by Caro Feely
The third herb in the song, rosemary, was delicious in winter served with aubergines, potatoes, lamb, duck – actually, most things. I loved to throw sprigs into my jams to give them a hint of something unexpected. But I discovered it was useful beyond cooking; a branch at each end kept ants off my clothes line and the leaves offered calcium, iron and vitamin B6. It is also a medicinal herb for memory and concentration enhancement and has anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties. Chopped fine and mixed with garlic and a little salt, sprinkled and baked on polenta, it was a delicious snack.
Rosemary contains carnosol, a potential cancer-preventing chemical. Research shows it inhibits the growth of breast tumours in studies of rats. Rosemary also helps lift your morale, relieves pain (including migraines), aids digestion and has antibacterial properties. It can be used as breath freshener and to stimulate hair growth. Rosemary can do well in and out of pots, and in the right conditions will grow into a large shrub with flowers of cornflower blue. Researchers put the exceptional longevity of a small Italian seaside village, Acciaroli, down to rosemary, anchovies and outdoor living. I was pleased to see the researchers noted that these amazing people (in a village of 2,000 inhabitants, more than 300 were 100 years plus) were not shy of enjoying a glass of wine either.
The last in the song, thyme, was my favourite herb to kill a sore throat. The instant I felt one creeping up I put a great bunch of thyme in a cup and poured hot water over it. A few minutes later, when it had cooled and extracted the benefits from the herb, I added a large teaspoon of honey and a drop of organic lemon juice. It was a magic pick-me-up.
Thyme kills off bacterial throat infections and helps decrease the oxidation and degradation of everything from sunflower oil to cheese. It is also an excellent source of vitamin C, a very good source of vitamin A, and a good source of iron, manganese, fibre and copper. But most of all, it is delicious. I sprinkled thyme on fresh tomatoes with a little oil and vinegar for a taste sensation or grilled it on tomato and goat's cheese toasts. Like rosemary, thyme can do well in and out of pots in the right conditions.
The famous four were staples for us and we always had a good few thriving bushes. Growing herbs gave me cooking inspiration. It was also the best way to be sure the herbs had been grown in a healthy fashion. In the new half-shaded vegetable garden, herbs like borage, coriander and basil were thriving at last. They were a tonic for us but also for the pollinators. The borage hummed like a propeller aeroplane about to take off it was so packed with bees recently received from a local beekeeper, Mr Patriarcha.
'If you don't use the smoker the bees will take Seán from here to Monestier,' he said, his greying head bent over his forgon (utility vehicle) parked in our courtyard.
'We were hoping to work more naturally and to avoid smoking the bees,' I said.
He laughed heartily. 'You must respect the bees but smoking doesn't harm them. Look at this beautiful mix – it is lavandin granules, lavender and pine needles,' he said, lifting the lid off a metal container in the back of his van.
I dipped my head inside and felt like I was stepping into a warm, relaxing bath.
Mr Patriarcha closed his eyes and leaned back like he was going into a trance.
'You see, that's what it does to the bees too – it calms them, relaxes them – so we can do the work we need to do,' he said dreamily.
Mr Patriarcha had delivered our hives earlier in the spring. At the Christmas market five months earlier, he announced that he was winding down his activity to retire and looking to sell most of his hives. We had bought two.
The bees appeared to have settled into their new home. On this, his second visit, he checked on them and offered advice on how to manage them. As the months progressed, we learned about the bees and I felt a whole new level of respect for each teaspoon of honey I ate. They tapped around 4,400 flowers and flew about 175 kilometres to make 1 gram of honey.
The bees were giving a clear early warning to the human race. They were dying in hordes, with 'colony collapse disorder' sounding the alarm about the environmental degradation caused by pesticides. In places like California, the almond and fruit farmers paid fortunes to bring bees from the other side of the USA and even flew them in from Australia because their own populations had been so decimated.
Bees have a sophisticated society and work together for the good of the hive; they are the ultimate socialists. They do a dance at the hive entrance to tell the other bees where to find the best flowers, giving the GPS coordinates in bee-speak and saving time on searching and unnecessary flying. This was where the systemic pesticides, particularly a new type called nicotinoids, were most dangerous. They worked on the bees' nervous system and impacted the bees' ability to remember where flowers were located and how to find their way home. Some were shown to not kill bees directly but, by impacting their ability to forage for nectar, to remember where flowers were located, and to find their way home, they destroyed the bees even if they didn't die instantly.
With research showing a direct impact on the bees' nervous system, these kinds of insecticides were probably also the reason for massive increases in nervous system disorders like Alzheimer's (up 500 per cent according to a recent study) and Parkinson's among humans. It is not possible to wash systemic pesticides off so certified organic or healthily homegrown are the only ways to avoid carcinogenic, nervous-system- and endocrine-disrupting chemicals getting into your body.
We learned that a key difference between organic and biodynamic honey was that organic beekeepers could still take all the honey as long as they provided the bees with an organic certified version of the sugar syrup offered as replacement. With biodynamic you had to leave the bees enough of their honey for them to survive the winter. The bees' honey was packed with immunity boosters, making it worth far more than just the calorie value. With their real honey the hive avoided many of the health problems that were damaging bee populations. But it was a lot more expensive than the honey – even the organic one – I found on the shelf in the supermarket. Now we knew the work that went into the honey – for the bees, let alone the beekeeper – we knew the price was justified.
Things were changing in other parts of the farm thanks to the bees. We left the ivy in the vineyard because along with biodiversity, the ivy offered bees flowers and hence pollen in early winter – one of the few plants that did. Ivy isn't a parasite – it climbs, so it doesn't harm the vine.
Through the beekeeping experience we learned that all honey, like wine, was not the same. They both reflected their terroir. We tasted honey from bees collecting pollen from lavender, sunflowers, spring flowers, summer flowers, forests like chestnut, and found they all had their unique flavour, a real sense of where they were from. Like wine, some honeys were not as wholesome as you might think. Some jars marketed as honey had even been found to contain no honey at all, just corn syrup.
Our apprentice Sandrine started her trial period with us. I asked her if she wanted to taste the honey from Mr Patriarcha.
'No thanks. I don't like honey,' she said.
'Why not try a little? This local honey might be different to what you have had,' I said.
She tasted.
'Hmmm. You are right. That is great. It doesn't taste like the honey I have had before. I really like it,' she said.
'I read that three quarters of the "honey" sold in the world is not honey,' I said. 'It's corn syrup dressed up as honey, or honey laced with corn syrup.'
Sometimes canny labelling led to misunderstanding by the consumer and at other times it was plain fraud. Neither was good since the health-giving properties of honey are legendary and research points to the health dangers of corn syrup.
'I saw a television show about that,' she said. 'That must be why I didn't like the honey I had before. I will send you the link.'
'Thanks, Sandrine, I would appreciate that,' I said.
Sandrine was keen and appeared to be embracing our organic perspective even though she had not arrived with that philosoph
y. Training her with the season already in full swing added to my stress although I knew it was necessary. I shoehorned training time into already long days. At the end of another long day, I ran out of the tasting room to cross the courtyard and flew across the gravel again. This time it was worse. My toes, knees, hands and chin were bleeding and I had a bump on my forehead I had come down so hard. I washed and disinfected my grazes then sat down, my head spinning. I had to slow down and get a grip. I felt like I was on the cusp of a nervous breakdown.
But as the days progressed things got better. The initial extra stress was worth it and Sandrine became a lifesaver for me. She needed guidance but she was keen. Wine sales were going well and growing; more wine lovers visited the property each season and our mailing list grew. Sandrine learned to sell wine at the château door and to fulfil internet orders. She followed me on visits and we set a target for her to be comfortable doing the half-day visits at our farm on her own by the end of the season. The time invested would really pay off the following summer when she would know the ropes and be able to make a serious contribution. Our first foray into the French employment market was working out.
While direct sales were flying, trade sales were limping along. The price of our wines had gone up in line with the increasing quality and constant cost increases. Trade clients were more price-sensitive than direct clients, who tasted and bought based on the quality not the price. We had to develop our trade sales and particularly those that would help us to sell more direct from the farm. I made a list of the top restaurants in the region, the ones we most wanted to be in, and talked them through with Sandrine. I hoped that having a French person to represent us would help with restaurant sales and that would in turn bring us more clients in the season.
'We must target these places with our wines, especially the Michelin-star restaurants,' I said. 'We're already on La Tour des Vents' wine list. I also really want to be on the wine list of Le Vieux Logis in Trémolat. I've read that it's the best restaurant in the Dordogne.'
'How will we do it?' asked Sandrine.
'We'll have to research as much as we can about them online then see if we can meet the sommelier. We're too busy now. It's a project for winter.'
Our restaurant list was put on the back-burner. With the tourist season well under way we couldn't spend time away from the property. We had reached a point where we regularly sold out of our whites and our top reds before the next bottling but we still had extra volume of our everyday Merlot red wine. We joined a newly conceived grouping of organic growers set up to sell the growing volume of bulk organic wine available in the region, hoping it would be a channel to sell our excess. France had gone from 1 per cent of the vineyards being organic when we arrived ten years before to almost 8 per cent.
More organic farmers represented potential for the region. State aid was promised for the grouping, enough to fund a salesperson, stands at wine fairs and the development of a brand. As a foreigner and relative newcomer, I sat quietly on the side watching the meetings and reading the emails. An uneasy feeling grew with each exchange.
The president of the management body and the newly appointed salesperson postulated that we shouldn't communicate about organic because their research said, 'No one wants organic wine.' I knew that wasn't true. Almost every day I had visitors who said, 'We want organic wine but we can't find it on the shelves.' I also knew that no one wanted cancer and if they hadn't made the connection between systemic pesticides and cancer yet then they were walking around with their eyes closed. I deleted their summary presentation in fury. Perhaps I should have kept it and put together a counterpresentation but I had the impression their views were fixed and I had no time to waste.
We found a negociant (a wine merchant) who offered us a better price than the producers' group and promised collection before harvest thus freeing up important tank space. It would give us a cash-flow injection but even at this higher price we had sold at a loss – the devastating reality of the bulk market. Meanwhile the producers' group sold no organic wine and dissolved. It was like watching an Astérix and Obélix village brawl except I wasn't laughing.
I had completed the details for the bulk sale with the courtier who acted between us and the negociant and was feeling depressed when a smart silver four-by-four with French plates drove up and parked outside the tasting room. A slim young man stepped out. I met him on the terrace and we introduced ourselves.
'I read your book Grape Expectations – in fact, I couldn't put it down. I had to come and visit,' he said.
'Welcome,' I said. 'Thanks for buying my book. I can do a tasting now. Actually, I could do a quick visit if you like.'
'That would be great,' he said. 'A quick visit then I'll buy some wine.'
'That's what I'm here for,' I said.
As we walked the vines it became clear he knew something about the subject. He was very interested in the biodynamic sprays that had helped us solve our downy mildew problem.
Back in the tasting room I took him through the range.
'I love your wines,' he said. 'They more than live up to my expectations after reading the book.'
We laughed at the unintended pun.
'Thank you. I'll let Seán know,' I said, hoping he would put his money where his mouth was.
'I should probably tell you I work for one of the big agrochemical companies.' He looked me in the eye for my reaction.
I felt a little shocked but tried not to show it. I hadn't pulled any punches against systemic chemicals as I took him on the visit of the vineyard. Was he about to announce that he would be suing me for my denouncement of the kind of products his company produced?
'I'm head of a research department. I know that what you are doing with biodynamics is the way we have to go. We have to make it easy for the big players to do what you're doing.'
'But you know biodynamics is about understanding your farm and being in it. It doesn't work by a simple recipe. It can't work as effectively as it has for us working by rote with no intimate understanding of the terroir.'
'I know. I got that from your book. But there have to be active properties in these solutions that could replace the systemic chemicals being used today.'
'Perhaps. But then it won't be biodynamics – it will be plantbased solutions. Still very interesting,' I said.
'It's the only way forward. The systemics will be stopped eventually and we have to have products to replace them,' he said.
He ordered ten cases. It was my biggest single end-client sale from the tasting-room door. I was stunned that I had made an impact on a key researcher in an agrochemical company. My first book was having an effect on our wine sales but also on a wider scale. His visit lifted my spirits and helped salve the lossmaking negociant sale.
My second book, Saving Our Skins, launched in the UK and Grape Expectations was released worldwide in anglophone countries. We hosted a small launch event with Martin Walker, author of the Bruno, Chief of Police series, and his friend Raymond, who I met at Vinexpo, as guests of honour. They were as charming and tonic as they had been in Bordeaux.
I began to receive uplifting letters from across the globe: a young woman who bought Grape Expectations at her local post office in a tiny village in New Zealand; an Australian who had found it at her local bookshop; and an octogenarian who had borrowed it from his local library and then bought wine and Saving Our Skins direct from us. What really motivated me to keep writing and helped lift me from my perimenopausal depressed funk were the letters that said, 'Your book made me think about the provenance of my food and wine. It changed my habits.'
Our bees were doing well, we were selling books and wine, but the negociant still hadn't collected the bulk wine. I followed up and followed up again. With the contract signed we couldn't sell our wine to anyone else but it was clear that they would not fetch the wine in the given time frame. It was a classic negociant tactic to wait until harvest when growers needed the tank space then offer a price below the market rate. At
that moment cashstrapped growers would take anything since they couldn't afford more tanks. I got the feeling the negociant on the other side of our deal might be hoping to negotiate the contract down. There was no way we were doing that. Thierry regularly had us rolling with laughter at his renditions of the smartly dressed negociant with pointy Italian leather shoes arriving in his latest model Mercedes to squeeze another few centimes out of the farmer in his tatty clothes and bashed-up forgon. We had to laugh or we would cry.
I had to be patient. I made myself a calming cup of lavender tea. The experience with the producer group and the negociant made me even more resolved to keep our focus on high-quality wine and to sell everything in the bottle rather than in bulk.