A Summer In Gascony

by Martin Calder

  ‘I can finish perhaps two barrels a day,’ the barrel maker told us. ‘There aren’t many artisan barrel makers left in Gascony. Most barrels are now mass-produced in factories; they can easily turn out a hundred and fifty a day. They are the Renaults of barrel making.’

  Renault was a byword for mass-production.

  ‘I have to make other things to survive,’ the barrel maker continued, pointing to some items near the door. ‘These barrels will be a set of chairs when I’ve cut them in half, and this thing here, with the tap on top, this is a beer pump.’

  The trip to the vineyard and the barrel maker’s was timely and memorable. Gascony had enjoyed a mild, wet spring, soaking the ground, followed by a long, hot, dry summer, forcing the vines to do their best work. The harvest started early. The grapes were rich and strong. The Madiran wines of that year were some of the best red wines of Gascony from the end of the century. Even now, some of that vintage are just reaching their peak of maturity.

  THIS PRECIOUS BOOTY

  WHEN I THINK OF JACQUES-HENRI, I THINK OF ARMAGNAC, the two became so closely associated in my mind. He didn’t drink a lot, but he held it close to his heart.

  Armagnac – ce précieux butin, this precious booty – has an aura of mystery about it. No one knows exactly when the drink was first made. Distillation processes were known in early mediaeval Europe, for the purpose of distilling herbs for medicine. The best guess is that Armagnac was first produced at the beginning of the fourteenth century, more than two hundred years before anyone thought of doing a similar thing in Cognac.

  The name comes from a Frankish knight named Herremann, who was granted a fiefdom in the southwest by King Clovis towards the end of the fifth century. Herremann meant strong warrior: it was later Latinised into Arminius, and then Gasconised into Armagnac. The spirit was originally known as aigardent or eau ardente, meaning firewater; only later did it take the name of the land where it was produced, the home of those troublesome, ill-fated Counts of Armagnac.

  The Armagnac vineyards occupy a vine-leaf-shaped area in the centre of Gascony. The grape varieties are the versatile Ugni Blanc, the delicate Folle Blanche and the aromatic Colombard. There are as many subtle variations of Armagnac as there are small, independent producers. The vineyards are grouped in three appellations. The most productive is the Bas-Armagnac area to the west, with its sandy soils. It produces light and fruity Armagnac, known as Black Armagnac, from its association with the nearby forests. The La Ténarèze appellation in the centre produces vigorous, aromatic Armagnacs. The Haut-Armagnac appellation to the east and south is a large terroir producing small quantities of high-quality spirit, known as White Armagnac because of the chalky soil in the area.

  The distinction between Bas and Haut describes the lie of the land rather than the quality of the Armagnac. The whole of the territory enjoys a good climate: the pine forests of the Landes shelter it from the worst of the Atlantic weather, and when a steady wind blows from the west the faint scent of pine resin is carried in the air.

  The mysterious transmutation of wine into spirit takes place in alembic stills. Different types have been used, outlawed, then reintroduced at different times. Portable stills – ambulating alembics – continue to be used, travelling from farm to farm, allowing farmers to make their own Armagnac. If anything appeals to a Gascon, it is something that allows him to be independent.

  The spirit is perfectly clear when it comes out of the still. The oak barrels impart the distinctive rich colours and flavours. Armagnac is aged for its first three years in new Monlezun black oak casks. After three years, it is transferred to older barrels that have already lost much of their flavour, in this way slowing down the rate of absorption of the tannins from the wood and ensuring the gentler qualities of the drink. During the aging process, which may last for decades, some of the alcohol evaporates. This lost portion is known as la part des anges, the angels’ share.

  Armagnac is reputed to have medicinal properties. Jacques-Henri said, with a nudge and a wink, that it helped to preserve his youthful vitality, and to emphasise the point he added, ‘Ça reveille les morts!’ It may not have supernatural powers to bring the dead back to life, but its magic works on the palate, where a momentary sharpness melts into a smooth, gentle warmth. The aromas of Armagnac are complex: apricot, prune, fig, rose, violet, vanilla, liquorice, treacle, tobacco, chestnut, clove, honey, ginger and hawthorn, the most sacred tree for the ancient Vascones. The drink has a delicate, captivating sweetness, called le rancio, which makes it the perfect digestif for settling the stomach after a meal. Gascons will sometimes swallow a nip between courses during a heavy meal, to help clear the palate and create a hole for more food, le trou gascon.

  Jacques-Henri recited to me the Armagnac prayer, which certainly showed his priorities in life:

  Mon Dieu, donne-moi la santé pour longtemps,

  De l’amour de temps en temps,

  Du travail pas souvent,

  Mais de l’Armagnac à chaque instant.

  Dear God, give me long good health,

  Some love from time to time,

  Work not too often,

  But Armagnac at every moment.

  Some connoisseurs insist that Armagnac be drunk from tulip-shaped glasses, which concentrate the aroma. Jacques-Henri wasn’t at all fussy about his Armagnac. When he wasn’t taking crafty swigs out of the bottle, he was happy to drink from tumblers. This was the Auberge, not the Château.

  Various types of bottles are used for Armagnac and there are different opinions over which is the more authentic. The tall, straight bottle, known as la droite, is the simplest to store and pour, but the shape is also known as the cognacaise, not a good association. For the died-in-the-wool Gascon patriot, Armagnac should come instead in the flat, pear-shaped and slightly misshapen bottle known as la basquaise. Oversize bottles of Armagnac are impressive, like the one-and-a-half-litre magnum. I knew I was well in with Jacques-Henri when he brought out the formidable two-and-a-half-litre pot gascon from the larder.

  PASTIS AND PEANUTS

  THE VANNEUSE, THE GRAIN-WINNOWING MACHINE IN THE BARN that had caused me so much pain, broke down. I was secretly pleased about this. Jacques-Henri wasn’t able to mend it himself, so he called in Gaston, the local fixer.

  Gaston was from the neighbouring village of Saint-Ferréol. There was something distinctly louche about him. He came on a Sunday morning with his girlfriend, who was about half his age and dressed from head to toe in black. Gaston worked noisily on the machine, while she stood around not speaking to anyone, petulantly drilling her big toe into the ground. She obviously had other plans for that Sunday morning.

  The wrenching, clattering and grunting finished and the machine was fixed. Jacques-Henri paid Gaston for the work and offered to buy him a drink. There was going to be a live performance of the cornemuse or French bagpipe in the Péguilhan café that afternoon; there had been posters on the wooden board outside for a fortnight announcing the forthcoming attraction. All of us – me, Jacques-Henri, Paul, Bruno, Gaston and his sulky girlfriend – decided to go to the café to hear the performance.

  There were many more cars than usual parked outside the café. We walked in, saluted everyone, shook hands with people we knew and sat at the only remaining empty table. As soon as we settled in, we ordered pastis with jugs of water and bowls of salted peanuts. Pastis is a working man’s drink. When water is poured in it changes colour from a dull, clear greenish-yellow to a bright, opaque cream. We ate salted peanuts with our drinks, the salt on the peanuts countering the sharp flavour of the aniseed.

  A lot of people from around the village, mostly men, had come to hear the cornemuse. They talked loudly with their friends and neighbours as the café filled up. I recognised a lot of people. The sign fixer who’d thought Anja and I were Vikings was talking animatedly to Monsieur Fustignac. He saluted us and made a hammering motion with his arm, to show the work he remembered us by. The postman who never got out of his van was there
– he did have legs after all! Hans was there without Lotte, knocking back the pastis. The old farmer whose cows Paul and I had nearly crashed into was in the café, as was Youssef, the master of the méchoui, although he wasn’t drinking. I also recognised the family of mad farmers from across the valley. Madame Parle-Beaucoup was run off her feet – for once she had no time to talk.

  At the back of the room was a great brown plastic wine tank, with a tap at the bottom, where people could fill their glass or their pichet. One customer was in high spirits. He bent over backwards, holding his head under the tap, pretending to drink from it, and promptly fell over. His friends at the next table laughed – ‘Bah, le con!’, what an idiot – and threw peanuts at him.

  Gaston had comments to make about nearly everything. He screwed up his eyes as he talked, looking shiftily at people as if he was trying to judge the effect of what he was saying. He thought it was funny to comment on the madness of the English driving on the other side of the road: ‘Ils sont fous ces Anglais, ils roulent à gauche!’ He scrounged cigarettes off everyone in turn: ‘T’aurais pas une clope?’ You haven’t got a fag? He was trying to sell his old banger of a car and he even asked me if I wanted to buy it, saying it would be useful for me to drive home in. I pointed out that, as he said, we drive on the left, so the steering wheel would be on the wrong side when I got home.

  ‘Hey,’ he replied, ‘you can drive it as far as the ferry port and just leave it there.’

  I declined the offer.

  Gaston was set on impressing the English Godon. He told me that he knew someone who knew Maurice Prat, the less famous brother of Jean Prat, Gascony’s most famous rugby player.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Le rugbyman!’

  At the time I’d never heard of either of the Prat brothers. Jean Prat was a living legend in Gascony: he led the French team to historic victories over les Anglais at Twickenham in the 1950s, earning himself the titles Mister Rugby and Sir John.

  ‘Do you know why horses don’t eat oysters?’ Gaston asked me, wanting to impress me further with his Gascon humour.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So that Gascons can keep their feet warm.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘A Gascon walks into an auberge on a winter’s evening, feeling the cold. All the places around the fire are taken. The Gascon says to the serving boy, “Go out to the stable and give my horse two dozen oysters.” The boy is surprised but does what he is told. All the travellers rush outside with him to watch the horse eat the oysters. While they’re outside the Gascon settles himself into the best seat by the fire. The travellers come back inside and tell him that the horse won’t eat the oysters. “What?” exclaims the Gascon, toasting his toes, “my horse won’t eat the oysters? Very well then, I’ll eat them myself!”’

  At last, the cornemuse player arrived. He set himself up at the end of the room. He fitted perfectly the image of the country musician, aged about thirty, with serious eyes and long, dark hair in a ponytail, a sort of modern-day minstrel.

  He began to inflate the cornemuse. It was unlike anything I’d seen before or since. The traditional Gascon bagpipe is en peau de chèvre, made from a whole goatskin turned inside-out, with the head and feet removed. Red and gold tassels were tied tightly around the leg stumps to block the holes. The mouthpiece was inserted into the chest where the oesophagus would once have been. The chanter pipe came out of the neck. It took a few minutes to blow the skin up fully. Inflated, the instrument took on the size and shape of a goat. It was grotesque. I thought, if he blows hard enough it might jump up and run away of its own accord.

  There was something strangely exotic about the cornemuse. I was reminded of pictures I’d seen of buzkashi, the type of polo they play in Afghanistan, where horsemen tussle with each other over a headless goat carcass.

  The cornemuse player looked entirely at ease with his bizarre instrument, which was almost too big for him to hold under his arm. The room quietened down in anticipation as he prepared himself. There was spontaneous applause from everyone when he finally pressed his elbow into the side of the goat belly and started to play. The cornemuse had a deep, low timbre, with haunting undertones reminiscent of North Africa. The strangest thing was to hear any melodious sound at all coming from a headless, footless, inflated goatskin.

  After several increasingly reluctant encores, the musician was getting tired of blowing into the skin to keep it inflated. When the audience asked him for yet more tunes, he protested with a line which I suspect may be a commonplace among cornemuse players: ‘Si vous voulez une chanson, écoutez le vent, il les connaît toutes.’ If you want a song, listen to the wind, it knows them all.

  The air became thick with pungent tobacco smoke and the smell of aniseed. Relaxing in the café, drinking pastis, listening to the cornemuse – this really was la paysandaille, a troupe of peasants in their element, enjoying themselves. At village gatherings like this the local people expressed l’amour du vieux pays natal, their love for the old land where they were born. Sitting with them, treated almost as one of their own, I felt like an honorary Gascon. Some of the men were still wearing their blue work overalls, a reminder that even though it was Sunday, farmers don’t have a day off. The men would go back to work when the break was over.

  I walked on my own through the village back to the Auberge, to clear my head. The weather was still, the animals quiet – there was an embracing silence all around. The air smelled sweet, apart from a faint whiff of caca d’oie coming from the goose farm. In the distance I could clearly see the Pyrenees. The mountains were always there, a grey, white or purple shadow along the southern horizon.

  Centuries ago, pilgrims passed through Gascony on the road to Santiago de Compostella. A twelfth-century guide written for pilgrims, the Codex de Compostelle, described the Gascons as poor but generous, and always hospitable towards travellers. For mediaeval pilgrims making the journey on foot, Boulogne-sur-Gesse was a regular stopping-off place. In the nineteenth century, other pilgrims began flocking to Gascony for the healing waters at Lourdes. For the modern traveller, the countryside of Gascony possesses its own soothing balm for the soul. The charm of the landscape and the pleasant attitude of the people invite you to linger and return.

  Gascony is a beautiful land. Gascony is also a state of mind, existing somewhere in the warm south, a place of simplicity, plenty and fulfilment.

  AU REVOIR

  THE LONG, HOT SUMMER WAS DRAWING TO A CLOSE. THE earth had produced a bountiful harvest and was resting in the late summer sunshine, getting ready for another season of plenty. The land, content with itself, looked drowsy and dreamy. Sunflowers were blackening in the fields as they ripened and dried ready to be harvested. At the far end of the village, an elderly woman could be seen brushing up acorns from her drive, to feed as treats to her pigs. The season was maturing, and I had grown with it.

  The end of my stay in Gascony was in sight. I knew I would have to return home before too long for the start of the autumn term. It had been a perfect summer, more rewarding than I could possibly have imagined. I felt truly alive and in tune with everything around me. The sunshine, fresh air and healthy food had left me glowing inside and out. The Auberge had become a home-from-home. I liked the sense of camaraderie that came from working together.

  Some of the work had been hard and dirty. Shovelling heaps of compacted sheep droppings may not be everyone’s idea of fun and killing a sheep may seem a brutal act, but I was pleased with myself for having done them. I was young enough to take part in everything, to embrace the whole situation, but just old enough to appreciate the value of life in Gascony. I had gone with ideas but they weren’t fixed ideas, and so in Jacques-Henri’s immortal words, I was able to adapt myself. It had been worth making the effort to get used to the southwest accent, with its rich, warm, expressive tones: it brought me closer to the people and the way they thought. Living among the country folk of Gascony, sharing their work, their pleasures and their day-to-day con
cerns, had taught me so much. This was the simple life. I saw how it was possible to live without things – like electronic gadgets and exotic holidays – that many people think are necessities. There was a strict routine in the way they planned their work and their leisure, always in one way or another tied to the land and the seasons. I was beginning to feel the pull of the land and the sense of obligation towards it that these people felt.

  Meeting Anja had made my stay in Gascony even more fulfilling, and we wanted to have some time to ourselves before the summer was over. Towards the end of September we told Jacques-Henri we would be leaving very soon. We felt awkward, as if we were committing an act of desertion. The news seemed to surprise and upset Jacques-Henri, but he tried not to show his disappointment. In a businesslike way he said he would settle our final payments. He had wanted me to stay on a while longer: there was end-of-season work to be done on the farm – cutting back, tilling, storing and repairing – and I would have come in useful. Nonetheless, Anja and I both felt we were leaving on a high note.

  The evening before our departure, Marie-Jeanne served a farewell meal of stuffed wild pigeons, palombes farcies, shot that very morning by a skilled paloumeyre from the village, who carried decoy pigeons tethered to a stick to attract the wild birds. We had one whole stuffed pigeon each, wrapped in strips of bacon. As an accompaniment we had sautéed cèpe mushrooms, gathered in the woods, which added a woody flavour to the dish. Cep means tree trunk in Gascon, and their thick stalks did indeed look like tree trunks. They brought home the idea of autumn as a time for going back to the roots of things and taking stock of the harvest. Fruit was well in season, and for dessert we had stewed pêches de vigne, small peaches that grew on low trees beside the drive up to the Auberge. After the farewell meal we solemnly drank a round of Armagnac, to mark the end of our employment as stagiaires, raising our glasses in a toast: ‘À la toa!… À la toa!…’