Grape Expectations

by Caro Feely

  Ad invited Chandra on a cycle ride and she agreed with alacrity. I watched with interest as they sped out of the yard. About five hours later they cycled back looking like they had been for a stroll. Ad had finally met his match. Chandra was young and fit enough to keep up with him every step of the way. The tour had ended up double the distance of the usual tour of torture and Chandra could still come back for more. I decided I wouldn't tell John and Bullet.

  We waited for extra ripeness in the cabernet sauvignon but it meant we lost a lot of the harvest, far more than we expected. Ad, Chandra and I did a pass through the vineyard taking off everything that had the slightest hint of a blemish. I was ruthless. Quality was everything. 'If you have the slightest doubt, cut it off!' By the end of our pass at least a third of the grapes were lying down the centre of the row. It was yet another blow to my finance spreadsheet.

  The day before Ad left, we dug the merlot out of the vats and pressed it. It was peaceful and joyful, the smell of Christmas pudding as intoxicating as I remembered. When the pressing was finished we prepared the reds to do their malolactic fermentations, wrapping their vats in silver insulation bubble-wrap blankets to keep the heat in; a trick I had learned from a neighbour.

  Ad was part of the family and we missed him when he left. He took the measurements for the terrace railings and promised to make them for us as a gift; it would save us thousands of euros.

  Meanwhile, Chandra set out early each morning, hoe in hand. She had made a list of things she wanted to accomplish over her time with us, having taken stock of the place and done an inventory of the tools. Her straw hat bobbing about the potager and surrounding gardens was a comforting sight. The lawn was mown, hedges that hadn't been touched in decades were trimmed, the shed was organised, the bulbs sitting in the shed were planted, weeds removed; the outstanding beds of the potager were cleared, filled with compost and worked, then neat patterns of Garrigue limestone were arranged around the herb beds, the roses and the lilies. Slowly the potager was transformed. In the evenings, not content with a full day of gardening, Chandra organised my cupboards and bookshelves or researched plants for me to consider for the garden in the spring.

  By the time Chandra left, Ellie was her best friend. Sophia missed her too and I wished I could have her back every six months to put some discipline on the corridor of crisis.

  With Chandra gone and the quiet of winter looming I needed cherry chocolate more than ever but Sean had cut our shopping budget to nothing. For a while the harvest had been all-consuming and I hadn't had time to think about economic reality. Despite the negative economic signs which would have put any investor off, I felt a calling in what we were doing and I was sure there would be a viable market niche for our organic wine farm and our biodynamic wines in the future. The new whites were exceptional and the reds promising. Our customers encouraged us with emails of congratulations and compliments. We were becoming deeply rooted winemakers. We had to find a way to make the business work.

  Chapter 17

  French Wine Adventures

  Jamie, the neighbour who had rented the winery in our first year, came round for lunch.

  'Have you heard that the biggest négociant for Bergerac wines has gone under?'

  Sean and I shook our heads.

  'We have a chunk of our 2006 on contract to them. Luckily it's no longer my problem. I've resigned. After fifteen years of hard labour in the French vineyards I'm heading back to the UK. I don't know what I'll do yet but vineyards are booming over there.'

  Part of the reason he had decided to go was that the property had been sold. He had read about the sale through a press release: the owner hadn't even told him face to face. I was shocked. For ten years Jamie had put his life and soul into that vineyard, going far beyond the bounds of duty. The property was a small part of the sale of the owner's larger business to an enormous publically listed entity. The owner must have been under non-disclosure but still, it was hard for Jamie to stomach. He decided it was time to move on.

  'We'll miss you,' I said. Jamie had been a great help to us in our first year. Since he had moved his wine back to their winery we hadn't seen him much. His news was a big surprise.

  We moved on to his other bombshell about the defunct négociant.

  'How much Bergerac wine went to him?' asked Sean.

  'At least a third, maybe more.'

  For the Bergerac wine-producing community the news was devastating. Financial troubles were often behind the injuries and deaths all too frequent in the industry. Winemakers were overstretched. They were working too many hours particularly at peak times because they were unable to afford help, and too constrained by bureaucracy. Only a few months before another winemaker, 3 kilometres away from us, had died falling off a vat.

  Our neighbour, Olivier, husband of Myreille who warned me of snakes, assured us that everyone was up for sale, if they could only get a price that would leave them with some dignity. The wine business had become so tough that people with generations of history behind them were considering giving up.

  We invited Thierry and Isabelle Daulhiac over for dinner. We had dined at their house a few times: Isabelle was a dab hand at turning out seemingly effortless gourmet dishes like truffle pasta. Thierry had a sense of humour and was a great source of information about the wine business and about our commune, leaving us guffawing at his anecdotes about colourful local personalities. He grilled us on the places we had lived and visited, finding it exotic, having never travelled outside Europe.

  After serving a starter of mushrooms with goats cheese grilled on top I opened a bottle of grand cru classé Pessac-Léognan, a white wine from the Bordeaux region that Sean had given me for my birthday. We'd discovered this château on a visit to Bordeaux years before and fallen in love with the wine. It didn't live up to the memory.

  'Your white wine is better than this,' said Thierry.

  Thierry wasn't just being polite; our white blend was better than the grand cru classé.

  'It's not fair,' said Isabelle. 'Many of our Bergerac wines are better than these wines that sell for multiple times the price.'

  'I can tell from the people around the table at the wine association management meetings that things are tough,' said Thierry. 'Some people have got serious financial problems. It affects decision-making. People are closed to new ideas and tired.'

  Bergerac was in a bad financial cycle. Prices were lower than they had been in ten years but costs had more than doubled.

  'Look at what is happening to people,' said Isabelle. 'Jean-Paul came to Saussignac with his family to follow their dream of making wine. He and his wife worked together the first few years as they both wanted to work in the business. It soon became clear that the farm was not going to support both of them, even though there was enough work for two. His wife got a job in Bordeaux and had a daily commute of more than an hour each way. They were back in the life they had hoped to leave but with no money as compensation. Then his wife got tired of it and decided to get a serious job again so she took a career opportunity in the north of France to keep the family out of the red. Now they have to commute eight hours to see each other.'

  'He bought at the peak of the positive cycle. Now he's got the property up for sale,' added Thierry.

  I remembered how, at a recent winemakers' gathering, Jean-Paul had said the first vintage was always full of hope. At last I understood how loaded the comment was. Modern farming realities had ground him and their dream down. Now their wine farm was a sinker for them and he couldn't cut it loose even at a major loss. It made me more worried about us. We had followed a dream like theirs. Now they were being crushed by it. Were we going to wind up the same way, with a broken family and a massive financial burden?

  'Is someone keeping an eye on him?' I asked Isabelle.

  'I think so. But we have other friends in Monbazillac who left the rat race to seek a better life, and now the only way they survive is by selling direct, so one of them is on the road at wine fairs a
nd markets the whole year. They never have time together as a family. They regularly leave their kids with friends because they have to be away constantly to survive.'

  I had heard stories of burly farmers in Australia crying into their fabulous wines that they couldn't give away. They could sell their water rights for more than their wine. Here in Saussignac and Bergerac we had our share of sad tales.

  'What about you? How are things going?' asked Isabelle as we tidied away the plates.

  'Pas mal,' (Not bad) I said. 'I'm looking for part-time work. If you come across anything suitable, please think of me. I could give classes in the Internet or English or entering export markets like the UK.' Isabelle was a teacher at the local vineyard college at Monbazillac.

  'I'll keep my eyes open for you but the school is cutting back too. No young people want to go into vineyards and wine. They see how hard people work for nothing in return. Student intake has plummeted in the last few years. Does Sean have anyone to help in the vineyard?'

  'No, he does everything himself.'

  'He's very courageous.'

  Over dessert of home-made chocolate mousse, a delicious and easy recipe that the proprietors of our local restaurant, Le Lion d'Or, had given me, we chatted about places we dreamed of visiting.

  That Sunday, I went for my regular run with Laurence. We usually talked as we ran, often getting into deep philosophical discussions or heart-to-hearts about our men, our children, our siblings, our parents and our innermost fears and hopes. I had discovered that not only was she a fountain of knowledge on French culture but she actively played the piano and the violin. Even in her running gear she always looked well turned out in a noble country-woman way. I mentioned Isabelle's stories.

  'Pierre has lost one major client who sold up. The wine business was too tough for him. But much worse are the accidents. Two of Pierre's clients died this year. It's a tough business. No one talks about it because it's a small percentage of the population that are winegrowers but the death toll is enormous.'

  I asked who they were. One was the Saussignac man who fell off his vat, the other was a winemaker in Duras.

  'He turned at the end of a row and the tractor rolled into a ditch and crushed him. He left three young children.'

  I felt sick. This was too close to the bone for me. Why continue this crazy fantasy? Perhaps it was winter depression but maybe this dream was not going to work out. Death and financial disaster crouched at the end of each row of vines. We never got that Friday feeling. The week blurred into the weekends well out of harvest time. We had not lifted a tennis racquet or been out to dinner on our own in years.

  The following Saturday we went to Pierre and Laurence's house for dinner. The girls played happily with their three kids. They were both already fluent in French. When Sophia started her new school that year Maîtresse confessed that she was convinced Sophia was from a French home despite her foreign passport.

  Pierre opened a bottle of white wine that I recognised. It was from the property of another vigneron who had left a successful career to follow the dream of making wine.

  'He makes good wine. But business is tough. He's a bitter man. Life is difficult. He's in business with a partner so he can't get out. He thinks that his family would have had a better life if he had stayed in his boring but financially rewarding desk job,' said Pierre.

  With a business partner it would be harder to exit, that was certain. There are so many long-term decisions in wine. There would never be a good time to sell. No wonder so many wine businesses went up for sale after the liquidator had forced the situation. I promised myself that would not be us.

  If people who had been successful winemakers for decades and in some instances generations were failing, the crisis was serious. I had to come up with a way for us to diversify into a complementary business. I recalled my conversation with Kerry a couple of months before and started drafting a business plan for wine tourism. That Monday when Sean came in from pruning, we sat down to a bowl of steaming soup made from our home-grown butternut squashes that were piled high in baskets in the kitchen and I told him about my ideas. We had talked vaguely about wine tourism when Kerry was visiting but then the harvest had consumed our attention.

  'I'm thinking of offering wine classes and wine tours along the lines of what Kerry suggested. We have to find other ways to make money and it seems like an obvious one for us in a region like Aquitaine with so many tourists.'

  'Maybe,' said Sean. 'How will you start?'

  'I'll outline my ideas for what we can offer and how to present them on a website this afternoon. I've already spoken to Kerry and he has agreed to put me onto his wine tourism site. After coding the website I'll develop the course material.'

  'Is it such a good idea? How much time is it going to take to get the website up? It probably won't generate anything and it will take you weeks of work.'

  I was frustrated by his attitude. I needed support and collaboration, not negative vibes. He was playing his usual devil's advocate.

  'But if we do nothing we'll never know. I don't think it will take me more than a week to get my ideas together and to have a site up. I'll use the template you developed for the wine site.'

  That evening I handed Sean the short plan I had worked out. 'We'll have to think about pricing but I want to start with wine courses, tours and vineyard walks.'

  'That sounds like a large range. Maybe you should start smaller.'

  'No, I need to start with the range we want otherwise it won't happen.'

  A few days later I visited our local tourist office to find out whether anyone was offering this sort of thing already.

  'I don't know of anything like that,' said the pretty young lady. 'We have the Wine Association wine course and we offer wine weekends through this tourist office.' The wine course was the one I had taken a few months before; their wine weekends were two nights' accommodation and a visit to a vineyard but no wine education. Both were different from what I was planning.

  'So could you promote my classes to English tourists when I have the brochures printed?'

  'We can't market your offerings through our tourist office since you are not a member. We only market accommodations and visits on behalf of members. Wine producers can't be members because there are too many of you.'

  'But this is something different to our wines. I'll be offering wine courses and wine tours where I'll be the educator and translator, not the vigneron.'

  'Wait a minute. You can't give tours unless you are a qualified tour guide. You can't be paid to drive people around unless you are a qualified chauffeur.'

  No wonder there was little entrepreneurial activity in France compared to other parts of Europe. Thinking on my feet and swallowing my frustration I replied:

  'I translate and I educate, I don't offer transport. They can walk, drive themselves or get a taxi. It's their choice, transport and "guiding" is not part of my fee.'

  'OK.' She continued to scrutinise the briefing document I had given her.

  'You can't offer your prices inclusive of accommodation or lunch unless you are a travel agent.'

  It was becoming clear that it wasn't only wine that was smothered with red tape in France.

  'OK, so let's assume I'm offering the wine classes, can you market them for me?'

  'No, if we market that for you then we have to market all the other activities offered by winemakers and there won't be enough room for everyone.'

  'But you told me no one else is doing what I am doing.'

  'I know. But others are doing things like cheese and wine tastings and tours of their wineries. We can't promote one and not the other. Come and see me again when the class is running and I'll see what I can do. If it's a one-off event, we can take the brochures.'

  There was going to be no free ride via the local tourist office. Undeterred, I continued the development of my ideas for French Wine Adventures. By Christmas the website was complete. I sent the link to Kerry asking him for comments. His rep
ly came back within hours with ten useful points. He was an invaluable advisor; his comments got to the heart and he always had practical solutions. He placed a link to my website from his own wine tourism website.

  Sean's family arrived for Christmas. It was the first time that Neal, Sean's youngest brother, and his wife Gillian had visited. They were entranced by the property and our wines. Within hours they were planning the spot for building their own house at Garrigue. I offered to test my wine course on them. For weeks I had been working like a person possessed getting the website and then the course content together. Everything got neglected, especially the housework. Gillian and Glynis, Sean's sister, took me aside and explained in the nicest possible way that they felt our house needed attention. It was time to clean it from top to bottom, sort through the kids' toys and generally get the place organised.