Saving Our Skins

by Caro Feely

  'When we make a truly elegant wine like this, we have to put it into a Burgundy-shape bottle,' said Seán.

  We were always thinking about the business. Not even this incredible Burgundy could draw us away from it. I worried about our relationship. Since arriving in France we had been consumed by the business and keeping it afloat. Wine was our passion but perhaps making it our livelihood would end by suffocating us as a couple.

  We had taken out a loan for the new press, and when the first payment and monthly insurance fee left our account, reality bit hard. It was the end of November and Seán had also signed the contract to purchase the new tractor. The five years of significant annual payments that accompanied it and the new press were a serious responsibility. We still weren't seeing the sort of revenue required to cover them and the other commitments necessary to keep the business afloat. Despite working long hours trying to sell to trade, I was having little success.

  The buyer in the chain of wine shops in Ireland that had been a staple for us for two years had left and our relationship with his replacement was not looking positive. She was never available to meet when I was in Dublin. Other potential buyers I contacted in the UK and the US already had Bergerac suppliers and often an organic one from Saussignac. They were not interested in hearing about another. It was a buyer's market; the wine crisis – created by too much supply relative to demand – was in full swing. Over 50 per cent of producers in our appellation were organic, something I loved but which was also proving an Achilles' heel.

  When we'd bought the farm we didn't know we had purchased in an enclave of organic producers. We instantly identified with them, despite being foreigners without a clue, and our fears of being left out as newcomers in rural France had been thoroughly quashed. We were welcomed with open arms by people like Thierry Daulhiac, but there was a commercial price to pay for us all being of one mind.

  I bemoaned how difficult trade sales were proving when I visited Thierry that week to plan our trip to Millésime Bio, the largest organic wine show in the world, held in Montpellier each year. Seán and I had decided I would do a recce to help us decide whether to make the investment in a stand the following year. Thierry had kindly offered me a lift since we only had one car. He would drop me and a friend, Gabi, who was staying with us for December and January, at our hotel. Gabi planned to explore Montpellier while I did the show.

  Thierry and I were seated in his tasting room. Local stone and tasteful tiles were matched with furniture that Thierry had made from 'junk': two beautiful bar stools with dainty legs and old Massey metal tractor seats welded on top, a counter welded from bits of a cast-iron bed and a large desk chair made from a wine barrel. 'Caro, I have found that export trade contacts usually take about three years of work to deliver sales,' he said. I felt a jab of adrenalin in my stomach. With our new loan commitments we didn't have that sort of time. Selling direct was clearly the way to go; that way, we were in direct contact with the end buyer and there was less risk. But it was a lot more work, and building that would also take time.

  Thierry described his experience selling to importers in the US and UK. Despite the apparent saturation of those markets, they were the obvious choice for us, since they were significant and English-speaking. I had tried contacting high-profile large-scale supermarkets like Waitrose, whose literature seemed to support artisanal producers, but for one order of a single wine they needed volumes that were equivalent to double our entire production; clearly not our level of artisanal. Our targets narrowed to specialist importers and small chains of shops.

  I had a breakthrough sale to a small chain of specialist delicatessen shops in Ireland that Christmas. They were happy and so were we, but they were relatively small.

  The exchange with Thierry was helpful but grim. There was no shortcut in the wine game. It was a play of multiple years, decades, even generations.

  Isabelle arrived home as I was preparing to leave.

  'Did you put your application in for the aid for the frost?' she asked.

  'What aid?'

  'FranceAgriMer is offering aid to those who were badly hit by the spring frost. It's not going to cover all your losses but it will help. You have to hurry. I think the deadline is tomorrow.'

  The next day I was at the mayor's office as it opened to pick up the form. I filled it in and made copies of all the relevant documents that offered proof that our yields were way below normal, then registered the application with the mayor minutes before the final deadline. I didn't know what the aid package would bring but we needed all the help we could get.

  I felt frustrated that after four years we still were not 'in the loop', despite signing up with all the necessary agencies at the start of our adventure. With the plethora of bureaucrats that control the lives of winegrowers in France it was hard to know who to target in the maze. I sent an email to our local federation, demanding they verify we were on the list for communications of this nature. Moments like this made me realise how much we had increased the challenge of transforming our lives from urban to rural by also moving country, culture and language.

  Gabi was dark and alluring, of Greek parents, with a naughty sense of humour and a contagious laugh. A friend from my Johannesburg days, she was planning to stay in the Wine Cottage for a couple of months en route to the UK to avoid quarantining her dog, which was too old to put through the trauma. Her beloved Labrador foiled her plans by dying just days before she and he were due to travel. Since all her travel arrangements were made, she stuck to them, thinking the calm of rural France would provide her with the time and energy to write her second novel. But she was struggling to adjust to life in our isolated environment, very different to the exciting chaos of Johannesburg, and she desperately missed her furry friend. A week before Christmas she knocked at our kitchen door with tears pouring down her cheeks. 'I'm so lonely, Caro.'

  We walked up for lunch at the Lion d'Or. It was my first girls' lunch in three years. We laughed and talked, enjoying the delicious fresh pasta served by François and Pascale, the couple that ran our local restaurant. Somewhere between the pasta and the pear pudding we decided to start an exercise routine – removing the canes that Seán had cut from the vine trellising.

  It was great to be outdoors. All the green wands that had waved delicately in summer were now hard and brown. Clinging to the wires with tendrils hard as iron, they had to be forcibly removed. Gabi's wicked sense of humour changed forever how I would see the practice of tirer le bois, pulling the wood.

  Despite our exercise routine and the planned trip to Montpellier, Gabi was depressed. The winter weather didn't help, bringing cold and damp totally unfamiliar to a girl used to the Highveld of South Africa. To make matters worse, the toilet kept blocking up. I called our plumbing merchant, the good-looking but generally unresponsive Monsieur Lambert, and explained the urgent situation. To my amazement our old friend JeanMarc, a muscular and jovial plumber with a shaved head, who had helped us through many plumbing crises in the past, appeared within hours.

  'What have you broken for me today?' he asked with the usual twinkle in his eye. Over the years we had been a top-performing client, breaking things like our boiler by not turning it off when the fuel was refilled, or our copper pipes by not emptying them before the winter freeze. Our 300-year-old farmhouse was not like the house we'd had in the city.

  He checked the toilet and then began digging into the earth around the pipe. The stink confirmed a significant problem.

  'We have to dig down to unearth all the piping between the house exit and septic tank entrance,' said Jean-Marc. 'It will take a long time.'

  'How long?' I felt a familiar twist of panic that accompanied each unplanned cost we had encountered since arriving.

  'About eight hours,' he replied.

  I made a quick calculation – his plumbing rate was almost four times the minimum wage. Without factoring in the stench and conditions of the dig or how many daylight hours were left, I blurted: 'We will do it oursel
ves. You can come back tomorrow morning and it will be ready.'

  'I'll help,' said Gabi.

  'No way, you're our guest,' I argued feebly.

  Soon Gabi and I were kitted out in our oldest clothes, rubber boots and gloves. We covered our noses with headscarves. When Seán came up from pruning at dusk he thought we were two bandits up to no good. Drenched in sweat and exhausted, we had a new appreciation for plumbers' work. In a couple of hours we were far from complete.

  After a day of hard-core pruning the last thing Seán felt like was digging a couple of tons of poo. But Gabi and I needed a break, dinner needed to be made and the pipes had to be ready by morning.

  When we moved from the city I had envisioned beautiful sun-drenched vineyards and wonderful wines. I hadn't foreseen clearing blocked drains, digging tons of C.R.A.P. – we never said the word, only spelt it, so the girls wouldn't pick up bad habits – and months of hard labour doing jobs like pulling the wood. At least it was great exercise. I could feel my arms were toned from three hours of digging. We set up industrial spotlights usually in service only at harvest time and Seán took over the digging relay.

  Several hours and curses later, the pipes were unearthed, crushed in several places, and the work area was ready for Jean-Marc. The pipes had been laid on a bed of rocks instead of sand, ensuring that this was bound to happen over time with the natural movement of the earth. The work also gave us the opportunity to spot another serious problem: our septic tank was angled the wrong way, sloping towards the house instead of away. The next morning we debated whether this was a problem that had existed since it was first laid, or one that had resulted from earth movement, but avoided discussing the only solution, which was to remove and replace the tank at the correct angle. After the previous afternoon and evening's experience, I wasn't volunteering. For a short time we would have to pump it regularly instead. These challenges were part of having a house that was centuries old. As a friend said, 'You don't own it, it owns you.' At least the toilet was back in order.

  In the first week of December, after one of the biggest dailies in Ireland recommended our vine shares as a Christmas gift in their weekend's pull-out Gift Guide, there was a flurry of purchases via the Internet.

  As the weeks progressed the sales gained momentum; the guide was clearly something people held on to and it kept giving. Not only was each purchase a new potential customer for longer-term wine sales, it was also much needed cash in the bank. As I created vine shares and photos deep into the night on the cranky old PC and inkjet printer that we had brought with us from Dublin, I cursed and felt relieved at the same time. Each photo print meant a sale but it took about an hour on the dinosaur machine. As the orders kept coming I knew I could justify – and could not live without – a new PC and printer. The vine share that had been a chance new product for us that year had turned to gold.

  On the first day of the Christmas holidays I set out bread, salad and ham on the table.

  'Ham isn't meat, is it, Mommy?' said

  .

  'Yes, it is meat, my poppet,' I replied.

  'What sort of animal is it?'

  'A pig.'

  She looked at me like I had sprouted wings, and exclaimed: 'There is no way! I have never seen such a flat pig!'

  Seán and I cracked up and Ellie and

  joined in. We discussed giving up ham but

  enjoyed her ham too much to consider this route. We explained that we must only eat good organic ham to be sure the pigs were raised correctly. Although we had not seen a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall-style exposé of the plight of factory-farmed pigs, we knew it was as bad as or worse than the plight of chickens. Pigs were so stressed in intensive farming that researchers were trying to genetically modify pigs to remove the stress gene; that way the conditions could be as horrendous as they liked and it would have no effect on production. Thinking of it made me nauseous.

  Something inside me said genetic modification spelt Frankenstein-style disaster. It felt wrong, like feeding cows meat, an act that ended in the horror of mad cow disease. Rudolph Steiner, the founder of the biodynamic method of farming, had predicted that feeding meat to cows would create madness, explaining the science behind it about eighty years before – never expecting it to actually take place. Greed and thoughtless industrial agriculture had taken it beyond hypothesis. I wondered what he would say about this new madness.

  wasn't giving up ham but she had stopped eating chicken. Under pressure from her, we stopped too, including the tradition of Sunday roast chicken.

  It was deep winter and being super-busy kept seasonal depression at bay, but for Gabi the intense human and animal contact of her previous life was sorely missing. I knew a dog would help her, especially during the ten days we planned to be in Ireland in February, when Gabi had volunteered to farm-sit for us.

  had been asking for a dog. Christmas was around the corner. If there was an ideal moment, this was it.

  I had been against our getting a dog, although I loved them, worried that we were not ready for the time and commitment required. We worked such long hours, particularly in spring and autumn, we barely had time for our daughters; I couldn't see how we would have time for a dog. But, on the other hand, we worked from home so we were around a lot. Using this and Gabi's immediate needs as my argument, I quashed my misgivings and contacted a local rescue centre. Two days before Christmas Seán walked into the kitchen and released a honeybrown furball from a carrier box. She ran around the kitchen sniffing and

  and Ellie scrambled onto the bench. They had never been around dogs. By the end of the evening they were ecstatic. They made a nest for the puppy with an old baby blanket in a basket. She cried at night and I was desperate to go to her but Seán wisely stopped me. She settled.

  In France the dog's birth year determines the first letter of their name and our pup's was D. All dogs born that year would be named with a name beginning with D, the following year it would be E and so on. When she proved herself to be an explorer, Dora, after the kids' TV programme Dora the Explorer, seemed apt. In a sheltered corner down in the limestone amphitheatre she stumbled unwittingly into a field of stinging nettles. Stung all over her soft velvety tummy, she sprinted around the courtyard non-stop for almost four hours, double the time she usually stayed awake. We researched cures on the Internet and tried them all, from lavender oil to watered-down urine. Each worked for a few minutes, and then she was off again, circling the courtyard. For all her pain, Dora never snapped, growled or showed aggression. She was honey-coloured and honey-natured. That Christmas

  lost her front teeth and Dora discovered snow for the first time. We had worried that a pup would cause problems for the chickens, who roamed freely in the vineyards and garden; but having arrived after the chickens, she saw them as top dog. Already I could not imagine life without her. Arriving at the Château de Saussignac for New Year with Pierre and Laurence, I felt we too had settled. The magnificent 400year-old vaulted room flickered evocatively in the light of the fire that roared in the massive hearth as we greeted Thierry and Isabelle and other friends gathered to celebrate.

  Laurence fed the hungry children then it was our turn: succulent scallops, seared to perfection, and conversation that flew like lightning. Thierry and another winegrower friend, both great raconteurs, entertained us until my stomach ached from laughing.

  This feeling of being part of the community hadn't happened overnight. On Christmas Eve the previous year, I'd found Seán listening to an Irish ballad at the kitchen table with tears rolling down his cheeks. We deeply missed Ireland and our friends there. This New Year's celebration was also the first time Seán dived into the conversation, participating in the fast dinner flow rather than staying quietly on the side. His French had been non-existent when we arrived, but now he felt confident enough to join in, despite spending most of his days in silent commune with his vines and wines. Now we were putting down roots, part of a strong band of friends.

  Part Two

&
nbsp; Leaf

  In biodynamics we talk of a leaf day when the water forces are powerful. It is a good time to plant a leafy plant like lettuce or to use foliar sprays to feed the plant or to enhance the plant's resistance to fungal disease. It is a time when I feel open to new ideas, like water that takes on the aroma of anything that passes through it.

  Leaf days occur when the moon is in the water constellations: Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces.

  In our wines we find that leaf elements, like fennel or mint in certain reds and fresh grassy or herbal notes in the sauvignon blanc, are reinforced on leaf days.

  Our instincts don't play it safe. Trust them.

  Jacquie Somerville, www.jacquiesomerville.com

  Chapter 8

  A Seed is Sown

  When Gabi returned from London, she could not believe there was a puppy to spoil. A few days later I had to tear her away from Dora as we set off to the Millésime Bio wine show in Montpellier with Thierry and Gérard, his brother-in-law, discussing everything from the wine crisis to local celebrities. The four-hour drive offered a chance to understand some of the deep undercurrents in our centuries-old wine community. From dirty business deals to love affairs, we traversed the gamut of life. As they dropped us at our hotel, Thierry invited us to a dinner presentation on biodynamics at their accommodation the following night, then proposed lending us his car the following day so Gabi and I could go exploring. His generosity amazed me.