House of Peine

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  Her vile mood instantly evaporated but this was hardly a religious experience; to her Saint Vincent was just a punctuation mark on the road from the village. On one side of him lay the close-knit community of which Clementine was not a part, full of the friends she did not have, the good times she had never enjoyed. But beyond him, to her right, marching neatly up the hillside like long lines of obedient brown soldiers, lay her true and faithful amies. Her grapevines. In this case, the robust and fruity pinot meunier. Whether bare or snow-covered as they stood in the winter, woody and hopeful as they were now, or green and heaving with late summer fruit, the first sight of the family vines always gave her the same pleasant burr of satisfaction.

  Actually, other vignerons, especially in Champagne, might have gone so far as to feel joy at such a sight; after all they were in the business of making the world’s famously effervescent celebratory drink. But while Clementine had spent her whole life living, breathing, making, and, yes, drinking the glorious sparkling elixir that imbued the rest of the human race with gaiety and exuberance, and while she undeniably loved those grapes more than she loved anything else, she herself could not claim so much as a single bubbly bone in her body. Not a bubble of any kind in any part of her, for that matter. For reasons that stretched far into the past, Clementine was as flat as a glass of Marne River water. A pleasant burr of satisfaction was as good as it got. She simply knew nothing more.

  She slowed the pump of those shapely legs on the pedals and let her bicycle cruise as her eyes lingered over the fruits of her labours. These vines up on the hill had been barely touched by the frost and anyway pinot meunier was tough, it could take it. She wasn’t worried about them. But in her other parcels of land at the bottom of the valley? Fear nipped at her satisfaction. Her pinot noir grapes did not have the resilience of their meunier cousins. They were not at all thick-skinned, they were sensitive and precious. You could taste it in the finished product, that’s why the extra effort in mollycoddling them through to harvest was worth it, more than worth it. Still, thought Clementine, guiding those grapes through the minefield of seasonal aberrations was not a job for the faint-hearted. She had no time to dilly-dally and feel a burr of anything. What was she thinking? Winemakers, when it came down to it, were farmers, working always against the whims of nature, especially here in the north. There was a good reason why no one else on the globe (except a small handful of Germans, some ninnies in England and a group of upstarts in Denmark) attempted grape growing at this latitude. Unless you knew exactly what you were doing it was a fool’s game. Even when you did know what you were doing you needed good luck in large quantities. And it could not be said that Olivier Peine had been known for his luck. Well, he was hardly having a good month.

  Clementine sped up again, her muscles singing, and looked down the hill to another Peine plot, near the river.

  To a casual passer-by, this part of the Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne hillside may have looked like one solid brown undulating blanket of grapevines separated only by the odd chalky pathway but in fact it was no such thing. It was instead a monochrome mosaic of different villagers’ grapes. If that same passer-by looked closely enough, he might notice that the colour, size or material of the posts varied from plot to plot, that grass grew between some vines, tangled weeds between others, pruning clippings lay between the grapes over there, but the ground was bare between those ones there. So it was in Champagne. One vigneron might tend his 20 rows a certain way while his neighbour, not spitting distance away, might do it completely differently and his neighbour, not half spitting distance away, might do it differently again.

  The Peines had their 19 separate parcels of grapes dotted along the hillside and down in the valley. They used metal posts and grew grass in the rows, which Olivier believed helped the vines grow deeper in the ground for extra nourishment. The Labordes had a dozen plots, as did the Feneuils; the Geoffroys (the name flitted through her mind like a moth — would she ever not feel a lurch at the thought of it?) had 17; and there were many more village vignerons who didn’t make their own wine but sold their grapes to Moët and Veuve Clicquot or, Clementine’s heart skipped a beat, to Krug, the king of champagnes.

  Oh, how she dreamed of producing just once in her life a vintage wine to rival Krug’s Clos du Mesnil, probably the most talked about, least-tasted champagne in the world. She had sampled it just once, at a tasting in Epernay many years before when she and Olivier were still included in such events. Sometimes to this day she woke up with the taste of those chardonnay bubbles on her tongue. And then there was the Vieilles Vignes Françaises, Bollinger’s ode to champagne the way it was before the phylloxera louse got to most of France’s native vines. She had tasted that Bollinger blanc de noirs only once too. “Laa-a-a!”

  The thing was, Clementine considered, returning to the safe subject of her one true reliable passion, Peine champagne was good, she knew that. She knew it in the same way François Peine had known it when he first grew his grapes and bottled their juice back in 1697 when bubbles were still considered a mistake. She knew the modern Peine champagne was every bit as good if not better than that of most grandes marques. Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne was a cru village after all — every single grape rated near perfect on the official scale of quality.

  They would never have the kudos of Krug or Bollinger, of course they wouldn’t, but both those houses made their champagne using grapes bought in from independent growers. No big champagne house owned enough land to grow all its own grapes. Why, some big champagne houses owned no land at all! Bought every last berry from someone else! At the House of Peine, on the other hand, every last drop in every last bottle came from a vine tended by no other hand than Clementine’s. She knew each row of vines by name and nearly every plant by character. She helped pick them, she pressed them, she coaxed their juice into barrels and their wine into bottles. She choreographed almost every last bubble. She might never have the kudos of her famous rivals, but she truly believed she had a champagne that was every bit as good — if not better.

  Of course, her famous rivals had been busy pouring their resources into making sure the world knew about their product, which the House of Peine had not. Instead, Olivier had stayed in his underground cave chiselled out of the chalky earth where, never mind the world, there wasn’t even a window. The rest of the universe could go to hell in a hand basket as far as he had been concerned. It certainly wasn’t going to find out about the deliciously nutty notes of the ’98 nor taste the strawberry highlights of the last rosé. Not with Olivier at the helm. The Krugs and Bollingers had left the House of Peine far behind in this regard and Clementine knew she could never catch up. But she could at least start trying now that the House of Peine was hers.

  Her confidence in this matter had grown, as it happened, since the night of the frost, when her loneliness had closed in on her like a fog. In the few short days since Olivier’s demise, Clementine had come to realise that without him, the House of Peine actually had more of a future than she could ever remember. Her mornings were no longer hampered by her father’s hungover mumblings, his brusque instructions; her afternoons no longer pockmarked with worry about him humiliating her in the street or being squashed by a falling barrel.

  It had slowly dawned on her that without the curmudgeonly obstacle of her complicated father she could do whatever she wanted. And what she wanted was to see the House of Peine return to the glory days of previous centuries, when Russian tsars had begged for it, English kings had toasted with it, and her Peine ancestors had walked the streets of Champagne with their heads held high.

  In fact, it was what she had been waiting for her whole long lonely life; it was why her time on this particular square of often bleak and battle-scarred earth was not a waste; it was the reason she got up in the morning.

  “Good-bye, Papa,” she shouted into the crisp quiet air, tears drying on her cheeks before she could even feel them. “And good riddance!” The dark prince of Peine was dead, long live the queen!
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  At this she felt an infinitesimal pull on her handlebars, which seemed to point her in the direction of her little unborn berry babies down near the river. Clementine let the bike take her where it wanted to go, crossing the road and squinting down the hill towards her nearest plot of pinot noir. Could it be? Her heart skipped a beat. Was she imagining it or was there an almost invisible green tinge to the dull woody brownness of her naked vines?

  Her heart sped up again as she veered off the tarmac and into the vines, Cochon bringing up the rear, her bicycle flying faster and faster down between two rows of Feneuil pinot, her body bumping and jiggling over the rough ground, her pinched waistband forgotten, her eyes fixed on her own canes. The gentle breeze colluded with her downhill speed and picked up her orange curls, unfurling them behind her like a cartoon character as she bounced through the vines, her open coat flapping noisily, flirting dangerously with the greasy chain of her bike.

  In her haste, however, she forgot about the stones that Olivier had recently moved after an entirely unnecessary argument with Henri Feneuil, to mark where their grapes stopped and the Peine ones started. Her front wheel, its tyre long due for more air, hit one such rock at just the right angle for the bike to come instantly to a standstill. Clementine was not so lucky. She flew through the air like a giant navy-blue juggling ball, landing flat on her back quite some distance from her bicycle with a noise not unlike a hot-air balloon in an emergency deflation.

  She lay there for a moment, wondering if she was dead. But everything hurt and she was pretty sure that the whole point of being dead was that nothing hurt at all. Slowly, still winded, she attempted to sit up, in so doing turning around to face her pinot noir canes at eye level. At this, the breath disappeared from her lungs once more, but her pain vanished and a smile launched itself across her face, completely changing the nature of her looks.

  To her pinot noir, she looked beautiful.

  And to her, so did they. Her eyes had not been deceiving her from the road. There had been the vaguest tinge of green. Débourrement! Bud burst! Each little knot on every single cane had broken into the tiniest of songs. All was not lost. The frost had killed nothing but Olivier. And now, on the very day his body had been committed to the ground, new life had been breathed into her vines.

  Clementine collapsed back on the grass and laughed. How she laughed!

  It was a sound the vines hardly ever got to hear. And it warmed them as much as the glorious spring sunshine, which chose that exact moment to make its first truly serious appearance.

  Mathilde

  Once spring had wriggled out beyond the clutches of winter, everything about the valley changed.

  It could be a bleak place in the cooler months, prompting many a thin-lipped tourist who hadn’t done his or her homework to murmur bitter asides to the effect that they didn’t care how delicious champagne tasted, Provence was much nicer this time of year.

  But come mid-May, the Marne Valley bloomed with hope. Those dry dark vines, having slept through the snow, survived the first frosts and gone on to give birth to millions of tiny buds, now sent supple green shoots out into the world, turning the landscape from dull brown and off-white to a kaleidoscope of brilliant jades and emeralds.

  Clementine was down in the cellar riddling; twisting and turning the resting champagne bottles to dislodge their yeasty sediment from the bottom of the bottle into the neck from whence it would eventually be disgorged. Once upon a time, riddling — or remuage as it was known — had been a revered profession, passed down from father to son, but as with many of the old ways, those days were long gone. Now most of the fathers were dead or arthritic and the sons worked in IT in Paris.

  There was still old Nicolas Bateau in Hautvillers if anyone looked hard enough, but it was common knowledge his hands were so crippled he was merely wheeled out to rattle the bottles for goggle-eyed visitors. The Bateau champagne, like most, was actually riddled in a jointly owned mechanical gyropalette, which did in eight days what took human hands eight weeks.

  As one might imagine, Clementine would not cross the street to spit on a gyropalette. Always a stickler for tradition, she riddled the bottles herself and unlike other vignerons who could not afford any alternative, she liked it. It gave her a chance to reacquaint herself with her grape juice, she felt. It had been pretty much ignored for the years it had lain in the cave inventing its own bubbles, after all, and deserved a bit of one-on-one attention.

  Standing in front of the wooden racks or pupitres full of bottles, arms outstretched as her hands moved back and forth, up and down, wrists flicking in perfect harmony, she often felt like a passionate conductor leading her favourite orchestra in a movement of enormous importance and beauty.

  More than three hours on the trot, however, and all she could hear were bum notes and out-of-tune instruments, which was why on this particular perfect spring day she decided a little something custardy was required to help her through to lunch. The off-key music of her bottles still ringing in her ears as she emerged into the courtyard, she stopped for a moment just to feel the sun on her face, to breathe in the fresh air. Then she jumped on her bike to head for the pâtisserie and whatever Bernadette had on offer. Cochon, hearing the bicycle start its noisy trip across the courtyard potholes, shook himself awake from his position under the kitchen table and started after her.

  At the bottom of the drive, however, they struck a snag. The once magnificent gates to the House of Peine refused to open. Clementine had to get off her bicycle and clatter and jangle them for quite some time, employing a smorgasbord of different expletives as she did so. This excited Cochon beyond belief — he so enjoyed a temper tantrum — but just when she was thinking she’d have to go back to the kitchen and settle for a stale baguette with a dollop of thyme honey, the gates begrudgingly creaked open and let them out.

  Once on the other side, having heaved them shut again, she dropped her bike and stood back with a critical eye. Cochon, who was in the mood for a little pastry something himself, flopped huffily onto the ground at her feet, one black eye rolling upwards as it followed her line of vision. Same old gates, as far as he could tell, but for Clementine it seemed that now there was the possibility, no, the promise of change in the wind, she was seeing all the same old things in an entirely different light.

  The entrance to a home was like the cover of a book, she decided, standing there, sweaty hands on sturdy hips: no matter what anyone said, it told you all you needed to know about what lay inside. And looking at the entrance to the House of Peine, well, truthfully, the story was a sad one, most likely titled “Has Seen Better Days”. The ridiculously ornate gates stood five metres tall, delicate curlicues fanning extravagantly far above her. Once they had been a particularly becoming sky blue but rust was now the predominant shade, the paint long since bubbled and flaked off into the ether. What’s more, the artisan ironwork stretched for five metres either side of the gates but then ran out to be replaced by an anaemic hedge that had once been tall and lush but was now crippled and spare with big bald patches where whole herds of animals — or people — could step through if they wanted to, which of course they didn’t.

  The château, half a kilometre back up the bumpy gravel drive, was another picture that painted a thousand words and told a barely happier story. Clementine squinted through the gates at her home for the past 44 years. It was golden brick and stood three storeys high (if you counted the attic floor with its cheerful collection of chimney stacks and dormer windows). From a distance, the bones of the house were as good as they had ever been but close up the impression was far less flattering. Nearly half the upstairs windows were boarded, the glass long since broken with no hope of being repaired. Many of the shutters hung crookedly off their hinges and grassy weeds grew enthusiastically out of the blocked guttering. The original front door had been in disrepair for decades, old slats from wooden packing crates nailed haphazardly across it to stop cracks from getting bigger and to keep draughts at bay — a losin
g battle as far as Clementine could fathom. Up closer still there was not even a door handle, just an old screwdriver in an empty geranium pot that one poked in the hole and wriggled to gain entry. There was no bell, no door knocker either, though Olivier had long ago scared away anyone who might come to visit and Clementine did not have the skill nor the inclination to get them back.

  Should that thin-lipped tourist happen to pass by, all this would be lost on him or her, it must be said. Why, in many ways, from a distance, the House of Peine looked like the perfect French fairytale castle. A grand dame of a château draped in the rich green cloth of her vines. That tourist might even forget disappointment about the general lack of charm in this part of the country and pull over to the side of the road, commenting that they saw something just like this house in the New York Times magazine. Or they might take a photo through the gates to catch the colour of the shutters so they could go home to their London flat and paint the outdoor furniture that exact shade.

  From where Clementine stood, having lived there all her life and planning on staying, it looked more like an abandoned ship that had been looted by pirates and left, full of nothing but ghosts, forlorn and becalmed on a luscious green sea.

  Still, it was afloat, wasn’t it, she thought, the promise of her future bringing a smile to her face as she reached down and grabbed the handlebars of her bike, Cochon jumping daintily to attention. And it would sail once again. She might even get a sign put up, a notice to the world that she was seriously back in the business. She had to cellar the recently bottled champagne first, of course, keep riddling the previous year’s, disgorge it when she had time, cellar that, take stock of Olivier’s reserves, look at the accounts — about which she knew absolutely nothing — and sort out some help to replace those useless twins. Actually, the sign would have to wait. She had a lot of work to do before the end of September and the vendange, the harvest.