Vintage

by Rosemary Friedman

  Despite the new installations, the chais were still light-years away from the new, architect-designed underground cellars, with their polished marble floors, of Château d’Estaminet, or the giant new vat stores, analytical laboratory, and pneumatic presses of Château Laurent with its ultra-modern bottling chain, which rinsed and treated the bottles with nitrogen and filled them at an astonishing rate, before standing them upright (to allow the cork to expand) and automatically labelling and wrapping them.

  Since Clare’s return from London to find not only the tyres of the Renault slashed, but the trout with which she had filled the moat of Château de Cluzac floating accusingly on their backs – dead and presumably poisoned – she had not been idle. With her energy levels topped up by her anger at the sabotage, she had never worked so hard in her life.

  The fact that she had enemies did not deter her. When obstacles such as the vandalised sign, the slashed tyres, the dead trout were put in her way, she duly reported the crimes to the gendarmerie, which had as yet not isolated the perpetrators. On the lookout for further acts of vandalism, she did not allow the incidents to deflect her and, when the blind fury they had provoked had abated, she treated them with the disdain they deserved. She had discussed the matter with Jamie. While obvious names, such as Balard and Van Gelder, presented themselves immediately, she knew that there were others in the Médoc who, for one reason or another, resented her presence. With twenty-four hours in the day not being long enough for all she planned to do, on Jamie’s advice she concentrated on buying four new tyres for the Renault and instructing the local fish-farm to restock the moat with trout.

  Baron Charles-Louis would not have recognised his recently vacated château and, according to Grandmaman – who was kept up to date with Clare’s ventures by the Comtesse de Ribagnac, who no doubt had her own spies – Baron Thibault (fiercely proud of both the agricultural and commercial aspects of the château) would have turned in his grave.

  A one-man band, Clare negotiated with builders and supervised the renovations of the Orangerie, which were already well underway, installed toilets in the disused dungeons, made contact with the airlines, to see if she could interest them in her quarter-bottles of Petite Clare, spent two cobwebbed days in the vast underground bottle store with Big Mick, choosing wines suitable to be shipped to London for auction, approached several English supermarket chains – including the formidable Julie Smith of Catesbury’s, who had accepted an invitation to Bordeaux – and negotiated with printers for the brochures for distribution to visitors and tour operators. The brochures with their logo, the de Cluzac coat of arms encircled by green and purple grapes, were now piled high in her office.

  ‘Successful wineries must be good at show business.’ Without Alain Lamotte at her elbow, she could never have got the show on the road in so short a time.

  She had spent days in Alain’s office in the Rue Vauban, poring over the layout and wording of her advertising matter, and through Alain she had been invited by Delphine to the annual fête champêtre to be held at Le Moulin de la Misère, in two weeks’ time.

  With Alain’s help she had produced an information pack which made public that which for three hundred years the incumbents of Château de Cluzac had taken pride in keeping to themselves. Alain had taken a photograph of her and Rougemont, standing on the steps of Château de Cluzac, for the front cover of the brochure.

  As they sat at the desk and hammered out the details of the text, which Alain transferred to his computer – editing and refining it, with reference to the Baron’s sale document, the details of which he knew chapter and verse – Clare became aware that the PDG of the Bordeaux branch of Assurance Mondiale was becoming interested in more than protecting his stake in the fortunes of the château.

  The first concrete indication she had that Alain’s concern was not entirely professional was when he put his proposed wording for an ‘Invitation to a château’, designed to be sent out independently to journalists and wine-buyers, on his screen.

  Alain’s spoken English was better than his written and howlers such as ‘…enjoy the vineyards covered with gravels’, and ‘…explore the corpse by the lake’, brought tears of amusement to Clare’s eyes. In an involuntary gesture, she had put her hand over his. Alain’s flushed face and the speed with which he had withdrawn his hand with its gold wedding band, as if the contact had burned his skin, confirmed her suspicions.

  To create a diversion, Clare had picked up the photograph of Delphine and the children, on holiday on some deserted beach, from his desk, and asked Alain where it had been taken. By the time he had explained that the photograph had been taken early one morning in Brittany, where they had rented a house for the summer, the moment was over, the flush had subsided from Alain’s face and he had regained his equilibrium.

  The incident, which afterwards was not referred to, was followed by a distinct change in the atmosphere as the relationship, which before had been strictly business, was now overlaid, at least as far as Alain was concerned, by desire.

  Watching Alain, as he attempted to keep his mind on the improvements to Château de Cluzac, on working out the feasibility of projects such as letting rooms for ‘Château Weekends’, and the possibility of opening a wine school such as was up and running at Kilmartin, Clare pitied him.

  He was a decent enough chap who was obviously fighting the temptation to deceive his wife and let down his beloved family. When he had difficulty in keeping his eyes on the computer screen, she tried not to let the atmosphere get too heavy, and diverted him with château business – his overriding passion and one that eclipsed any other thought he might have in his head – whenever she could.

  Alain was not unattractive. His large frame, which bore tribute to his regular games of tennis and of squash, was running to fat only round his middle, and he exuded a certain dependable appeal. His vapid personality and lack of imagination, however, were a turn-off. Although he was obviously an extremely kind and well-intentioned man, without whose help Clare could not possibly have masterminded the transformation of Château de Cluzac, he could not hold a candle to Jamie. She was not the slightest bit jealous of Delphine.

  Many hours which were not passed with Alain were spent supervising the workmen, who now cluttered up the grounds, spreading the word about Château de Cluzac – by telephone and fax – to destinations all over the world, and soothing the ruffled feathers of Monsieur Boniface (out of his element with all the innovations), Albert Rochas, Jean Boyer and Sidonie. She also spent time in the tasting-room with Halliday, who had volunteered to help her with her second wine.

  While Big Mick asserted that in the grandest châteaux, where the vines were old and weak, with twisted trunks, stunted rods and pale leaves, the grapes were simply picked and left to get on with it – and Alain Lamotte saw successful wineries in terms of ‘show-biz’ – Halliday Baines was convinced that the only future for winemaking was in the application of technology.

  With no vocational training herself, Clare was fascinated by the oenologist’s expertise. Her mind reeled as he boasted of the computer-controlled irrigation systems which he had installed in Australia, and the ‘genetically manipulated’ yeast with which he turned the time-honoured methods of vinification on their heads.

  ‘We have these huge insulated tanks containing more than five hundred and fifty chemicals…’

  ‘Chemicals?’

  ‘Ethanol, acids, esters, sugars, 1,4-dihydroxyphenyl-3butanone… You know it better as wine. Every year, in the desert, we produce seventy million litres – seventy million! – of blended wine, some of it less than a year old, one third of which ends up in the UK where nearly a quarter of a million glasses of the stuff will be filled from a cardboard box with a plastic neoprene tap at the side. “Bag-in-the-box” technology was developed in Australia. Sales of traditional European wines are declining. It’s part of the New World revolution. If you’re going to make wine, my dear…’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘D
id I say something?’

  ‘The name’s Clare.’

  Halliday ignored the admonition.

  ‘It’s got to be good wine. Wine that is not oxidised – exposed to the air so that it goes brown and tastes like tea – wine that is not affected by bacterial spoilage…’

  He moved to the trestle table, covered with a white tablecloth, on which Jean had set out a dozen bottles and glasses. Picking one up he rinsed it in water before holding it up to the light to check that it was perfectly clean.

  ‘So many people have been exposed, for so long, to wine that is technically faulty, that they’ve forgotten how a good wine should taste.’ He handed the glass to Clare. ‘OK,’ he said arrogantly. ‘Let’s see what you can do.’

  Determined both to improve the tarnished image of Château de Cluzac wine and to take the bumptious oenologist down a peg or two, Clare applied herself to the task in hand.

  Ignoring the Australian, but remembering his words that wines, like human beings, must have both personality and character, she concocted a wine in which neither fruit nor oak was dominant, a wine filled with the aroma of plums and blackcurrants, a soft, elegant wine, which, while not for maturing, was easy to drink.

  ‘Not at all bad!’ Halliday was clearly impressed. ‘Bienvenu à la “Petite Clare”.’

  At lunch, served in the salle-à-manger by Sidonie, who was somewhat mollified by the present Clare had brought her from London, which was too good to wear and which she had put away, still in its Fortnum and Mason bag, in her drawer, Clare asked after Billy. A look of pleasure he was unable to conceal illuminated Halliday’s face as he took out his wallet and removed two well-thumbed sheets of paper, one of which was covered with a childish scrawl.

  ‘I had a letter from Maureen. And one from Billy. Billy’s got to have his tonsils operated on. He gets these mega sore throats, all the glands up, can’t speak, poor kid, that kind of thing. We’ve been putting it off.’ He referred to the letter on blue airmail paper. ‘According to Maureen, the doc says we – she – shouldn’t wait any longer. She doesn’t want it to interfere with his schooling. I told her to go ahead…’

  ‘He’ll be all right.’

  ‘You think so?’ Halliday’s expression was naked with anxiety.

  ‘I had mine out when I was six,’ she said. ‘All I remember is the ice-cream. Billy will be fine.’ Clare tried to reassure him.

  ‘At least he’s near a hospital. My father was a wool-grower. I grew up on a farm. Ninety miles from nowhere. One bungalow, two barns and the sheep-shearers’ lodge. Eight thousand sheep sharing fifty thousand acres of outback. That was it. In the rainy season, when the road was cut, there was nowhere to go.’

  ‘It sounds romantic.’

  ‘It takes your breath away. A weather-boarded bungalow no more than a speck in a landscape so vast, so empty, that nobody this side of the world can possibly imagine it. There wasn’t much in the way of temptation, of course. It’s not exactly a social whirl.’

  ‘How did you pass the time?’

  ‘Bushwacking round the countryside with my dad. In his four-wheel drive. He knew every tree, every flower, every animal. There’s some pretty strange wildlife. My father could whistle like a kettle.’

  ‘Do your parents still live there?’

  ‘Just the two of them. The next station is six miles up the valley. They read the Bible to each other. It gets pretty lonely.’

  ‘And I think the Médoc is the back of beyond. I miss London. I miss Jamie.’

  Halliday raised his wineglass.

  ‘Absent friends. To Jamie!’

  ‘To Billy and his tonsils!’

  ‘To the success of “Petite Clare”!’

  Thirty-two

  ‘Claret is a blended wine and each grape variety has its clearly defined role. Cabernet sauvignon, the grape of the Médoc, has a blackcurrant flavour which gives the wine its colour and depth, while the merlot is softer and more aromatic. Grapes from different plots in the vineyard – the cabernet sauvignon, the merlot, and in some cases the cabernet franc and the petit verdot’ – Clare ticked the varieties off on her fingers three times a day like the beads on her rosary – ‘are vinified separately and chronologically according to maturation dates. At Château de Cluzac the grapes arrive here at the winery or cuvier, and are then tipped into the fouloir-égrappoir…’

  With a sweep of her hand she indicated a large V-shaped receptacle with a giant screw running along the bottom of it. ‘This removes the stalks and gently breaks the skins. The grapes are not so much crushed, as many people imagine, as “broken” just sufficiently to allow the fermentation to begin. Originally the de-stalking was done by hand, on a table with a griddle-top. The bunches were rubbed on the griddle until all the berries were separated from the stalk…’

  ‘Entschuldigen bitte…’ The hand of a back-packer in shorts and vest shot up.

  ‘Yes?’ She welcomed questions which established that the visite was paying attention.

  ‘Wo sind die Toiletten, bitte?’

  Putting on her best smile, which over the course of the past weeks had begun to wear thin, Clare directed the girl with the sunburned nose to the dungeons, where the toilets were now more or less functioning.

  ‘From the stemmer,’ she said, resuming where she had left off, ‘the grapes are pumped into the vats’ – she led the party along the recently hosed floors – ‘where the fermentation process changes the sugar in the grapes to alcohol…’

  ‘For how long must they ferment?’ A brachycephalic Dutchman blinked at her through his thick lenses.

  ‘About ten to fourteen days. It depends on the year. When the fermentation is underway, the solid matter in the grapes rises to the top and forms what we call the chapeau, or cap, which must be kept moist. The act of fermentation releases energy in the form of heat. If the temperature in the vat is allowed to rise too high fermentation can stop and the juice becomes vinegar instead of wine. If the temperature falls too low, the yeasts are inhibited from working.

  ‘These stainless-steel cuves,’ she continued, indicating the pristine vats still regarded with contempt by Jean Boyer ‘have built-in cooling jackets which enable us to control the temperature. The vats used to be made of wood. Some of them were as much as a hundred years old. Wood, of course, does not last for ever…’

  Keeping an eye on the group, some of whom had wandered off to take flash photographs with their fancy cameras, Clare, wearing her black directrice’s trouser-suit relieved by a silk scarf (the Quinconces market rather than Hermès) tied round her neck à la Grandmaman, described the four elements of winemaking – fermentation, maceration, pressing, and malolactic fermentation – as they had been explained to her by Halliday Baines and over which she had burned the midnight oil.

  ‘The first morning of the harvest can sometimes be cold. If the temperature is less than thirteen or fourteen degrees…’

  ‘What’s that in fahrenheit?’ The up-market accent belonged to a middle-aged Englishwoman with a notebook, wearing an ankle-length skirt over sandals, and an unflattering sunhat. She had already asked how long the visite was scheduled to last, if one could leave in the middle, and whether there was anywhere to sit down.

  Doubling the centigrade figures to which she added thirty, Clare came up with an approximate answer.

  ‘Roughly fifty-eight degrees…’ She had now forgotten where she was. ‘If the temperature falls below thirteen or fourteen degrees centigrade’ – she met the Englishwoman’s eye – ‘fermentation will not start. Four or five days before the harvest begins, a starter vat – le pied de cuve – is prepared, and a small quantity of grapes is fermented to produce a “yeast soup”. This is placed in the bottom of the first vat to start the fermentation. Using these yeasts, we pump the must…’ She used the term to see if they were still awake.

  ‘“Must”?’

  ‘The unfermented grape juice. We pump the must over three times a day, and within twenty-four hours fermentation will begin. The
maximum colour extraction occurs after four to five days and the temperature is carefully maintained…’

  She explained how the maceration process allowed the pigment to be extracted from the pips and skins to give the characteristic colour to the Médoc wines. The ‘marc’, or solid matter was pressed, the temperature of the wine increased (encouraging malolactic fermentation, the natural conversion of malic acid to lactic acid), and sulphur dioxide added – to protect against oxidation and bacterial activity – before the wine was racked and put into casks.

  Leading the group into the gloom of the first-year cellar, in which each grape variety was kept separately until the assemblage, Clare looked with despair at her time-expired barrels which, even at Halliday Baines’ conservative estimate of twenty-five per cent, and with the harvest only weeks away, she had little hope of renewing.

  Attracting visitors to the château, from which they would hopefully depart having shelled out a few hundred francs on the attractions and purchased a couple of bottles of wine and a T-shirt, was one thing. It enabled her to keep afloat. Ensuring what already promised, according to Albert Rochas, to be a major vintage, one that could make or break the Château, without investing in new oak, was another.

  Leading her group through the second-year cellar, she introduced them to the maître de chai. Instructed by Sidonie, and for the sake of his job, the blue-overalled Jean Boyer, bung hammer in hand, managed to overcome his embarrassment and pose for the intruders who insisted on taking his photograph (local colour). She amused the group with the cellarmaster’s dictum, ‘One barrel of wine can work more miracles than a church full of saints’ (repeating it for the benefit of the Englishwoman who laboriously wrote it down), before conducting them to the salle de reception, which, with its promise of a free drink, was what most of them had been waiting for.