A Year In Provence Page 17

  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-Rhone. 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.

  Our own vendange, the agricultural highlight of the year, took place during the last week of September. Faustin would have liked it to be a few days later, but he had some private information about the weather which convinced him that it would be a wet October.

  The original party of three that had picked the table grapes was reinforced by Cousin Raoul and Faustin's father. His contribution was to walk slowly behind the pickers, prodding among the vines with his stick until he found a bunch of grapes that had been overlooked and then shouting-he had a good, carrying bellow for a man of eighty-four-for someone to come back and do the job properly. In contrast to the others in their shorts and vests, he was dressed for a brisk November day in a sweater, a cap, and a suit of heavy cotton. When my wife appeared with a camera, he took off his cap, smoothed his hair, put his cap back on and struck a pose, waist deep in vines. Like all our neighbors, he loved having his portrait taken.

  Slowly and noisily, the rows were picked clean, the grapes piled into plastic crates and stacked in the back of the truck. Every evening now, the roads were busy with vans and tractors towing their purple mountains to the wine cooperative at Maubec, where they were weighed and tested for alcoholic content.

  To Faustin's surprise, the crop was gathered without incident, and to celebrate he invited us to go with him to the cooperative when he made the last delivery. "Tonight we will see the final figures," he said, "and then you will know how much you can drink next year."

  We followed the truck as it swayed off into the sunset at twenty miles an hour, keeping to narrow roads that were stained with fallen, squashed grapes. There was a queue waiting to unload. Burly men with roasted faces sat on their tractors until it was their turn to back up to the platform and tip their loads down the chute-the first stage of their journey to the bottle.

  Faustin finished unloading, and we went with him into the building to see our grapes going into the huge stainless-steel vats. "Watch that dial," he said. "It shows the degrees of alcohol." The needle swung up, quivered, and settled at 12.32 percent. Faustin grunted. He would have liked 12.50 and an extra few days in the sun might have done it, but anything above 12 was reasonable. He took us over to the man who kept the tallies of each delivery and peered at a line of figures on a clipboard, matching them with a handful of slips of paper he pulled from his pocket. He nodded. It was all correct.

  "You won't go thirsty." He made the Provençal drinking gesture, fist clenched and thumb pointing towards his mouth. "Just over one thousand two hundred liters."

  It sounded like a good year to us, and we told Faustin we were pleased. "Well," he said, "at least it didn't rain."

  October

  THE MAN stood peering into the moss and light undergrowth around the roots of an old scrub oak tree. His right leg was encased up to the thigh in a green rubber fishing wader; on the other foot was a running shoe. He held a long stick in front of him and carried a blue plastic shopping basket.

  He turned sideways on to the tree, advanced the rubber-clad leg, and plunged his stick nervously into the vegetation, in the manner of a fencer expecting a sudden and violent riposte. And again, with the rubber leg pushed forward: on guard, thrust, withdraw, thrust. He was so absorbed by his duel that he had no idea that I was watching, equally absorbed, from the path. One of the dogs went up behind him and gave his rear leg an e
xploratory sniff.

  He jumped-merde!-and then saw the dog, and me, and looked embarrassed. I apologized for startling him.

  "For a moment," he said, "I thought I was being attacked."

  I couldn't imagine who he thought was going to sniff his leg before attacking him, and I asked what he was looking for. In reply, he held up his shopping basket. "Les champignons."

  This was a new and worrying aspect of the Lubéron. It was, as I already knew, a region full of strange things and even stranger people. But surely mushrooms, even wild mushrooms, didn't attack fully grown men. I asked him if the mushrooms were dangerous.

  "Some can kill you," he said.

  That I could believe, but it didn't explain the rubber boot or the extraordinary performance with the stick. At the risk of being made to feel like the most ignorant of city-reared dunces, I pointed at his right leg.

  "The boot is for protection?"

  "Mais oui."

  "But against what?"

  He slapped the rubber with his wooden sword and swaggered down toward me, D'Artagnan with a shopping basket. He delivered a backhand cut at a clump of thyme and came closer.

  "Les serpents." He said it with just the trace of a hiss. "They are preparing for winter. If you disturb them-sssst!-they attack. It can be very grave."

  He showed me the contents of his shopping basket, snatched from the forest at the risk of life and limb. To me, they looked highly poisonous, varying in color from blue-black to rust to violent orange, not at all like the civilized white mushrooms sold in the markets. He held the basket under my nose, and I breathed in what he called the essence of the mountains. To my surprise, it was good-earthy, rich, slightly nutty-and I looked at the mushrooms more closely. I had seen them in the forest, in evil-looking clusters under the trees, and had assumed that they were instant death. My booted friend assured me that they were not only safe, but delicious.

  "But," he said, "you must know the deadly species. There are two or three. If you're not sure, take them to the pharmacy."

  It had never occurred to me that a mushroom could be clinically tested before being permitted to enter an omelette but, since the stomach is by far the most influential organ in France, it made perfect sense. The next time I went into Cavaillon, I toured the pharmacies. Sure enough, they had been converted into mushroom guidance centers. The window displays, normally devoted to surgical trusses and pictures of young women reducing the cellulite on their slim bronzed thighs, now featured large mushroom identification charts. Some pharmacies went even further, and filled their windows with piles of reference books which described and illustrated every species of edible fungus known to man.

  I saw people going into the pharmacies with grubby bags which they presented at the counter rather anxiously, as though they were undergoing tests for a rare disease. The small, muddy objects in the bags were solemnly inspected by the resident white-coated expert, and a verdict was pronounced. I suppose it made an interesting change from the usual daily round of suppositories and liver tonics. I found it so distracting that I almost forgot why I had come to Cavaillon-not to loiter around pharmacies but to shop for bread at the local shrine of baking.

  Living in France had turned us into bakery addicts, and the business of choosing and buying our daily bread was a recurring pleasure. The village bakery in Ménerbes, with its erratic opening hours-"Madame will reopen when she has finished making her toilette," I was told one day-had first encouraged us to visit other bakeries in other villages. It was a revelation. After years of taking bread for granted, more or less as a standard commodity, it was like discovering a new food.

  We tried the dense, chewy loaves from Lumières, fatter and flatter than the ordinary baguette, and the dark-crusted boules, as big as squashed footballs, from Cabrières. We learned which breads would keep for a day, and which would be stale in three hours; the best bread for making croûtons or for spreading with rouille to launch into a sea of fish soup. We became used to the delightful but initially surprising sight of bottles of champagne offered for sale next to the tarts and tiny individual pastries that were made fresh every morning and gone by noon.

  Most of the bakeries had their own touches which distinguished their loaves from mass-produced supermarket bread: slight variations from conventional shapes, an extra whorl of crusty decoration, an elaborate pattern, the artist baker signing his work. It was as if the sliced, wrapped, machine-made loaf had never been invented.

  In Cavaillon, there are seventeen bakers listed in the Pages Jaunes, but we had been told that one establishment was ahead of all the rest in terms of choice and excellence, a veritable palais de pain. At Chez Auzet, so they said, the baking and eating of breads and pastries had been elevated to the status of a minor religion.

  When the weather is warm, tables and chairs are placed on the pavement outside the bakery so that the matrons of Cavaillon can sit with their hot chocolate and almond biscuits or strawberry tarts while they give proper, leisurely consideration to the bread they will buy for lunch and dinner. To help them, Auzet has printed a comprehensive bread menu, the Carte des Pains. I took a copy from the counter, ordered coffee, sat in the sun, and started to read.

  It was another step in my French education. Not only did it introduce me to breads I had never heard of before, it told me with great firmness and precision what I should be eating with them. With my apéritif, I could choose between the tiny squares called toasts, a pain surprise which might be flavored with finely chopped bacon, or the savory feuillets salés. That was simple. The decisions became more complicated when the meal itself was being chosen. Supposing, for example, I wanted to start with crudités. There were four possible accompaniments: onion bread, garlic bread, olive bread, or roquefort bread. Too difficult? In that case, I could have seafood, because the gospel according the Auzet authorized only one bread to eat with seafood, and that was thinly sliced rye.

  And so it went on, listing with uncompromising brevity what I should eat with charcuterie, foie gras, soup, red and white meat, game with feathers and game with fur, smoked meats, mixed salads (not to be confused with the separately listed green salads), and three different consistencies of cheese. I counted eighteen varieties of bread, from thyme to pepper, from nuts to bran. In a fog of indecision, I went inside the shop and consulted Madame. What would she recommend with calves' liver?

  She set off on a short tour of the shelves, and then selected a stubby brown banette. While she was counting out my change, she told me about a restaurant where the chef serves a different bread with each of the five courses on his menu. There's a man who understands bread, she said. Not like some.

  I was beginning to understand it, just as I was beginning to understand mushrooms. It had been an instructive morning.

  MASSOT was in a lyrical mood. He had just left his house to go into the forest and kill something when I met him on a hill overlooking a long stretch of vineyards. With his gun under his arm and one of his yellow cigarettes screwed into the corner of his mouth, he stood contemplating the valley.

  "Look at those vines," he said. "Nature is wearing her prettiest clothes."

  The effect of this unexpectedly poetic observation was slightly spoiled when Massot cleared his throat noisily and spat, but he was right; the vines were spectacular, field after field of russet and yellow and scarlet leaves, motionless in the sunlight. Now that the grapes had all been picked there were no tractors or human figures to interfere with our appreciation of the view.

  Work on the vines wouldn't start again until the leaves had fallen and the pruning began. It was a space between seasons, still hot, but not quite summer and not yet autumn.

  I asked Massot if there had been any progress in the sale of his property, maybe a nice German couple who had fallen in love with the house while camping nearby.

  He bristled at the mention of campers. "They couldn't afford a house like mine. In any case, I have taken it off the market until 1992. You'll see. When the frontiers are abolished, the
y'll all be looking for houses down here-English, Belgians…" He waved his hand airily to include the other Common Market nationalities. "Prices will become much more important. Houses in the Lubéron will be très recherchées. Even your little place might fetch a million or two."

  It was not the first time that 1992 had been mentioned as the year when the whole of Provence would be showered with foreign money, because in 1992 the Common Market would come into its own. Nationalities would be forgotten as we all became one big happy family of Europeans. Financial restrictions would be lifted-and what would the Spaniards and Italians and the rest of them do? What else but hurry down to Provence waving their checkbooks and looking for houses.

  It was a popular thought, but I couldn't see why it should happen. Provence already had a considerable foreign population; they had found no problem buying houses. And, for all the talk of European integration, a date on a piece of paper wasn't going to stop the bickering and bureaucracy and jockeying for special preference which all the member countries-notably France-used when it suited them. Fifty years might see a difference; 1992 almost certainly would not.

  But Massot was convinced. In 1992, he was going to sell up and retire, or possibly buy a little bar-tabac in Cavaillon. I asked him what he'd do with his three dangerous dogs, and for a moment I thought he was going to burst into tears.

  "They wouldn't be happy in a town," he said. "I'd have to shoot them."

  He walked along with me for a few minutes, and cheered himself up by muttering about the profits that were certain to come his way, and about time too. A lifetime of hard work should be rewarded. A man should spend his old age in comfort, not breaking his back on the land. As it happened, his land was exceptional in the valley for its ill-kempt appearance, but he always spoke of it as though it were a cross between the gardens at Villandry and the manicured vineyards of Château Lafite. He turned off the path to go into the forest and terrorize some birds, a brutal, greedy, and mendacious old scoundrel. I was becoming quite fond of him.