Saving Our Skins

by Caro Feely

  Seán shook his head. I explained that he had researched extensively and was sure that the small vineyard we were about to plant was the ideal place for cabernet sauvignon on our farm. It was a flat limestone plateau with excellent drainage that received full sun all day and the rows would be planted north–south ensuring even more sun on the trellised leaf surface.

  'OK. If you are sure of that, then the next step is to look at these cabernet sauvignon clone descriptions and decide which best suits your needs.'

  Her finger traced down the page in front of her.

  'You see, this one is bred for volume, this one for quality of flavour, this one for disease resistance. You need to decide which characteristics are most important for you and make your choice. I can leave this document with you.'

  'Thanks, Cécile. We want quality first and disease resistance as well. What do you recommend?'

  Cécile marked a few clones on the page.

  'You also need to select the right rootstock. Given the results of the limestone test, you have to go with fercal. It is the only rootstock that can handle this limestone plateau. Have you decided who you will buy the plants from? Remember buying from a nursery, rather than taking your own cuttings, is obligé if you want to receive aid for the plantation.'

  Armed with Cécile's advice, we invited three nurserymen to visit and quote for supplying the vines. When we finalised our decision, the lucky winning nurseryman looked at us as if we had three heads when we explained our detailed requirement.

  'You want to order three different clones for this tiny vineyard?' he said, incredulous. 'Usually I supply one high-yielding clone for multiple acres.'

  We were adamant: we wanted biodiversity. It was key to flavour and to disease resistance. Knowing what we know now, even selecting three clones wasn't enough; for biodiversity we need massal selection rather than cloned vines. This meant for future plantations we would take cuttings from individual uncloned vines. Since the 1980s, when cloned vines became the norm, disease resistance has been dropping. With modern cloning we have lost the biodiversity that helps a particular plant species to stay strong. We still had a lot to learn. Fortunately, it was a single acre rather than all twenty-five.

  As we finalised our choice, Cécile announced that she had bought a vineyard of her own about three hours from us and would be leaving her job at the Chamber of Agriculture. We were sad to see her go. She was a familiar figure who had been a patient and supportive teacher through the years. I liked to think she had discovered a different perspective on her journey with us, just as we had been nourished by her technical expertise.

  Now we were on our own in the vineyard, as we were with the winemaking. We felt ready.

  My clandestine meetings at Millésime Bio in Montpellier had brought us an importer. Mary Pawle, the longest-established organic wine importer in Ireland, was keen to represent our wines. She and her husband Ivan were the kind of people we wanted to work with. Their ethos, ethics, philosophy and size fitted with ours; and, just as important, I really liked them.

  This success convinced us to sign up for a stand at the organic 'off exhibition' to be held at the time of Vinexpo in Bordeaux in June. Vinexpo was one of the biggest wine shows in the world, attracting around 50,000 professional buyers. The 'off exhibition' shows that took place on the periphery, like the one we would be part of, were less expensive than Vinexpo itself, but the cost still made my head spin.

  With the down payment on the tractor and the deposit on the new vines paid, I worried about how we would survive the next few months. Mary planned to order when she redid her catalogue, but that was a while away. I had to make sales and I had to make them fast.

  Thinking about it all one night, I wound myself into a frenzy, ate several squares of dark chocolate, then couldn't sleep. Given the insomnia I decided to continue researching potential importers for the show. I worked into the early hours of the morning, sending requests to meet at the Vinexpo 'off-show'. Some responded but none were planning to be there.

  As I descended into a deep depression, however, the pitiful balance on our bank account astonishingly grew. It was the aid payment for the frost-related losses, a silver lining to the panic of that frightening day. The cloud over my head lifted as we pulled back from the precipice, thankful for a minor miracle made possible by Isabelle.

  Chapter 9

  Roller Coaster

  Expressions Bio, the off-Vinexpo organic show, was held in the old German submarine base in Bordeaux, a dark underground venue that felt damp and was filled with a sense of violence and sadness. The bunker was cold and cavernous, the nearly 10 metres of solid concrete roof contributing to the feeling of weight inside. The World War Two U-boat pen felt haunted not only by the violence of what it housed, but by the violence of its construction; I later read that six thousand prisoners of war worked on it and many died from exhaustion, drowning or falling into the concrete. But even before I knew this, I could feel the lingering presence of its history. There was nothing organic or joyful about it and I wondered how it could have been chosen as the location for this show. Fortunately Clément and Francine Klur were on the stand next to mine, offering a lift to the mood and non-stop conversation. We discussed wine, vineyard accommodation, tourism, eco-friendly living and our new association Organic Wine Tours. They were super-ecological, using their apartments as a way to share their organic ethos, even requiring their guests to compost waste.

  'I'm not sure our visitors would do it properly,' I said. 'We aren't very good at it ourselves. We leave our compost bucket until it is full to bursting or until the smell forces us to empty it.'

  'Oh my God!' said Clément in mock horror in a supremely English accent to tease me. 'We leave ours until it stinks and seeps fermenting gloop.'

  'Tiens, autre chose,' said Francine, interjecting the equivalent of 'hey, and another thing', as she often did, tumbling one thought after another in a frenzy of ideas and energy. 'You should visit us. We'll visit you next time we come to Bordeaux. Everyone in the association should visit each other, it will make us stronger.' We made a loose plan for us to visit them en famille for a week in December. Given Francine's fresh ecological thinking on everything from wine labels to construction, I was sure a visit would be a shot of inspiration. At the end of the first day I had poured less than half a bottle of each of our wines, about eight tastes, to 'tyre kickers' – people who were there for their wine club, students or – worse – trying to sell me something. I discovered the label Bergerac did not tempt wine buyers to stop and taste. On the second day I hid the organiser's sign that had Bergerac in bold and left a sign with the name of our vineyard. More people stopped, but most were looking for wines priced well below what we could produce for.

  The kind of low prices they mentioned would only be possible with intensive conventional viticulture, prices that appeared cheap but which did not factor in the long-term cost of desertification of farmland, the pollution of water sources and the degradation of the health, or even death, of vineyard workers.

  The large sales I had pinned on the show, critical to paying the looming second payment on the basket press and the balance on the plantation, did not materialise. I didn't even have any promising leads. Meeting the cost of the show alone required selling a pallet of wine – six hundred bottles. At the end of the last day I was thoroughly depressed. The show had been an opportunity for networking, meeting like-minded growers and brainstorming with Francine, but it had delivered nothing in sales.

  Seeking wine to drown my sorrows, I left my stand to go exploring. Wandering the aisles I saw a Bergerac winegrower I hadn't met before and introduced myself. Athanassios was a delightful Greek man, another import to the region like us. Stunning to look at, a physique like a statue from antiquity and entertaining, he was the perfect antidote to my dark mood. He owned and farmed an organic vineyard in Pécharmant, the 'charming hill' red-wine appellation north-east of Bergerac, where Ian and Brigit Wilson lived. His wines were fabulous and I gl
ugged back with abandon, happy that Thierry was giving me a lift home. I asked my new friend what he thought of the show.

  'Never again! I don't need to come here to be insulted by arrogant wine buyers who walk past with their noses in the air or who stop and taste then say, "I like it but I'll never sell it because no one's heard of your appellation," or who want wines for less than two euros. No! A total waste of time! Never again.'

  I felt the same way. Selling direct to end-consumers was more fun, faster, and they paid before taking the wine. Trade could be arrogant, as Athanassios said, demanded payment terms of two to three months and even then many required significant follow-up to get them to pay. Applying Thierry's estimate of three years of work to sign them up, only to lose them because the buyer changed, made it even less attractive. But the investments we had made needed to be paid for. Planting new vineyards was expensive. One acre put us back several thousand euros and required loving care for five years before offering a yield that might help pay for the outlay if we were able to sell it.

  The Irish financial crisis was biting hard and our direct sales to end-consumers had fallen off a cliff. If we hadn't had the vine-share windfall at Christmas and the frost aid, we would have been in dire straits. I arrived home thoroughly dispirited. Seán listened to my gloomy prognosis. We had pinned big hopes on that show. 'Don't worry, Carolinus. You'll find a way. You just have to work harder.'

  He was teasing me, knowing that I already worked long hours and saw few weekends or holidays. Riling me to anger was better than seeing me totally deflated, sapped of energy by the disastrous expo. I stomped outside to hang washing on the line and tried to gain control over my pointless fury. Only we could make a difference to our future. The state of the market was not in our control but we could succeed by changing the rules. I would not be a punchbag for arrogant buyers.

  Like Athanassios, if we wanted to be in this wine business we had to be rebels. We had to stand out and change the rules to suit us, rather than succumb to the rules of a game set by large buyers, a game doomed to be lost by small producers. Wine buyers were only reacting to the market conditions of too much supply. I dumped my bag on the bed in my makeshift office, threw my paltry contact notes onto the desk in disgust, then logged on to check my emails. Sitting at the top of the inbox was an email from Damien, the wine buyer for the small chain of delicatessens that had bought from us before Christmas. My heart sank: it had to be a problem. Through the years I had found that wine buyers seldom emailed to express niceties alone, and never for unsolicited orders.

  Proving me entirely wrong, the email contained an order for four pallets of wine – a significant chunk of our annual production. And the shops were chic, exactly the kind of places we wanted to be associated with. I let out a whoop of glee. Usually orders were the result of months or years of information and negotiation. The order would pay the looming press loan repayment, the balance on the new vines and some.

  In the positive glow of Damien's order, I signed myself up for the WSET Level 3 course for late autumn. Passing the exam would take us a step closer to being qualified to run a wine school.

  Over the next few days we planted our first new vines, the acre of cabernet sauvignon, taking care to time it with the planting time zone defined by our biodynamic calendar. The Maria Thun calendar plotted the movement of the moon, stars and planets relative to the earth over time and we could use this information to determine the ideal moment to do different work in the vineyard. The transplanting zone was a two-week period per month during a descending moon. This is the ideal time to transplant – what we were doing when we planted new vines – because when the moon is descending the sap of the plant rises less, thus it will be less stressful for the plant and it will recover and re-root faster.

  Talking to Gérard Cuisset, a long-time organic convert, a few weeks later, he said: 'We planted a field of vines last year; half of it at the right moment during the planting zone, then we had an urgent order so we stopped for two days and then continued with the other half. By that time we were outside of the planting zone. The difference was incredible. The half planted at the right moment took beautifully; the other half is not looking good.'

  Two years later Gérard started the process towards biodynamic certification, making us two in Saussignac. Our own certification was well into its first year at the time. We had welcomed the Demeter certification representative a few weeks before. He was impressed with our free-ranging insect-eating chickens and with Seán's vineyard work, and particularly interested in our experiments with the Maria Thun compost in the vegetable garden. We had planted cabbages on one side of the garden path in simple composted cow dung, and on the other in the Maria Thun compost that Seán had made by composting the same cow dung with the biodynamic preparations inside old oak wine barrels dug into the ground. The resulting cabbages were like night and day. In the standard compost the cabbages were leggy and spotted with fungal disease and holes from insect attack, and in the barrel compost the cabbages had tight heads and were healthy and disease- and insect-free. It was so stark it seemed like witchcraft, but it was about the food value of the compost for the plant. The preparation-boosted compost was like a healthy vitamin drink and the straight cow dung merely left to break down for a year was more akin to a sugar-water carbonated drink.

  After the formal checking of the paperwork for our certification and a tour of the vineyard, he joined us for lunch and we exchanged ideas as we crunched on coleslaw and home-made bread. We needed to find better ways to dynamise and spray our preparations. We were mixing by hand and Seán was spraying them with a 50litre copper backpack on his back. After doing 10 hectares like that, he needed a week off to recover. Our Demeter man promised to send us information sheets on alternative solutions.

  Our cabernet sauvignon plantation was a major milestone. If Seán's analysis of the location was correct, the vineyard would produce stunning wine in a few years. We were excited.

  Now the vines were planted, they needed love and water. There was no irrigation allowed in an appellation d'origine contrôlée in France once the vines were producing fruit. Watering was allowed on young plants prefruit only, so there was no point in a permanent irrigation system. In the blistering heat we watered 2,500 baby vines by hand. Seán drove the tractor at a snail's pace with a vat of water on the forks at the back, stopping every few metres and I watered with a hose behind. This slow and painful method was the most efficient we could devise.

  The main thing we had to be careful of now was the rabbit problem; the nurseryman had told us that rabbits were a catastrophe. They could wipe out a vineyard in a night.

  'Should we get an electric fence for the vineyard?' I said to Seán, wiping the sweat from my brow as we turned into the last row nearest the treeline where the rabbits hung out.

  'Dora is our secret agent,' he said, pointing.

  To the horror of Sophia and Ellie, Dora had a baby rabbit in her mouth. It was gory but better than losing a vineyard investment worth thousands.

  Summer brought ferocious heat, a blur of visitors and gîte guests, the rapid approach of our fourth harvest and an email from a Niall Martin in Dublin. He asked if he could stay in our gîte, learn about harvest and film it to use in a show for the Irish national broadcaster. I tried to contain my excitement: a slot on television would be the marketing coup of our vineyard's short history.

  The Christmas gift article had doubled the guests booked for our harvest weekend. It would stretch the boundaries of my event-organisation skills. I wasn't complaining. We needed the bumper turnout and the sales it would generate.

  The bottling costs always left the account early summer, giving us a nasty shock no matter how much planning we did for it. Our most significant outgoing of the year, it was frightening but necessary. While a million-bottle, bulk wine operator could bottle a wine for a third of a euro, for an artisan outfit like us, a quality bottle, label and cork cost a euro or more.

  Bottling involved a minefield
of decisions. The five dry components – bottle, cork, capsule, label and box – needed to be specified and ordered, plus mountains of paperwork for each individual wine had to be filled in, all within specific time limits.

  The cork alone offered myriad choices, from plastic to metal to real cork, and then within these categories even more choice. I was constantly asked about the cork versus screw cap question in the tasting room. As organic producers, we couldn't consider plastic, the cheapest option, or screw cap, not so cheap but with elements we didn't want. Screw caps are metal and not, therefore, a renewable resource, whereas cork is. The metal cap is also usually lined with a plastic inner. As with the plastic cork, this is bad for long-term storage as the wine can take elements from the plastic over time, not just taste but potentially dangerous chemical elements like endocrine disruptors. For wines that are going to age in the bottle like ours, we absolutely could not select either of these.

  Cork is harvested every seven to eight years from trees that live for hundreds. Not only is it renewable, but buying it encourages growth and maintenance of forests, important for our planet's ecosystem. For wine quality, cork offers breathability that allows the wine to age optimally. The key negative with natural cork is the potential for cork taint, caused by bacteria; making wine smell of wet dog or damp basement. To combat this we bought DIAM corks, manufactured using a process that guaranteed no cork taint and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) approval. Each year at bottling we reconsidered all the options and latest research but came back to this one. The price of the stopper alone could run to over a euro for a high-quality natural cork, compared with a couple of centimes for a plastic one. The corks we used constituted about a third of our bottling costs. The wine was selling well with the chain of delicatessens but they had enough stock that they wouldn't be reordering for at least a year. Even with professional buyers like them and Mary Pawle in the pipeline, we needed another boost to the direct sales to keep our boat afloat. Niall's television show could be it. I replied with a casual suggestion that our harvest weekend would be the ideal time to visit.