by Caro Feely
A couple of days later I ran a half-day wine tour in the old tasting room. I made sure to fill the smelly pipe with water before we started, then took the group round the vineyards, explaining winegrowing and organic farming. We returned for the wine-tasting education and lunch. As we reached the crème brûlée ice cream, passion fruit sorbet and Saussignac dessert wine course, a guest received a call from their architect.
'You won't believe it,' said John to Karen, his wife. 'Our builder just went bust.'
'What? They've been in business more than fifty years. How can they?' she said with a little urgency but no major panic in her voice.
'Yep… and they had the best reputation of all the builders we considered,' he said. 'If you'll excuse me I need to step outside to make a few calls.'
'You seem very relaxed,' I said to Karen. 'If our builder went bust I'd be jumping off the cliff out there.'
'It sounds bad and it's bad for the company, but we're protected,' she said. 'We'll be mildly delayed but we won't lose money since we only pay weekly tranches as they finish parts of the build, rather than in big chunks upfront. It's frightening how many small businesses are going under with the crisis. Luckily we had thought through this scenario and prepared for it.'
John came back in and we moved on to coffee. It seemed they were sailing through the crisis with barely a care. But that night I tossed and turned imagining all the horrible repercussions if it happened to us. I had never considered this angle. Paying a third up front, a third midway and a third at the end was standard practice in France.
Sébastian had moved on to working on the lodge. Getting it ready for the liquid concrete was the priority, rather than finishing the tasting room that only had about 10 per cent left to do. He gave me the outstanding balance invoice and asked me to pay it.
Awakened to a lack in my education by Karen and John, I had given myself a crash course on managing a building project the night before. As part of my cramming session I read that you should never pay the final amount until all the work is finished, since builders are notoriously slow to do the final bit. I was super-anxious. I said I preferred to pay when the wood panelling was finished.
A few hours later Véronique banged on the door. With her red hair flaming she demanded payment of the final sum. I said I would talk to Seán – my standard fallback for any difficult situation.
Seán clumped in for lunch, his back aching. Getting back into pruning after almost a year off was always a tough transition. Our lunch conversation that year almost always revolved around the project: design, finance, people, the list was never-ending. As I served up pumpkin soup I explained my showdown with Véronique in the courtyard that morning. 'What happens if they go bust?' I said.
'I don't think they will go bust,' said Seán. 'It's more about making sure the final bits are completed and don't hang around for months or years.'
'Exactly. We have to have it finished to provide proof for the aid. We have to meet the deadline for that, come hell or high water,' I said. 'So what will we do?'
'We know Sébastian and Véronique,' said Seán. 'They will respect the deadlines and the work. Look at how they have managed the project so far. For the sake of goodwill on the project, I think we have to pay it now. After all, we know where they live.' I was torn but when Sébastian came back after lunch I gave him the cheque.
A few days later Sébastian and Véronique arrived together with dark rings under their eyes and I expected the worst; that they had gone bust. I joined them in the courtyard, angst exploding in my stomach.
'Caro, we had a horrible sleepless night,' said Véronique.
I could see that.
'The company providing the windows and doors telephoned yesterday to say there is a six-week delay on the ones for the Wine Lodge.'
I felt a moment of deep relief sweep through me. They hadn't gone bust. Then the panic returned as I realised we wouldn't be ready for summer rentals, some already sold.
'Don't worry, don't worry!' she said. 'We have found a solution. A2S can supply the windows and doors in time. They are more expensive but we will absorb that extra cost. They will also fit them, so that will give Sébastian breathing space.' What had seemed like a disaster had turned into an opportunity.
Sébastian needed a break and Véronique had booked a Mediterranean cruise for them. I, for my part, said a prayer to the God of Construction asking that no one – including ourselves – would go bust in the meantime.
Chapter 23
Killer Chemicals
The blossom buds forming on the trees announced spring – and with it the respective bulletins d'alerte issued by the local chemical supplier and Chamber of Agriculture started up. The newsletters alerted us to the weeds, bugs and climatic conditions about to strike our farm and what killer chemicals we could use to foil them. They read like chronicles from a war zone.
At a viticulture conference I learned that the products used were exactly that, the products of war. The creation of nitrates for cannonballs began in the late 1800s. As demand from World War One dropped, these nitrates were then recycled to become agriculture's first chemical fertiliser. The next step was the creation of pesticides, including fungicides, by recycling killer chemicals 'innovated' during World War Two. The third wave was the creation of herbicides like Agent Orange, used during the Vietnam War to destroy food and cover of anti-government forces.
Such chemicals are routinely used on our food, unless it is certified organic. They create massive profits for agricultural chemical companies. One of the largest agro-chemical companies even call themselves 'a sustainable agriculture company' – their new tag line when I looked up their website. It shows what a mockery has been made of the word 'sustainable' by industrial agriculture.
Each bulletin d'alerte announced in big red letters the arrival of the latest insect or disease that would spread doom and devastation through our vineyards. At the start of our adventure, each one brought a racing heartbeat and a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Now I knew these insects and diseases were a direct result of intensive chemical farming. We had learned to take the alerts with a pinch of salt. Bad farming created opportunities for disease and pest outbreaks. On our farm, with the strong health of naturally farmed vines and the balance of the biodiversity, they were no longer scary.
We were constantly observing our vines and practising good husbandry. The vines did not look after themselves, contrary to the belief of some guests – quickly changed after a few days of watching Seán labouring through the windows of the Wine Cottage.
My new understanding of the struggle between conventional and organic farming, namely the huge profits made by chemical companies and their resultant power over politicians, horrified me. Seán said I was arriving at a kernel of political and social awareness at last. He had always read more widely than I had, a habit started as a young journalist. I felt like I had my eyes wide open for the first time. It was a horrible realisation.
At least it meant I could take action. I bought books on ecology and on the facts behind chemical farming and read them from cover to cover, then placed copies in the tasting room and Wine Cottage. I shared information via our Facebook page. I realised every single thing I did, no matter how small – and especially every purchase we made – was supporting one method or another. Buying organic was not just for me and my family's health; it was for the land, the grower and the producer. It was choosing natural means rather than chemicals of war as the method of farming I wanted, and the future that went with it.
Spreading a gossamer-thin sheet onto our bed – one we had bought twenty years before in Johannesburg – I reflected on the irony that, while we used ancient, threadbare towels filled with holes, and the children's beds had sheets that hailed from my childhood, the Wine Lodge was about to be furnished with luxury, super-soft organic sheets and towels. We were just surviving in our rundown farmhouse next door, stretched to our limits to support this bold new step. I hoped the new lodge and tasting room wou
ld move us from holey to whole. So far it had added significantly to our workload and overheads, but soon it would be open for business.
After making the bed I pulled on running shorts, grabbed my Walkman earphones and went downstairs to take Dora for a run. As we dropped down into the valley of Saussignac I felt nature's embrace and turned off the earphones. The birds that had been singing started an urgent warning call. It was their notification that Dora had entered the forest. A little squirrel, hearing the warning, barrelled up the hill towards us with an apple in his mouth, thinking the danger was below him where the birds were calling. A few metres from Dora he looked up, saw her, dropped the apple and sprinted up the nearest tree, his face the image of Scrat in Ice Age when he loses his nut. I stood for a moment taking in the wonder of nature, laughing out loud. Dora looked up at me and seemed to be smiling too.
The commune track dropped down from the village towards Gageac, passing through a wilderness with a stream running through it. It was home to other animals, like marmots and wild boar, and to wild plants like feathery, delicate horsetail and tall, bold stinging nettle. As I ran I was overwhelmed by earthy aromas, dense and fungal but delicious, like the smell of a fine black truffle mixed with the forest floor.
When I arrived home I looked up the day on our Maria Thun biodynamic calendar. It was a root day. Even the aromas in the valley reflected it. There was something truly powerful at work. The root sign meant earth forces were strongest, making it the ideal time to plant root crops and to do work related to root systems. It didn't seem possible but a few days later in the same place I was overcome with floral aromas, as if I'd stuck my head into a bouquet of wild flowers. Again, I had no idea of the day but when I returned and checked the calendar I found it was a flower day, the perfect day to transplant flowers and do activities related to flowering or flowers; for example, picking camomile flowers for camomile tea. It sounded crazy, but it was like clockwork. Seán thought I was mad. I knew it was real.
On our farm I found these smells were reinforced close to our well; perhaps water had a heightening effect. Some days I felt I was growing into the earth, like I had roots and had attached myself to our small piece of paradise. I read detailed books on biodynamics and signed up for a course, keen to understand more about how and why these phenomena worked as they did.
The apple farmer near Gardonne about 5 kilometres downstream from us sprayed chemicals on his orchard about forty times a year. He wouldn't eat his own apples. When a farmer won't eat his own produce it makes me worried. The Gardonne well was one of 500 polluted wells in France, given 'special project' status to try to decrease the level of pollution. It was crazy to think that it was being legally poisoned by the farmers around it. In a feeble attempt, the local Chamber of Agriculture contacted all the farmers in the catchment area to meet with them and help to change their ways. They organised a group meeting to show the alternatives. The only people who turned up were the bureaucrats themselves and those, like us, who were demonstrating our mechanical weeding equipment as a non-polluting alternative to herbicide. The soft 'phone and meet' method would not create change.
I learned that in the nineties, the city of Munich had encouraged farmers in their water catchment area to go organic – via money, not phone calls – after seeing a significant rise in agricultural pollution in their water. It had been a mega-success. They converted most of the farmers to organic and did not need to undertake costly cleaning of the water. The cost of the organic incentives was a third of the cost of cleaning the polluted water of nitrates alone. I was amazed by the clear logic of it and shocked we weren't doing more in France.
The unseen costs of chemical warfare on farms came back to us in taxes and higher charges for water, when they should have been levied on the agricultural product that used the chemical in the first place. The number of beekeepers in France had halved in the previous decade and so, to encourage more to enter the profession, France allocated a 40-million-euro programme to encourage beekeeping. On the other hand, they did not ban the pesticides that had killed the bees, the main reason for fewer beekeepers. It was farcical.
We could change the world one gesture and one cent at a time. Each person who demands organic engages the change. With organic farming we have clean water and healthy bees. Organic seems more expensive comparing prices on a supermarket shelf, but considering the consequences of a world without bees and without clean water – hence no human life – it is not so expensive after all.
As I came to first blush of social and political awareness, spring was in full flourish and the old Sébastian we knew was back. He had a young, upbeat apprentice who brought new energy. The project rushed like a runaway train towards our deadline for pouring the liquid cement. The tiles could only be laid after the heating had run under the concrete for a full month. The kitchen could only be installed after the tiles were laid. My project management skills from my previous city life were forced back into action.
We were meeting our deadlines; Sébastian's woodwork was truly magnificent and Thomas's stonework an art. I had all but given up hope of publishing my book Grape Expectations, the story of our first three years in France, when an email from the publisher announced they were somewhat interested if I was willing to rework the parts that needed editing. I spun into seventh heaven. Getting a publisher was the silver bullet for a wannabe author like me, something I had barely allowed myself to dream of. After all the years of work and of thinking of this moment it seemed too good to be true. I kept re-reading the email. Of course I would be willing to rework the manuscript. I would rewrite the whole thing if they liked.
That night Seán toasted my success.
'To Carolinus, soon-to-be-published author!' He was excited for me.
'Thanks SF! Here's to you, too! I wouldn't have got on and done it if I hadn't read Maeve Binchy's advice in the book you gave me last year. But we mustn't count our chickens before they've hatched, either.'
Over the following weeks, I ping-ponged the manuscript back and forth with my editor, Jen Barclay. The publisher wasn't ready to commit yet but the improvements made thanks to her guidance were marked. The work we were doing meant it would be in better shape for self-publishing or another publisher if this one did fall through. I desperately hoped it wouldn't.
As we entered the last phase of the project a second wind, a new energy, filled the team. Thomas's wife, a dark-haired beauty, visited to see the buildings for the first time.
'What great fortune! Fine artisans, handsome and half-nude too!' she exclaimed, pointing to her husband and Sébastian working bare-chested on the roof in the late spring sun. Seán didn't know that I had chosen them for their looks; luckily they had turned out to be great artisans as well.
Aideen and Barry O'Brien, our friends from Dublin, arrived with their son, Cillian, and daughter, Juliette, perfectly timed for painting the Wine Lodge and bottling the new vintage. It was Sophia's birthday and Easter. With the fast-forward project that year, I felt like I had missed part of my children's growing up. Seán had been like a single parent at times while I disappeared for long days touring, away to Ireland or the UK for marketing, wine shows or WSET. We laughed heartily with Aideen and Barry about how each day Seán was disappointed when he came in from work at lunchtime, especially in winter when he was pruning, expecting a hot meal, only to find me deep in my work and unconscious of the time. But for Seán it wasn't a laughing matter.
'You forget how hard it is to do physically exhausting work all day. I need a good lunch to refuel. It is impossible to think, my brain is as exhausted as my body just with the process of physical survival out there.' The way to a man's heart is through his stomach, I recalled. I promised to do better.
That year, I had everything planned for the bottling well in advance. It required military precision and infinite patience. We had nine different labels every year, and each had to be carefully created with details from laboratory analysis (like the alcohol content) to organic certification, then
sent to three different parties for signoff. Seán said that when he came to bed at 2 a.m. I writhed and said 'Bottles, capsules, labels' in a panicked voice then turned over. I woke at six still dreaming – or having nightmares – about bottling.
Despite my angst, the bottles, labels, capsules, corks and wine were perfectly aligned. I did have everything right and Pierre de St Viance, our friend and bottler, did not have to bring out his Marseille expletives that had been de rigueur in the past.
Cillian was a bottling master and also, we discovered, a painting genius. For the Wine Lodge we had selected natural chalk, an ecological paint but a challenge to the painter, no easy one-coat wonder. Cillian had skill and patience, creating walls that begged to be stroked.
