pen one against another, knee-deep in slurry. The stink would follow us for another few kilometres.

  It didn't seem logical. I reflected on what could be behind this phenomenon and could only deduce that it was because fossil fuels were cheaper than human labour. The grass could be baled by a machine more easily and at a lower cost than managing herds on the prairie with personnel. This was in stark contrast to the health and animal-welfare issues on the other side of the coin.

  Beef provides omega-6 and omega-3 fats, both essential to our health; we need a balance of about three to one. Over four to one and we start to experience health problems. I had read that, whereas grass-fed cattle had omega-6 to omega-3 ratios that were around the recommended level of three to one, after 200 days in a feedlot, grain-fed cattle had ratios exceeding twenty to one. The contrast was even starker for intensive eggs compared to free-range eggs. I realised then that our home-grown eggs didn't only taste better, they were way healthier too.

  Even as an organic farmer totally wired into all of this information I still sometimes bought whatever my local supermarket proposed, handing my conscience over to buyers driven by quarterly results, not concern for my health or animal ethics. Reading books like Fast Food Nation and Food, Inc. had opened my eyes and made me more vigilant, but I sometimes strayed because I was in too much of a hurry to read the fine print. Seán would demand that the offending product be returned, but that wasn't easy in France where the customer is never king and seldom right.

  We hopped off the I-5 to take a district road to Santa Cruz for our first winegrower rendezvous. It was early and we were making good time so we stopped at a coffee shop in Paso Robles. The car park was filled with 4x4s.

  'All the cars look new. How do they keep them so clean?' said Thierry. We laughed, reminiscing about Naomi's trip in his mud-encrusted utility vehicle and thinking how much of a shock it must have been for her, coming from this culture of gleaming chrome and bright paintwork.

  Hoping for a coffee similar to those experienced from the same chain in Vancouver years before, I ordered a cappuccino. As we sipped our drinks, Seán ragged Thierry about the pink sweater he had on, warning him not to wear it in San Francisco. Seán would not be seen dead in pink. In Dublin
I had once made the mistake of buying him a stylish black T-shirt from Eden Park for his birthday. There was a tiny pink bow-tie emblem on it, barely visible, but the spot of pink meant Seán would never wear it. I tried inking it black but the ink washed out each time and Seán rejected the shirt outright. Eventually I gave it to the local charity shop. I should have given it to Thierry. My small coffee was so large I couldn't finish it. It wasn't as good as I remembered. A while later we arrived at Santa Cruz, a small city of around 60,000 people known for its surf, and becoming known for its wineries. Philippe Coderey, director of viticulture at Bonny Doon and a biodynamic specialist, was a tall, eccentric mix of French and American traits. He grew up and worked on vineyards in France then moved to the US, first to Pennsylvania then to the winelands of California. From newly furnished, modern but ghostly empty offices on the ground floor, he whisked us upstairs.

  'Bonny Doon has been having a tough time financially so many people were laid off,' he explained. They were going through a change of strategy from bulk branded wines to quality estate-grown wines, but it was a tough transition.

  His office and sensitive-crystallisation lab was a comfortable, shabbily furnished attic. I felt more at home there than in the stark offices downstairs and could see he did too. He emptied his heart to us: his crystallisation work; problems he had with his back from too much driving to see all the growers; his relationship with Bonny Doon's founder and leader, Randall Grahm, self-described as the 'original Rhone Deranger', and, according to their own website, described by his staff as 'particular'.

  Philippe talked non-stop for several hours, delighted to have a chance to speak French. His crystallisation work included wine but also vineyard earth and earth from other places. One was a comparison of blank dust from Death Valley and dust from an American Indian tribal-dance ring that was vibrantly alive, like a biodynamic wine. Both original dusts looked identical, but their crystallisation told a whole other story about their quality.

  Randall parked his red Citroën outside. Looking down at him from the attic window, he was smaller than I imagined. When Philippe introduced us, he seemed quiet, not the court jester I had read about. He made his reputation with good wines but also with marketing stunts like a mock funeral for cork, burying a real cork that he called 'Thierry Bouchon' in New York's Central Park, capturing the imagination of journalists at the height of the cork versus screw cap debate. The opposite of us, he believed screw cap was the only way and had milked the media angle.

  The cellar and offices behind were empty but the tasting room and restaurant out front had a full staff. No expense had been spared. A biodynamic flowform water feature had pride of place at the entrance, there were nooks made of massive oak casks that housed private tables, chandeliers made from wine bottles, bar counters made from old barrel staves, and posters explaining biodynamics. It was beautiful and packed with clever ideas and unusual features. We ordered the biodynamic wines; the Albariño white and a red. The wines were delicious and the food imaginative, local and finely prepared. Philippe was fascinating but the experience was marred by his frustration.

  'Mais c'est que du bluff!' (Their talk about biodynamics is marketing hype), said Thierry as we left the winery. I described an advert I had seen for a large organic wine producer a few years before. It proclaimed they had the largest organic compost heap in the USA – with the tag line 'our neighbours might not like it but our vines sure do!' Their heap may have been the largest but it implied everything from them was organic, whereas I read that only about 15 per cent of the grapes under their brand name were organic at that time. It was the kind of marketing confusion that would not be tolerated in France.

  Isabelle reminded us that we could not talk wine all day every day. She wanted to sightsee. The following day we explored southwards: Monterey, the setting for John Steinbeck's Cannery Row; the evocative seascape of 17-Mile Drive; Pebble Beach and Big Sur. It was totally California. But I wanted to visit the winelands, having seen most of this before on a year working and travelling round the world in my early twenties.

  We were feeling nervous about our budget after the hefty dinner bill at Bonny Doon. If we ate like that every day we wouldn't have funds for the week. Between sightseeing we picnicked on the beach in Carmel then dined at a cheap Mexican restaurant a couple of blocks down from our hotel. The hotel, selected for proximity to Bonny Doon, wasn't fantastic and the restaurant even less so. I woke up retching in the middle of the night and stayed at the toilet bowl through the early hours.

  We had ordered different things; luckily the other three were unscathed. Feverish and miserable, I tried not to vomit in the car as we drove from Santa Cruz to San Francisco.

  'Regardez!' yelled Thierry as we came into San Francisco city.

  Looking up from my nauseous haze I saw a hip new Mini, our first small-car sighting. San Francisco was a different world to LA; instead of gas-guzzlers there were Minis and Toyota hybrids, though still no cowboys. I felt like death, unable to stomach anything but a little water. Even that made my gut unhappy. I prayed the upset would be over the next day when we hit the winelands. The cheap food now didn't look so cheap. Missing our clean, home-grown food, I dragged myself around San Francisco trying not to let the team down, then fell into bed in our hotel, escaping my unhappiness by diving into a good book. Seán watched over me, adamant he would not leave me alone to accompany Thierry and Isabelle to Chinatown. For all the food-safety laws in the US that meant Roquefort and other unpasteurised cheeses were illegal, I had never had food poisoning in France or Ireland.

  It was the longest time we had spent in an English-speaking country since leaving Ireland, but, travelling with Thierry and Isabelle, we had never spoken more French. It was fun. The next day we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, setting the GPS for Ceàgo Vinegarden, founded by Jim Fetzer, former president of Fetzer Vineyards, long since sold and now owned by a massive conglomerate. Some of the money from the sale had seeded his new Ceàgo venture, a biodynamic farm.

  About halfway to Ceàgo we saw a sign to Chateau Montelena, the winery made famous in the 'Judgement of Paris' in the seventies, and more recently in the film Bottle Shock that tells the story – Bottle Shock and Sideways had been on Thierry and Isabelle's pre-trip 'watch list'. Bottle Shock tells the story of an American city professional, Jim Barrett, who went wine-farming in the Napa Valley before it became famous. On the opposite side of the Atlantic, a Paris-based wine-shop owner and now famous English wine journalist, Steven Spurrier, was concocting a way to improve sales by bringing in high-quality international wines. He decided to raise the prestige of his shop and his new line with a competition between top French and top international wines. On his trip to Napa he meets Barrett, who wants nothing to do with the competition, but his son Bo slips Spurrier a few bottles. In the meantime, the wine concerned did a volte-face and went brown. Barrett drank himself into depressed oblivion and gave it all away. In these scenes Bottle Shock so perfectly captured the angst of being a winemaker, I felt it was a masterpiece. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the ocean, the bottle given to Spurrier hadn't turned brown and wins the competition against famous grands crus chardonnays from Burgundy. The wine changes back to its normal colour in Napa, Bo gets the girl and they get the wine back. I loved the film and demanded we stop to pay homage.

  Thierry did a U-turn and we took a winding road up through a forest that led to an entrance that was a mix of old-chateau style and modern Japanese garden.

  I was keen to taste the chardonnay on which they had built their reputation. It was only available as part of a flight of four wines for twenty dollars per person, the lowest-priced tasting they offered. We didn't have time for four wines plus we were told the chardonnay was not grown on the estate, it was bought in. The estate only grew red grapes. The chardonnay wasn't even from the same vineyard as it was when they won the tasting in Paris back in the seventies. It was a shock to our French perspective, where the word 'chateau' on a label guaranteed the wines were
exclusively grown and made on the estate.

  Ceàgo Vinegarden was a hacienda-style winery with a boat-landing on Clear Lake, and a lavender, olive, sheep and vine farm. Barney Fetzer, a twenty-something, thick-set, bearded farmer dressed in checked grey shirt, muddy chinos, boots and a cap struck a chord with Seán and Thierry, his secateurs hung on a belt at his hip. At last a real winegrower, I could see them thinking, not a poncy winery owner.

  The field hands in the vineyards we had seen from the roadside on the trip so far had their heads stooped and faces hidden by hoodies pulled low, as if they were embarrassed by what they were doing, instead of proud. Next to the field would inevitably be a flatbed truck with two chemical Portaloos on it, effectively saying: 'You are not worthy even to leave your C.R.A.P. here on our land.' I was sure it was a legal requirement, but nonetheless its implication was scary.

  The modern, industrial economy denigrated manual labour. Since changing our own lives, I knew it should not be so. Rough working hands should be celebrated, not hidden in embarrassment. People who worked with their hands, who were passionate about what they did and were respected for it, were the happiest in the world. Barney knew his vineyards. He worked his land; his hands told the story. He pointed to a stack of cow horns in the biodynamic preparation tower. Biodynamics uses plant sprays like the dried stinging nettle, but also more complex preparations created to improve the health and life of the farm. The most important is 'the 500', cow manure fermented in a cow horn, buried and overwintered in the soil before being dynamised – mixed into water in a special way – and then sprayed onto the soil. Barney explained that on the lower level they stored the horns and the preparations, and that on the upper level was the dynamiser, so that the preparations could be moved to the sprayer by gravity.