A Year in Provence (22 page)

Hunting in our part of the valley started shortly after seven o’clock one Sunday morning, with salvos coming from either side of the house and from the mountains behind. It sounded as though anything that moved would be at risk, and when I went out for a walk with the dogs I took the biggest white handkerchief I could find in case I needed to surrender. With infinite caution, we set off along the footpath that runs behind the house toward the village, assuming that any hunter worth his gun license would have moved well away from the beaten track and into the tangled undergrowth farther up the mountain.

There was a noticeable absence of birdsong; all sensible or experienced birds had left at the sound of the first shot for somewhere
safer, like North Africa or central Avignon. In the bad old days, hunters used to hang caged birds in the trees to lure other birds close enough for a point-blank shot, but that had been made illegal, and the modern hunter now had to rely on woodcraft and stealth.

I didn’t see much evidence of that, but I did see enough hunters and dogs and weaponry to wipe out the entire thrush and rabbit population of southern France. They hadn’t gone up into the forest; in fact, they had barely left the footpath. Knots of them were gathered in the clearings—laughing, smoking, taking nips from their khaki-painted flasks and cutting slices of
saucisson
—but of active hunting—man versus thrush in a battle of wits—there was no sign. They must have used up their ration of shells during the early morning fusillade.

Their dogs, however, were anxious to get to work. After months of confinement in kennels, they were delirious with liberty and the scents of the forest, tracking back and forth, noses close to the ground and twitching with excitement. Each dog wore a thick collar with a small brass bell—the
clochette
—hanging from it. We were told that this had a double purpose. It signaled the dog’s whereabouts so that the hunter could position himself for the game that was being driven toward him, but it was also a precaution against shooting at something in the bushes that sounded like a rabbit or a boar and finding that you had shot your own dog. No responsible hunter,
naturellement
, would ever shoot at anything he couldn’t see—or so I was told. But I had my doubts. After a morning with the pastis or the
marc
, a rustle in the bushes might be too much to resist, and the cause of the rustle might be human. In fact, it might be me. I thought about wearing a bell, just to be on the safe side.

Another benefit of the
clochette
became apparent at the end of the morning: it was to help the hunter avoid the humiliating experience of losing his dog at the end of the hunt. Far from the disciplined and faithful animals I had imagined them to be, hunting dogs are wanderers, led on by their noses and oblivious of the
passage of time. They have not grasped the idea that hunting stops for lunch. The bell doesn’t necessarily mean that the dog will come when called, but at least the hunter can tell roughly where he is.

Just before noon, camouflage-clad figures started to make their way to the vans parked at the side of the road. A few had dogs with them. The rest were whistling and shouting with increasing irritation, making a bad-tempered hissing noise—“
Vieng ici! Vieng ici
!”—in the direction of the symphony of bells that could be heard coming from the forest.

Response was patchy. The shouts became more bad tempered, degenerating into bellows and curses. After a few minutes the hunters gave up and went home, most of them dogless.

We were joined a little later for lunch by three abandoned hounds who came down to drink at the swimming pool. They were greatly admired by our two bitches for their devil-may-care manner and exotic aroma, and we penned them all in the courtyard while we wondered how we could get them back to their owners. We consulted Faustin.

“Don’t bother,” he said. “Let them go. The hunters will be back in the evening. If they don’t find their dogs, they’ll leave a
coussin.
”

It always worked, so Faustin said. If the dog was in the forest, one simply left something with the scent of the kennel on it—a cushion or, more likely, a scrap of sacking—near the spot where the dog had last been seen. Sooner or later, the dog would come back to its own scent and wait to be picked up.

We let the three hounds out, and they loped off, baying with excitement. It was an extraordinary, doleful sound, not a bark or a howl but a lament, like an oboe in pain. Faustin shook his head. “They’ll be gone for days.” He himself didn’t hunt, and regarded hunters and their dogs as intruders who had no right to be nosing around his precious vines.

He had decided, he told us, that the moment had come to pick the table grapes. They would start as soon as Henriette had
finished servicing the
camion.
She was the mechanically minded member of the family, and every September she had the job of coaxing another few kilometers out of the grape truck. It was at least thirty years old—maybe more, Faustin couldn’t remember exactly—blunt-nosed and rickety, with open sides and bald tires. It had ceased to be roadworthy years ago, but there was no question of buying a new truck. And why waste good money having it serviced at a garage when you had a mechanic for a wife? It was only used for a few weeks a year, and Faustin was careful to take it on the back roads to avoid meeting any of those officious little
flics
from the police station at Les Baumettes, with their absurd regulations about brakes and valid insurance.

Henriette’s ministrations were successful, and the old truck gasped up the drive early one morning, loaded with shallow wooden grape trays, just deep enough for a single layer of bunches. Stacks of trays were placed along each line of vines, and the three of them—Faustin, Henriette, and their daughter—took their scissors and set to work.

It was a slow and physically uncomfortable business. Because the appearance of table grapes is almost as important as their taste, every bunch had to be examined, every bruised or wrinkled grape snipped off. The bunches grew low, sometimes touching the earth and hidden by leaves, and the pickers’ progress was in yards per hour—squatting down, cutting, standing up, inspecting, snipping, packing. The heat was fierce, coming up from the ground as well as beating down on the necks and shoulders. No shade, no breeze, no relief in the course of a ten-hour day except the break for lunch. Never again would I look at a bunch of grapes in a bowl without thinking of backache and sunstroke. It was past seven when they came in for a drink, exhausted and radiating heat, but satisfied. The grapes were good and three or four days would see them all picked. I said to Faustin that he must be pleased with the weather. He pushed back his hat and I could see the line sharp across his forehead where the burned brown skin turned white.

“It’s too good,” he said. “It won’t last.” He took a long pull at his pastis as he considered the spectrum of misfortunes that could occur. If not storms, there might be a freak frost, a plague of locusts, a forest fire, a nuclear attack. Something was bound to go wrong before the second batch of grapes was picked. And, if it didn’t, he could console himself with the fact that his doctor had put him on a diet to reduce his cholesterol level. Yes, that was certainly a grave problem. Reassured at having remembered that fate had recently dealt him a black card, he had another drink.

I
T HAD
taken me some time to get used to having a separate purpose-built room devoted exclusively to wine—not a glorified cupboard or a cramped cavity under the stairs, but a genuine
cave.
It was buried in the bottom of the house, with permanently cool stone walls and a floor of gravel, and there was space for three or four hundred bottles. I loved it. I was determined to fill it up. Our friends were equally determined to empty it. This gave me the excuse to make regular visits—errands of social mercy—to the vineyards so that guests should never go thirsty.

In the interests of research and hospitality, I went to Gigondas and Beaumes-de-Venise and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, none of them bigger than a large village, all of them single-minded in their dedication to the grape. Everywhere I looked, there were signs advertising the
caves
that seemed to be at fifty-yard intervals.
Dégustez nos vins
! Never has a invitation been accepted with more enthusiasm. I had
dégustations
in a garage in Gigondas and a château above Beaumes-de-Venise. I found a powerful and velvety Châteauneuf-du-Pape for thirty francs a liter, squirted into plastic containers with a marvelous lack of ceremony from what looked like a garage pump. In a more expensive and more pretentious establishment, I asked to try the
marc.
A small cut-glass bottle was produced, and a drop was dabbed on the back of my hand, whether to sniff or to suck I wasn’t quite sure.

After a while, I bypassed the villages and started to follow the signs, often half-hidden by vegetation, that pointed deep into the countryside where the wines baked in the sun, and where I could buy directly from the men who made the wine. They were, without exception, hospitable and proud of their work and, to me at least, their sales pitch was irresistible.

It was early afternoon when I turned off the main road leading out of Vacqueyras and followed the narrow, stony track through the vines. I had been told that it would lead me to the maker of the wine I had liked at lunchtime, a white Côtes-du-Rhône. A case or two would fill the void in the
cave
that had been made by the last raiding party we had entertained. A quick stop, no more than ten minutes, and then I would get back home.

The track led to a sprawl of buildings, arranged in a square U around a courtyard of beaten earth, shaded by a giant plant tree and guarded by a drowsy Alsatian who welcomed me with a halfhearted bark, doing his duty as a substitute for a doorbell. A man in overalls, holding an oily collection of spark plugs, came over from his tractor. He gave me his forearm to shake.

I wanted some white wine? Of course. He himself was busy nursing his tractor, but his uncle would take care of me. “
Edouard! Tu peux servir ce monsieur
?”

The curtain of wooden beads hanging across the front door parted, and Uncle Edward came blinking into the sunshine. He was wearing a sleeveless vest, cotton
bleu de travail
trousers, and carpet slippers. His girth was impressive, comparable with the trunk of the plane tree, but even that was overshadowed by his nose. I had never seen a nose quite like it—wide, fleshy, and seasoned to a color somewhere between rosé and claret, with fine purple lines spreading out across his cheeks. Here was a man who clearly enjoyed every mouthful of his work.

He beamed, the lines on his cheeks looking like purple whiskers. “
Bon. Une petite dégustation.
” He led me across the courtyard and slid back the double doors of a long, windowless building, telling me to stay just inside the door while he went to switch
on the light. After the glare outside, I could see nothing, but there was a reassuring smell, musty and unmistakable, the air itself tasting of fermented grapes.

Uncle Edward turned on the light and closed the doors against the heat. A long trestle table and half a dozen chairs were placed under the single light bulb with its flat tin shade. In a dark corner, I could make out a flight of stairs and a concrete ramp leading down into the cellar. Crates of wine were stacked on wooden pallets around the walls, and an old refrigerator hummed quietly next to a cracked sink.

Uncle Edward was polishing glasses, holding each one up to the light before placing it on the table. He made a neat line of seven glasses, and began to arrange a variety of bottles behind them. Each bottle was accorded a few admiring comments: “The white monsieur knows, yes? A very agreeable young wine. The rosé, not at all like those thin rosés one finds on the Côte d’Azur. Thirteen degrees of alcohol, a proper wine. There’s a light red—one could drink a bottle of that before a game of tennis. That one,
par contre
, is for the winter, and he will keep for ten years or more. And then …”

I tried to stop him. I told him that all I wanted were two cases of the white, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Monsieur had taken the trouble to come personally, and it would be unthinkable not to taste a selection. Why, said Uncle Edward, he himself would join me in a progress through the vintages. He clapped a heavy hand on my shoulder and sat me down.

It was fascinating. He told me the precise part of the vineyard that each of the wines had come from, and why certain slopes produced lighter or heavier wines. Each wine we tasted was accompanied by an imaginary menu, described with much lip smacking and raising of the eyes to gastronomic heaven. We mentally consumed
écrevisses
, salmon cooked with sorrel, rosemary-flavored chicken from Bresse, roasted baby lamb with a creamy garlic sauce, an
estouffade
of beef and olives, a
daube
, loin of pork spiked with slivers of truffle. The wines tasted
progressively better and became progressively more expensive; I was being traded up by an expert, and there was nothing to be done except sit back and enjoy it.

“There is one more you should try,” said Uncle Edward, “although it is not to everybody’s taste.” He picked up a bottle and poured a careful half glass. It was deep red, almost black. “A wine of great character,” he said. “Wait. It needs
une bonne bouche.
” He left me surrounded by glasses and bottles, feeling the first twinges of an afternoon hangover.

“
Voilà.
” He put a plate in front of me—two small round goat’s cheeses, speckled with herbs and shiny with oil—and gave me a knife with a worn wooden handle. He watched as I cut off a piece of cheese and ate it. It was ferociously strong. My palate, or what was left of it, had been perfectly primed and the wine tasted like nectar.

Uncle Edward helped me load the cases into the car. Had I really ordered all this? I must have. We had been sitting in the convivial murk for nearly two hours, and one can make all kinds of expansive decisions in two hours. I left with a throbbing head and an invitation to come back next month for the
vendange.