Saving Our Skins

by Caro Feely

  On closer inspection she wasn't in good shape, boasting a nasty open wound on her rear where the dog had grabbed her. Seán carefully took her to the hen house, where the rest of her brood was peacefully installed for the night. He created a nest of hay on the wood floor, gave her some water and grain and hoped for the best. The next morning the girls were ecstatic she had returned but we downplayed the chances of a recovery. Blackie sat quietly and didn't move all day. We considered a trip to the vet but decided the trauma would probably kill her and the bill would probably kill us. We took her treats of cheese and leftovers; she was eating, which was a good sign. The next day she moved a little and two days later she limped out to forage with her friends. Within a week there was barely a limp and the only reminders of her recent trauma were missing feathers and a large scab. It was a chicken-run miracle. We rechristened her 'Lucky Blackie'.

  Sunday's comforting routine was a run with my friend Laurence, followed by a visit to our local farmers' market with

  and Ellie. Gardonne, 4 kilometres from Saussignac, contained that market and offered such sophistication as a train station, a pharmacy, a bank and a convenience store. But, most of all, I loved the market with its familiar stallholders offering a range of vegetables, fruit and meat straight from the farm. In summer the tomato punnets were draped with basil leaves that demanded lunch outdoors, and the perfume of the melons reached across the little square, just waiting to be matched with a thin slice of jambon de Bayonne as a simple starter. The strawberries sold by a tall and humble farmer had a clean and delicious flavour – the very essence of strawberry. The supermarket ones that I once bought in a moment of madness were so tasteless by comparison that I threw them away. Usually nothing was thrown away, but they tasted so toxic I couldn't even bring myself to give them to the chickens. I had read that strawberries were one of the products really worth buying organic – like grapes and hence wine – since, when conventionally farmed, they contained high chemical residues. I could taste it was true.

  As

  , Ellie and I arrived at the market one morning in late autumn, the seasonal strawberries were no longer available and instead the delicious smell of farm chickens roasting on a rotisserie drifted across the square on the cold air. The poultry producer also offered uncooked chickens that looked healthy, their skin robust yellow, not the pale, almost fluorescent white of industrially raised chickens. Rows of them lay peacefully in the cold cabinet, their heads tucked neatly around their bodies with their eyes closed and their feet folded underneath them as if they were asleep. As we waited for the chicken I had chosen to be packed up,

  tapped me urgently on my side. 'Mommy, do they wait for the chickens to die before they kill them?' she said.

  The chickens looked exactly like her friends, the hens at Terroir Feely, except they were dead and defeathered.

  'No, they can't wait for them to die, my Fia. They are raising the chickens for meat. But these chickens had a good life. They were allowed to run around outside, not like factory-farm chickens that are in a closed room, crowded in with hundreds of others, living in their poo, sometimes dying in it with no room to move,' I explained. Seán and I had watched Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's exposé of intensive production and it was something I couldn't be party to, no matter how tight our budget. Rather no chicken than industrial chicken. I took my parcel off the counter and, as we walked away,

  realised what this meant. Her face crumpled and tears began to flow down her small cheeks. She grabbed my arm.

  'But Mommy, they can't kill the chickens! That's not right. We have to stop them. Mommy, we have to stop the people killing the chickens!'

  She was an animal activist with a mission, putting all the force of her small body into pulling me back towards the producer. I went down on my haunches so I was eye-level with her.

  'Poppet, if we want them to stop raising chickens we have to stop eating chickens. If people want to buy them to eat then there will always be someone raising and selling chickens.'

  As I tried to explain how the world worked it didn't seem so logical. I didn't want to create a scene so I led

  and Ellie firmly to the car to help them into their child car seats before the discussion continued.

  's blonde bob reached her waist; her beautiful, open face that was usually smiling was tear-stained and held a worried frown. She worked herself into a frenzy that overflowed as we took off.

  'We have to find out who the king and queen are and make them stop the people killing the chickens,' she said.

  One of the ironies of France is that, despite the revolution in 1789 which led to the demise of the monarchy, kings and queens and nobility are still entrenched in the psyche, the education system and the children's books; even more so than in countries where a monarchy is still in place.

  'Sweetheart, it's not a king and queen in France, it's the government and a president,' I said. 'We would have to write a letter to them about the chickens. But even they can't do anything about the chickens. The only way to stop people killing chickens is to convince people to stop eating chickens.'

  'But Mommy, we have to do something!' said

  exasperated. 'But I don't want to stop eating chicken. I like it too much.'

  'You see, my Fia, that's the problem,' I said. 'No one else wants to stop eating chicken either so that's why the chickens get killed for meat.'

  'But Mommy, if people are always killing the animals then the animals will turn against us and start killing us. We have to stop the people killing the animals.' After a Gallic pause, not satisfied with taking the animal farmers to the cleaners, she turned on the hunters: 'And Mommy, we have to stop the hunters from killing the animals. Otherwise there will be no more animals left on earth and then what will we do, hnh? Then what will we do?'

  This was a nasal Gallic 'hnh?' rather than an American 'huh?' and it carried a good dose of French disdain just in the way it was uttered. Ellie, at three, wasn't all that sure what the stakes were but she joined in now regardless.

  'Yes, Mommy, then what will we do, hnh?' she said, nodding her curly head vigorously. I caught her piercing blue eyes momentarily in the rear-view mirror and felt like a criminal in the dock. Despite her tiny size and shy personality, Ellie had a penetrating look that could stop an adult in their tracks.

  I decided I had better get the crowd onto another tack, one with a more realistic target than stopping the entire population of France from eating meat.

  'At least we eat chickens that have been raised in kind conditions and have had a good life until they get killed. There are lots of chickens that don't even have that for the short time they are on earth. That's what you need to fight for. It's cruelty to the chickens, not the raising of the chickens for food that we should be telling people about. But if you really want to stop animals being killed for meat you have to stop eating meat yourselves and then try to convince other people to stop too.'

  was now crying freely again thinking about the poor dead chickens. Once we got home, Seán, who had stayed behind to garden, was brought into the debate to offer up his version of why people killed chickens and what we could do about it.

  'We have to give the animals a good life, respect the animals,' said Seán. 'But you are right,

  , we should eat less meat or maybe we should give up meat. If we are not willing to kill the meat for ourselves, perhaps we should give it up.'

  We had discussed this many times. We enjoyed eating meat but were too chicken to kill it ourselves. Brigit and Ian Wilson killed their cocks for meat when they wanted to have a Sunday dinner. They didn't cop out and go to the market. But neither of us was willing to do it. I could not imagine killing one of our chickens. Perhaps that meant we should give up meat. The beady-eyed analysis of my small animal activists and Seán's reflection made me see the world differently.

  Somewhat guiltily, I started preparing the dead chicken I had bought at the market. Within minutes, most of our live chickens were up on the kitchen windowsill giving
me a 'we know what you are doing' look. The previous time they had done this in such an obvious manner was the day I had brought a roast chicken home a few months before. They stared accusingly in the window and only left when Seán took the bowl of vegetable scraps out to feed them at the run. I made use of every single part of the chicken, down to boiling the bones for stock that we could use over the coming weeks. We weren't ready to give up chicken but we could reduce our consumption with thrift and good practice.

  As the weeks passed we ate less meat and became more vegetarian. My animal activists wanted to stop eating meat at school, too. We decided that wouldn't be a good idea since there was no vegetarian option, but we asked Olga, the school chef, to offer

  little or no chicken when that was on the menu.

  From the age of two and a half, as part of the full day at school, French kids are served a three-course lunch complete with such adult flavours as radishes, endives and olives. On a few irregular lunchtime visits to the école maternelle – the pre-school – I was amazed to see the small groups of tiny people talking in a civilised fashion over plates of boeuf bourguignon or poisson pané. Seán and I felt a hint of envy as we perused the menu provided each month. Not only did it sound good, it clearly tasted really good too. I regularly heard 'This is not as good as Olga's' as I served up my pale representations of the dishes she created.

  'Olga: can we get someone fired for being too good at their job?' teased Thierry as we waited at the school gate a while later. 'I have had enough of hearing "Oh, Olga's haricots verts are better than this", "Oh, this hachis Parmentier (cottage pie) isn't as good as Olga's", "Oh na na na, na na ni, na na na." Ça suffit! (Enough already!) Can't you do something to make the meals you give these kids less good?'

  All the parents laughed conspiratorially. Their cooking didn't make the O.L.G.A. grade either. I was relieved it wasn't only me.

  Seán took ownership of our 'new' press the day we needed to press the reds: we had become specialists in doing things just in time. As part of the purchase arrangement the supplier removed the old double press.

  'I can't believe how big it feels, how much space there is,' said Seán, walking into the half of the winery that had been occupied by the old press and pulling the Karcher pressure washer into position to give it a good scrub down.

  As Seán power-hosed, I swept the floor with a squeegee and a broom. Neither was very efficient. The concrete floor was worn and full of tiny craters. There was still so much we wanted to change: the floor needed to be relaid or tiled, the roof and insulation needed doing. At least the wiring had been taken care of, removing the risk of electrocution, a serious threat when we arrived.

  Seán finished hosing and moved the Karcher out, then pushed the red chassis of the new press into position.

  'Wow, you can move it on your own! At last, something human scale,' I said, feeling it was instantly more us, better suited to the small-lot, plot-specific wines we were making.

  The main U-shaped body of the press had a metal plate in the centre that used hydraulic power to press down into the oak cage that was like a slatted drum, fitted over a stainless steel tray that fed the juice out of a spout into a receptacle and then on to the relevant vat. We had purchased two of these cages so we could fill one, press the grapes, and then, when the pressing was finished, the cage and tray could be removed and replaced by the second, which could be pressed while the first was being emptied.

  The next step to free up space in the winery would be the removal of two enormous vats – each the size of a minivan standing on its rear, too large for our individual vineyard wines. That would have to wait until we had the time and money to do it.

  Seán had released the 'free run' wine from the vats overnight, getting up every few hours to check everything was OK. With the reds, this step released about 80 per cent of the total end wine, since the fermentation process had extracted most of the juice already. The last 20 per cent would be released by pressing with our new press. The final quality of a wine is determined by an almost infinite set of factors, of which the press is one. Our new press was the 'caviar' of presses, a basket press. It pressed gently, which meant that it did not crush the pips and release the bitter oils within, and it did not mangle the grapes, which could release harsh tannins that we didn't want either. Basket-pressing is seen by some winegrowers as significant enough in terms of quality to be included as information on their front label.

  We usually kept the press wines separate and then mixed them into the final blends as required a few weeks before bottling. They brought structure, body and grip through their strong tannins. There are many different types of tannins. Strong tannins are different to harsh tannins. Strong tannins can be smooth and bring power, but harsh tannins rasp and grate the tongue. For our long-ageing reds, we wanted strong as opposed to harsh tannins. I left Seán to the pressing and prepared to welcome guests for a day tour.

  When I looked in at the end of the day after saying farewell to my guests, Seán passed me a tumbler of dark red liquid. I tasted.

  'Beautiful wine. What is it?' I said.

  'The press wine,' said Seán.

  'No way!' I said.

  'This press makes a difference,' said Seán smiling proudly. 'We don't get as much volume but the quality is significantly better. Au revoir, rustic press juice, hello jus fine.' To celebrate, Seán appeared from the cellar bearing a bottle of Chambolle-Musigny Les Amoureuses 1999, a premier cru from Burgundy. Les Amoureuses: The Lovers. It had a lovely ring to it. I had seen the name a few times in ETS Martin, a wine shop that had become a favourite to visit with wine-tour guests. The name alone made me want to taste it.

  I had read that this premier cru vineyard in Burgundy's prestigious Côte de Nuits region was about twelve acres divided among thirteen different owners. To put that into perspective, it was half the size of our vineyard then divided into thirteen parts. There were many suggestions about where the name came from; perhaps it was the place where young lovers went to explore their passion. The explanation I preferred was that after rain, the clay of the vineyard would stick to your boots, clinging on like young lovers.

  This bottle was one of Seán's secret purchases from our previous lives as professionals in the city. Back then we didn't have a shared bank account and his acquisition of a 'few' special wines only came to light much later when they required several times the capacity of his brother's large family car to bring them from London to Saussignac. It wasn't only Seán who was inflicted with the wine lovers' disease. A newspaper article revealed that many wine lovers had a second, hidden credit card to feed their habit of purchasing wines that their partner would consider way too expensive.

  I had seen the affliction in action when two couples from Wales visited Saint-Émilion with me. On a tasting visit to ETS Martin, the ladies made it clear that the Bordeaux wine made from white grapes planted at a grand cru classé estate in Saint-Émilion, while delicious, was one of those in the 'way too expensive' category. SaintÉmilion is a red-wine-only appellation, so even if it is made there, a bottle of white cannot refer to SaintÉmilion. With this one retailing at around eighty euros, I could totally see their point. The men tasted and drooled but were not allowed to buy. Mark emailed me the following week with a little secret. He and Peter had revisited ETS Martin without the 'girls' (their lovely wives), had drunk an entire bottle of the forbidden fruit in Martin's vaulted cellar, then bought six, plus six more reds. Though Mark and Peter did own up to the 'girls' later.

  Now I was delighted Seán had engaged in his illicit shopping, since Les Amoureuses was a crystal glass of pure joy; a cherry symphony with a hint of coffee and a swish of minerality in the finish. A journalist once coined the term 'iron fist in a velvet glove' for Burgundy pinot noirs and this was exactly that.

  Enjoying each other's company at mealtimes was sacred.

  and Ellie actively participated in dinner conversations, providing amusing contributions.

  Picking up the amoureuses threa
d of the conversation,

  said, 'Today Inés teased Pierre that he was amoureux with Coralie.'

  Ellie looked bashful. Pierre was her best friend. Perhaps she would be a little jealous if he was amoureux of someone else. Seán quickly diffused the situation.

  'For whom are you amoureuse, Ellie?' he asked.

  'Juan,' said Ellie without a blink.

  'Wan?' I asked.

  'Yes, the Juan with the blonde hair,' said Seán. I was clearly being left out of the loop on school affairs.

  'As in Juan Carlos, King of Spain?' I asked.

  'Yes, he's the one with short hair. The naughty one,' said Ellie.

  'The Juan who's best mates with Jean-Philippe,' said Seán.

  Ellie nodded sagely and Seán and I exchanged a glance. Jean-Philippe was another 'naughty one' in the threeyear-old pack. Ellie had come home with a few scrapes thanks to him. I didn't want our kid mixed up with him or this new blonde-haired 'Don Juan'. The Les Amoureuses in my glass was one thing, that was quite another. I took a long draught. It was light but deep.