Dying on the Vine (4 page)

It was another beautiful day, warm and sunny but not hot. A gentle breeze ruffled the sunflowers as I drove past a field of them, peering anxiously up at their celestial benefactor. Two police cars stood in front of the Willesford vineyard buildings. The investigation continued, it seemed, so I drove out and went to my secondary destination, the Peregrine vineyard. I had planned on coming here anyway, though I would have preferred to get the story on Willesford first.

I drove past neat rows of vines which looked healthy and productive in the black soil. There was only one building at the end of the well-kept dirt road. Near it stood some gleaming stainless steel barrels and a minitractor, fairly new. I found a door and knocked. There was no reply and I had to knock again. A man opened it.

He was a pleasant-looking fellow in his late thirties and he greeted me with a half smile. I gave him my cover story about articles for a magazine. He nodded and invited me in to a small office with windows looking through into the winery. Schedules hung neatly in a row on the wall and a large bulletin board showed fermentation times, bottling dates, and shipping details. What looked like a decorative painting under glass was actually an enlarged wine label, and there were several framed photographs.

“Gerard Girardet,” he introduced himself. “I am the manager.” He switched to English, which he spoke extremely well. “You are writing articles on vineyards owned by English, you say? The vineyard you want is, of course, next door.”

“I know,” I told him, “but I want to get other viewpoints as well as talking to them directly. Unfortunately, there was a sad accident there yesterday and the police are still investigating.”

He nodded and motioned me to sit at the small desk with him. “I heard about poor Emil. Gored to death by a sanglier… it's hard to believe.”

He noted my surprise. “Oh, yes, I know all about it. This is Provence—village gossip is like native drums. Everyone knows everything that is going on.”

“Then you probably know a lot about the Willesford vineyard?”

“Impossible not to—we are practically surrounded by it.”

“It seems to be much larger than you.”

“It is. Very much larger.”

“Doesn't that intimidate you?”

He waved his hands in typically French gesture of dismissal. “Certainly not. Why should it? Willesford has its wines, we have ours. It has its markets and we have ours.”

That was a good opening for the question that had puzzled me from the night before.

“Do you sell locally?”

“No; Willesford has the market—what is the expression … ‘sewed up'?” I nodded. “Yes, sewed up, so we sell elsewhere—Paris, Lyon, Marseille—and the higher price we can charge pays the freight.”

“There are rumors in London that Willesford wants to buy you out,” I told him, employing the principle that it sometimes pays off to appear obtuse.

His smile broadened. “The rumors I've heard are the other way around.”

I looked amazed.

He seemed pleased with the reaction he had generated. “And it's not all rumors,” he said. “Peregrine has made offers for Willesford. So far, Willesford's turned them down.”

“Why does Peregrine want to buy?”

“To enlarge, to expand. We are very limited here. I will show you around. You will see.”

He certainly was open. Whatever was going on, he either wasn't a part of it or he was a fine actor.

“Peregrine is a Paris-based company, isn't it?” I asked casually.

“It's a conglomerate. It has offices and operations in many cities and is involved in many businesses.”

“And it wants to expand in the wine business?” I said to encourage him. “That would be good for you, I suppose. You'd get to run the entire operation.”

“I would hope so, of course. I have done a very good job here. It would not mean the loss of any people at Willesford, either. Combined, the two vineyards would be very strong and we would want to keep all the team.”

“You know Simone Ballard, Lewis Arundel…”

“Certainly. Marcel,
the maître de vin,
too. Oh, we are rivals, you might say, in as far as we both make wine—but nothing more.”

I wasn't getting anywhere on this tack. Time to try another one.

“This unfortunate death … will it affect Willesford's business, do you think?”

He shook his head firmly. “No, why should it? Nothing to do with wine.”

“I hadn't realized that such dangerous animals roamed this part of Provence.”

“You find sanglier on the menu at many restaurants so they must be in this area. It is true that people don't usually see them—only hunters.”

“But they are not usually this big and dangerous,” I said.

He frowned. “Does anyone know how big this one is?”

“Well, no, but if it attacks men, it must be big…”

“Hmm,” he said noncommittally. “Anyway, it is wine you are interested in. Would you like to see our vineyard?”

Traces of morning dew still clung to some of the vines. The sun was still climbing and throwing shadows across the rows. The grapes looked healthy, still small for they had some months to grow before being picked. Gerard looked at them proudly.

“Do you expect a good vintage this year?” I asked him.

“So far, it looks that way. We have the promise of plenty of sun and if, like last year, we have some rain late in the season, it will be an excellent vintage.”
^:

From here, the cliffs behind both vineyards stood tall and forbidding against the light blue sky. There were chalky patches but mostly they were scrubby low growth with a row of pines along the ridge. I noticed what I had not seen before: occasional dark holes in the cliffside.

“What are those?” I asked.

Gerard followed my finger. “Caves.”

“Are they old?”-

“Troglodyte tribes lived in them a very long time ago. When the Romans came here, they used the caves to store grain and wine. They have been used many times since. The Cathars hid in them during the religious persecutions. The Maquis used them as hideouts during the Nazi occupation. The Provençal temperament is obstinate and independent. The locals did not like the Germans, and the caves made ideal places to store weapons, to hide when the Germans came looking to make reprisals.”

“What's in them now?”

“They are empty. Mam'selle Ruche, the schoolteacher in Saint Symphorien, takes tours through every Saturday afternoon, when the school is closed. It is risky to go except on the tour—it is said that the caves go very deep inside the hills and a person could easily get lost and never come out.”

He turned to go back into the building. I was still looking at the cliffs.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“No, no,” I said. “It's very pleasant out here in the sun.”

The building was efficiently utilized, not a square meter wasted. The vats were all stainless steel, like the ones outside. Valves and pipes were all stainless steel or shiny copper. Temperature controls were fitted—a feature not usually found in such small vineyards. The control booth had an electronic scale and a digital readout. Bottling was automatic, even though it was the smallest automatic bottling unit I had ever seen.

It was all a far cry from most wine operations. No dirty floors and smelly wooden casks, no cracked and patched green plastic hose littering the aisles, no boxes and barrels and miscellaneous paraphernalia that was no longer wanted but left lying around on the chance that it might be useful one day.

It was the cleanest, smartest, tidiest operation I remembered seeing for a long time and I told Gerard so. He looked satisfied.

“And it's the vineyard with the smallest staff,” I added.

“It's mostly me,” he said with just a touch of pardonable smugness. “The equipment is almost entirely automatic, so I can handle the operation alone. Oh, at harvest time we have Spanish labor to do the picking. Numbers of them come through this area every year—they can make more money here than at home. I can always get a man or two in from the village if I need them for loading or unloading. Otherwise, it's just me.”

“Your winepresses look large for your throughput,” I said. “Why is that?”

“I don't like to subject wine to any unnecessary manipulation. I don't like to fine or filter it, so what we do here is make the most use of whole-cluster pressing. The hoppers are built to our own specifications so that they keep the grapes whole as long as possible. Then, with the oversized presses, we get more free-run juice and very little sediment to filter out.”

“But picking the grapes as whole clusters means that you get more leaves, doesn't it?”

“Yes. We use a simple air blast on the feed hoppers to get rid of them.”

It was certainly a highly efficient little wine factory but … little, that was the operative word. Did the small output of wine justify such sophistication? The use of an air blast to remove leaves was usually seen in only large, high-output vineyards. Gerard beckoned me to follow him. We went into a compact but fully equipped laboratory. He opened a cabinet and took out a bottle and two glasses. He pulled the cork and poured.

He handed me one of the glasses, took the other, and held it up to the light. He appeared content with his examination, toasted me with a nod, and we drank.

It was a distinctive white wine, starting with a spicy aroma then continuing through a lush texture, floral yet buttery at the same time. It was full bodied but smooth with a lingering finish, hinting of pear. I congratulated Gerard and told him, “Reminds me of one of the better white wines from the northern Rhône—say, a Condrieu.”

“I am glad you like it,” he said politely.

It was, in fact, considerably better than I had expected. If he made wine of this quality, it wasn't surprising that it could be sold in Paris or Marseille for good prices—certainly better prices than the local auberges would want to pay.

We drank again and somewhere a door banged. Footsteps could be heard and then the door to the laboratory opened. A man peered in. When he saw me, he said quickly, “Sorry. See you later, Gerard.” He closed the door and was gone before I realized that he had spoken in English.

In the glimpse that I had of him, the man was very heavily built and carried himself in a slight crouch. He had a mass of unruly, curly hair and a face that was dark, almost swarthy. His complexion was uneven, with small growths on the nose and one cheek.

“It has been compared to a white Chateauneuf,” Gerard said as if there had been no interruption.

“I would say this is better,” I told him. I could ignore interruptions too.

“Another glass?” he offered.

“No, thank you. It really is excellent but I must go.”

“Stop in again anytime,” he said as we came out into the neat courtyard. “I am always glad to be of help.”

I stopped as I reached my car and made a show of going through my pockets for the car keys. In truth, I was scanning the cave entrances—those dark, mysterious holes in the chalky cliffside—and trying not to be obvious about it.

I could see nothing now, but when we had been outside before, I had distinctly seen a figure come out of one of the caves, then hastily duck back out of sight. And this was Friday—not Saturday, the day of the schoolteacher's tour.

T
HE WILLESFORD VINEYARD WAS
just as deserted as the last time I had been here but this time Annabel came bouncing toward me as soon as I got out of the car. I said a few soothing words which amounted to “I come in peace” and this, surprisingly, prevented her from barking, though she stood poised and quivering, regarding me with a reproachful look that I couldn't avoid interpreting as “You—last time you were here there was a dead body.”

Simone was in one of the offices, encased in glass and surrounded by paper. I rapped on the door and went in.

“Ah,
c'est vous,”
she said. Her tone would have been appropriate four hundred years ago when a messenger announced the approach of the Black Plague.

“Yes, it is,” I agreed. “I'm sorry I didn't get to talk with you before but it was not the right moment. Now that the police have gone, however, I wonder if I might have a few minutes of your time?”

She mentally reviewed several good excuses but evidently rejected them all on the grounds that she would have to do this sooner or later so better get it over with. She sighed, put down her pen, and said, “Very well. What do you want to know?”

I eased her into it gradually with questions about the area, the yield, the type of grape, the quality of wine, the market … all the routine questions that anyone would ask. They were also the questions to which she had answers right on the tip of her tongue and this gave her confidence, so when I hit her with my next question, she was taken aback.

“Why does the Peregrine vineyard want to buy you out?”

She straightened in her chair. “Who told you that?”

I gave her my look of surprise. “Everybody. It's common gossip.”

She said nothing so I asked quickly, “Why? It's true, isn't it?”

“There—there have been offers,” she admitted slowly.

“I can see they might want to expand—they don't have much land.”

“You've been over there?”

“Yes. You were tied up with the police so I went and talked to them first.”

“You talked to Gerard?”

“Yes. Nice fellow. Very helpful.”

“What did he tell you?” she asked.

“He said Peregrine is seeking expansion. He thought your two vineyards together would be a powerful force in the wine business.” I was overstating a little but it might stimulate her into telling me something. She didn't.

“He pointed out that the two of you don't compete so there would be every reason to combine.”

“Don't compete?” Her voice rose.