Duck Season

by David McAninch

  “Now,” Dutirou said, raising an index finger, “it is in the aging where the real story of Armagnac begins.” At that moment, to Luc’s evident relief, the lesson was interrupted by the arrival of Jean-Christophe and the first of the evening’s other esteemed convives.

  The guests, eight or so of them, were in the food-and-wine business, like Luc. One was a gregarious restaurateur in his late twenties, another was a middle-aged, pot-bellied foie gras buyer who, according to a whispered aside from Luc, did a clandestine side trade in ortolan, the banned but delicious songbird. There was also a dapper wine négociant who arrived with two cases of very fine-looking bottles.

  One of the attendees looked familiar to me. After a minute, I realized it was the friendly counterman from Boucherie Cugini. He seemed as flabbergasted to see me in this out-of-the-way place as I was to see him. He’d come bearing dinner wrapped in bloody waxed paper: six enormous and extravagantly marbled rib eyes.

  Our host, Jean-Christophe—his neck mummified in a thick wool scarf in that fussy French way—excused himself frequently to perform adjustments to the alembic, confer with Dutirou, take temperature readings from the eau-de-vie, and make notations in a yellowed ledger. He seemed distracted and distant, though he did, admittedly, have more-immediate concerns than the rest of us.

  The festivities began, in the accepted tradition of Gascon male bonding, with a ridiculous quantity of charcuterie—boudin, andouillette, Ibérico ham, saucisson, pâté de tête—and two enormous slabs of foie gras. With this we consumed many glasses of what the wine merchant called the “small stuff”: a couple of Languedocs, a Chinon, a Nuits-Saint-George, a juicy Châteauneuf-du-Pape. We ate and drank standing up, off plastic plates, with the alembic throbbing away next to us, infusing our clothes with wood smoke. For a while, the men engaged in shop talk. The foie gras buyer lamented the renewal of the ortolan ban. The restaurateur talked about a shortage of oysters in the Arcachon Bay. Luc complained about the rising price of Basque wines. But as bottles continued to be emptied, the banter got looser and faster, and soon had escalated to a full-bore gasconade, bristling with put-downs and dirty jokes.

  At around ten o’clock, Jean-Christophe flipped shut his ledger and stood up. In an unexpectedly macho flourish, he grabbed a shovel that had been leaning against the wall, opened the hatch of the firebox, and, releasing a dazzling shower of sparks, shoveled a pile of hot coals onto the room’s stone floor. Over the spread-out coals he laid a grill grate. Then he threw on the rib eyes. After sixty seconds or so, he flipped them. Sixty seconds after that, he took them off. The thick steaks had fraternized with the coals just long enough to color the meat’s exterior and soften the fat; inside was cool, crimson, uncooked flesh. This, the young Cugini butcher told me emphatically as we repaired to a long dinner table at the room’s far end, was as it should be.

  We were too distant from the alembic for its heat to warm us, so we ate dinner in coats and scarves. The steaks tasted deeply of tangy, bloody aged beef. As the meat disappeared, the wines got older: a 2008 Vacqueyras, a 2001 Saint-Julien, a 1982 Haut-Médoc, and, as we were mopping the juices from our plates, a 1964 Saint-Émilion Grand Cru, its label mostly rotted away. It was a musty artifact, shot through with skeins of dark fruit and a distant echo of tannins. Dessert was store-bought chocolate truffles. We ate them like peanuts, tossing the foil wrappers onto the bloody steak platter.

  Never once did the machine-gun chatter slow down. After a while, I stopped trying to follow along, though the others took no account of this—every few minutes, someone would toss a non sequitur my way as if I’d been listening the whole time:

  “You’ve got to fry the bird whole!”

  “Never trust a Béarnais!”

  “I didn’t even get her name!”

  “Whaaaassuuuuuuuuup!”

  At length the Armagnac came out: a half-dozen bottles, each a different vintage and a different blend. I wish I could remember how they tasted. But it was late, and my palate had given up the ghost. The restaurateur, who was sitting next to me, took a sip of one, closed his eyes, and said: “Like Baby Jesus in a velvet suit.”

  Now it was three o’clock in the morning and Jean-Christophe was standing at the head of the table with a long glass pipette in his hand.

  “Me first, doctor!” someone shouted.

  We followed our host outside into the frosty night. Our feet crunched across the gravel, and we entered the damp darkness of the chai. Jean-Christophe flicked on a light. Four rows of wood casks marched off into the indiscernible recesses of the stone-walled shed. Jean-Christophe extracted a straw-colored liquid from one of the casks and dispensed a little of it into each of our glasses: an Armagnac in gestation, a foretaste of the nectar it would become.

  Sometime before dawn, Luc deemed himself sober enough to drive us back to Plaisance. His engine wouldn’t turn over, so he got three of his friends to push the car down the tree-lined dirt track so he could pop the clutch. We rolled through all the stop signs on the way home.

  IT MAY COME AS A disappointment to some, and as a relief to others, that not all Armagnac-distillation feasts call for swilling wine and brandy until the wee hours. The following week, Henri stopped by to deliver an embossed card requesting the pleasure of the recipient’s company at this year’s repas distillation at the Domaine Baronne Jacques de Saint Pastou, in the village of Monguilhem. Henri told us that Saint Pastou was a very old Armagnac-making family with roots in Gascony’s noblesse. The lunch sounded fancy, but Henri assured us it was really quite mondain, by which he meant lots of tiresome small talk and air-kissing.

  “Monique doesn’t go anymore,” he said. “It bores her to tears.”

  Henri also mentioned that the Saint Pastou family was a little bit famous even outside of Gascony, because Pierre de Saint Pastou, the estate’s young heir, had been a contestant on a recent season of L’Amour Est Dans le Pré, a reality-TV series that matches lonely bachelor farmers with potential mates. (The series name—literally, “the love is in the field”—is a play on the title of the rom-com set in Condom.)

  Henri said that Pierre’s brief turn as a TV personality had worked out well: The couple got married, and business had been very good ever since.

  The Saint Pastou domaine was one of those demure French farmsteads that could have been conjured in the mind of a painter or a movie-set designer. At the center of the property, which was surrounded on all sides by picturesque vineyards, stood a perfectly square manor house with two skinny stone chimneys rising from a pyramidal roof. Keeping the house company were a few pristinely maintained farm buildings and an immense, high-ceilinged chai sheltered by a steeply pitched tile roof with deep eaves. The estate was accessed via a long, narrow white-gravel drive. The day was sunny and unusually mild, and as we approached the house, with Charlotte and Michele in the backseat in pretty dresses, and Henri at the wheel relating some interesting fact about an old rail line that once served the area, I decided, mondain or not, that this looked like a fine place to spend a Saturday afternoon.

  A few dozen guests were already milling around a long table in front of the house. A thick-set young man with a cherubic face, dressed in a cable-knit sweater, was standing behind the table, serving drinks and making conversation. This was the scion, Pierre de Saint Pastou.

  Among those in attendance, there was an unusual preponderance of tweed and corduroy. More than a few guests were wearing hunting jackets—the old-fashioned kind with the padded shoulders and elbow patches. One fellow was sporting knickers, which he had paired with bright-red wool socks pulled up to the knees. Cashmere seemed to be favored among the women. Almost everyone, male and female, had a scarf draped over their shoulders, including the local curé, who was standing at the edge of the crowd in his cassock and collar. It seemed every living member of the local nobility had descended on a single patch of farmland for the day.

  As if to confirm this impression, I ran into Irène Pinon, the mother of our friend Agnès, while I was waiting
for a drink. Wearing her customary oversize sunglasses and gripping a snifter of Armagnac, she looked me over and, by way of greeting, asked, “Who are you with?”

  I pointed to Henri, who was a short distance away, chatting with Michele.

  Surely seeking a brighter star in the social firmament, Madame Pinon made to leave but was delayed by a balding, tweed-clad man of wide girth. He kissed Madame Pinon on the cheek.

  “My son, François-Xavier,” said Madame Pinon.

  François-Xavier grinned and shook my hand.

  “Agnès has spoken of you in her e-mails!” he said, showing a more cheerful mien than his mother. He insisted we join him at lunch, and asked me to call him Feex.

  Feex was interesting company. Seated at one of the refectory tables that had been set up in the chai, with a bottle of Madiran and plates of grilled magret in front of us, we talked at length about his sister. Feex spoke with unguarded candor about how hard it had been for the siblings to get their mother to accept Agnès back into the family, and about how he admired his sister’s independence.

  “Agnès forced us out of our aristocratic torpor,” he said.

  Parting with Gascon tradition, I asked Feex what he did for a living. He said, somewhat obliquely, that his line of work was le networking.

  Toward the close of the meal, after ceremonial glasses of new eau-de-vie, the elderly patriarch of the Saint Pastou family, Jacques-Henri, stood in front of the alembic with a microphone and led an eight-man choir in the singing of a Basque ballad called “Itxatxo.” This was a moment of unexpected, arresting beauty. So splendidly harmonized were the men’s voices, so resonantly did they carry through the vast, stone-walled chai, so haunting was the song’s melody, so mournful its intonations—though I couldn’t understood a word—that I found myself suddenly choked with emotion.

  It was a clever bit of timing. No sooner had the song ended—with more than a few guests wiping their eyes—than Jacques-Henri thanked everyone for coming and invited the attendees to make their way to the ad hoc boutique that had been set up near the door of the chai. With that, everyone rose from their seats and began queuing up at a high wood counter, behind which stood Pierre de Saint Pastou. Grinning broadly, he accepted fistfuls of cash in exchange for bottles of Armagnac, which the guests tucked under their arms as they strode out into the waning afternoon.

  THERE ARE FOUR MAIN KINDS of grapes used for making Armagnac: ugni blanc, baco, colombard, and folle blanche. Of these, the least-used is folle blanche, which goes by different names in different parts of France, including fol, fou, enrageat, plant de madame, dame blanche, gros plant, picpoul, taloche, came braque, mendic, mendik, and mondic. Folle blanche (crazy white) accounts for just 4 percent of the total surface area under cultivation in the Armagnac-making zones of Gascony. Most estates grow just a little of it, to add some backbone to their distilling wine. This is because folle blanche, from a grower’s perspective, is emmerdant—a pain in the ass. It falls prey easily to gray and black rot and various kinds of insects, and requires lots of extra care and attention.

  Almost no one makes Armagnac exclusively from folle blanche. Those who do are for the most part considered stubborn eccentrics. If there is a cult figure among this small coterie of distillers, it is a woman named Martine Lafitte.

  “She is pur et dur,” André Dubosc said when, on one of our excursions, we paid Martine a visit. He accompanied that description with a knuckle-rap to the skull, a gesture he reserved for the most irascible Gascons. Dubosc explained that bottles of folle blanche Armagnac from Domaine Boingnères, as Martine’s estate is called, fetched hundreds of euros apiece, but that because the yield from the grape was so poor, Martine had never parlayed her cult status into a wider success.

  “When it comes to folle blanche,” said Dubsoc, “her motto is plutôt mourir que trahir.” “Sooner die than betray.”

  The entirety of our visit with Martine that day took place in the foyer of her house, standing up, while she stroked her cat. Glancing at me from time to time through thick-lensed glasses, she seemed wary of her foreign visitor. Looking to be in her sixties, she had dark bangs and a stout frame packaged in a tight leopard-print top and black slacks. After she and Dubosc chatted for a while, Martine cut the conversation short, saying she had business to attend to. When I inquired about the distillation, she extended a vague invitation to visit the domaine.

  I was surprised when, not long after, she actually called me—and, moreover, sounded put out that I hadn’t phoned her first. She said that I should visit the estate as soon as possible, as they were almost finished distilling the season’s harvest of folle blanche.

  The next morning, I was parked in front of a schoolhouse in a village called Le Frèche. Martine had instructed me to call when I got there so that she could send someone to fetch me: Finding the place on my own would be compliqué. I phoned the number she’d given me and spoke to a gravel-voiced man who told me to stay put.

  Soon a white van pulled up and flashed its brights. I followed it down a series of country roads. A thick fog had moved in, and I couldn’t see much in front of me beyond the van’s taillights. Eventually, though, I could make out rows of vines on either side of the road, their leaves a late-autumn yellow. We pulled into a wide courtyard and parked under a cluster of leafless plane trees that had been pruned to the knuckles. They looked like bony hands reaching up from the underworld. A shuttered farmhouse stood a short distance away—the old family manor, no longer occupied, it seemed. Opposite that was a plain, plaster-walled structure. I guessed that this was the distillation shed, because a pipe sticking out of the side of the building was discharging a steaming liquid into a cistern, filling the air with a rotten-fruit smell—this was the vinasse, the alembic’s unevaporated runoff.

  The van’s driver got out. A fireplug of a man with a pug nose perched at a great distance from his upper lip, he resembled a caricature from a nineteenth-century political cartoon. He said his name was Claude.

  He explained that Madame was running late and had asked him to show me around the vineyard.

  I grabbed a scarf from the backseat of my car. With resignation, I’d taken to wearing one, Frenchman-style, because Gascony’s particular variety of damp autumn chill had a way of getting right down my shirt collar. I followed Claude along a muddy path separating two vine plots, and then into a row of vines. He crouched by one of them and pointed at tiny holes in its trunk.

  “Insects,” he said. “Worse every year.”

  We walked a little farther.

  He crouched down again and plucked off a handful of shriveled, unharvested grape carcasses, which disintegrated in his hand. “Black rot.”

  Claude excused himself momentarily to urinate behind a tree. He continued to speak as he did so.

  “Growing folle blanche is hardly worth it anymore,” he called out. “But Madame, she is set in her ways.”

  As we walked back toward the distillation building, Claude divulged that Madame Lafitte was planning to sell the estate. She had no children, he said, and she would soon be too old to run the place.

  He revealed that there had already been an offer on the property, but Madame Lafitte had turned it down because the buyers weren’t interested in keeping the domaine going, and had indicated that they would uproot the vines.

  For a fleeting, ridiculous moment, I fantasized about buying the place myself and becoming a gentleman-farmer-distiller. Alas, I lacked both the funds and even a fraction of the horticultural aptitude required of a grower of folle blanche.

  Domaine Boingnères’s alembic was much shinier and newer than the ones I’d seen previously. It was gas-fired, and its boiler and twin columns were perched on brick pedestals. Otherwise, though, it was the same basic scene: ka-chug ka-chug ka-chug, firewater trickling into a barrel. Claude went over to the still to check the temperature of the eau-de-vie with a glass thermometer and then consulted a well-thumbed book—titled Guide Pratique d’Alcoolmétrie—that was lying on top of some n
ewspapers on a linoleum-topped table.

  This distillation shed had a peculiar feature: a full kitchen. I could see it through a doorway at the far end of the room. Inside, a skinny, apron-clad woman was adding pieces of vine wood to a hearth. I asked Claude if I could go in and introduce myself. He looked at me funny.

  “Not much to see,” he said, “but be my guest.”

  The cook had a long, sallow face and appeared to be infected with the same gloominess as Claude. I was beginning to think spores of it were floating in the air. When I asked what she was making, she seemed surprised that I could possibly be interested. She pointed to a platter of plucked wood pigeons and told me they were going on the grill. All I could think of was how long it must have taken her to clean them.

  The cook told me she prepared all the meals during la distillation. “Lunch and dinner, every day for twenty days—ouf,” she said. “But it’s easier than it used to be. Before Madame added the kitchen, the meals had to be carried all the way from the house.”