Grape Expectations

by Caro Feely

  Juggling Ellie in one arm and the phone in the other I called the CIVRB. I explained my story while trying to stop Ellie from grabbing the phone. Madame listened patiently and told me to phone the Institut National de l'Origine et de la Qualité (INAO) Bergerac who were responsible for managing the AOC.

  Soon I was explaining my dilemma for the second time. The Madame at the INAO said she could only give copies of agréments to the person who owned the property at the time.

  'You could contact the previous owner. If they contact me I'll be able to release a copy.'

  'They have moved to Spain and we don't have contact details for them,' I said. 'Anyway, the Bergerac liquidator sold us the wine, not the previous owners. We own the wine. You must be able to give me a copy of the document.'

  Madame was kind but firm; there was no way. In any case, they only kept the last four years of agréments. Our wine was more than four years old. My heart sank.

  'You could try contacting the INAO juridique in Paris,' she threw out as a parting comment.

  Perhaps this was a sinister plot to make me practise my French and to test Ellie's patience. I gritted my teeth and called the INAO juridique to tell my tale for the third time.

  'You must contact the INAO in Bergerac,' said Madame helpfully.

  Ellie tried to grab the phone and I couldn't blame her. I was finding it somewhat difficult to control my frustration too.

  I explained calmly that the INAO Bergerac had sent me to her. She was apologetic but adamant that they were the only people who could solve my problem.

  After settling Ellie into her high chair I called INAO Bergerac again to be told a little more firmly that despite what Paris had said there was nothing she could do.

  'Contact the Bergerac liquidator and your notaire,' said Madame and put down the phone.

  The liquidator was on vacation and the Scarlet Pimpernel, our notaire, was unavailable. As a last resort I called Jamie.

  'I'll try to grease the wheels for you, Caro, but I can't promise anything. Sometimes there's no logic to these things,' he said.

  I visited the notaire's offices in Saussignac and found his assistant in.

  'Officially I can't do anything,' she said. Then glancing around to see no one was looking she whispered, 'I'll make a few calls for you.'

  Jamie called back a few hours later and said he had got nowhere. If Jamie couldn't swing it, it wasn't possible. I put down the phone, defeated.

  Cécile, our vineyard consultant, came to do our weekly tour of the vineyard. Most of her service was free to us as newly installed young farmers, a huge bonus. We started this routine as soon as the first buds appeared. I was the person touring the vineyard each week while Sean looked after les enfants. He still wasn't confident enough in the language to take on the weekly meeting. He planned to take a course with a local language school at the end of the growing season when we hoped his work pressure would ease, so I wouldn't have to make all his phone calls and take his meetings for him. Contrary to my initial misgivings, though, I looked forward to my weekly meeting with our vineyard consultant, taking copious notes for debriefing Sean. Cécile was a mine of information. Her knowledge, attention to detail and reliability were refreshing. At the end of her visit we stopped for our usual summary of the position.

  'Have you made your vineyard declaration for the Saussignac?' said Cécile.

  'I don't think so. What is it?'

  'You need to declare Appellation Contrôlée Saussignac and Appellation Contrôlée Côtes de Bergerac vineyards upfront. The deadline for the declaration was yesterday. Didn't you get a form in the post?'

  'No,' I replied, feeling nauseous. Both of these appellations were part of our planned range of wines.

  'Contact the INAO straight away,' said Cécile. 'They may let you make a late declaration because you didn't get the forms.'

  There were four bodies that controlled the lives of the Bergerac winemaker, and I didn't know which was responsible for sending these all-important forms. After more than six months I was still totally confused about where the lines of responsibility lay between the Fédération des Vins de Bergerac (FVB), the CIVRB, the INAO and the douanes (customs), who were strangely linked into many processes. Bureaucracy was proving a serious opponent and we hadn't made any wine yet.

  I called the INAO Bergerac again, the same people I had been in touch with in my failed hunt for the copies of the agréments, and explained my new problem. Madame said she would allow me to do the declaration for AC Saussignac and AC Côtes de Bergerac in person the following morning at their offices. I arrived punctually. When we finished the declarations Madame picked up a folder on her desk and passed it to me.

  'I have those copies for you.'

  I opened the folder to find the four agréments we needed for the sample shipment. I still don't know who convinced her to give us copies of agréments that were officially no longer available but I took them home, elated.

  A few days later as we prepared the sample shipment two AOC 'police' arrived. One was Joel, a middle-aged farmer with a mass of bob-length greying blonde hair, and the other our old friend Monsieur Ducasse, the Chamber of Agriculture representative, who raised his eyebrows in surprise at seeing us still here. He and Joel had come to count buds and check that the pruning on the Saussignac appellation vineyards met the strict rules. Ellie eyed him suspiciously, maybe wondering if she was in for another dazzling display of facial contortions.

  Appellation rules cover everything; from what you plant and how you plant it, to how you make your wine. These rules are outlined in a cahier des charges and are so detailed they even define the maximum number of buds allowed per vine; eight in this case. Low yields are necessary for quality and this is a way to restrict yields from the start of the season. The vineyard check went smoothly and they left after offering Sean a few suggestions about managing the yield and de-leafing. I was sure that our quota of administrative skirmishes was over for a while.

  The following week we got a letter from the INAO saying they could not grant us the right to do AC Saussignac as we had no white grape vines.

  'SF, I think the notaire duped us and transferred the white half of the vineyard to his brother,' I said, exasperated.

  'No, it's a farce created to keep you practising French,' said Sean.

  A few calls to the INAO and a visit to the douanes traced the error to a historic rental agreement by the previous owners. It was all straightened out in one afternoon. I was almost disappointed.

  With the house renovations in hand thanks to Jamie's intervention with Lambert, we started to look to future building priorities. The winery electricity was a matter of life and death and a tasting room was fundamental to sales success. I called the electrician that Jamie recommended. Jamie was a great colleague to have, always happy to help and knowledgeable not only on winegrowing and winemaking but also bureaucracy and renovation. We didn't get to know him very well socially, he was a bachelor with a busy diary, but I was pleased we'd been able to help him out too in those early days so that I could call on him when needed.

  Christophe the electrician, based in Gardonne five minutes away and available 24/7 to his winemaker clients, arrived in a beautiful new Mercedes van.

  'Ce n'est pas aux normes,' said Christophe, looking around the winery. 'We must take it out and redo it.'

  'It's not within regulatory norms' was a phrase I was becoming familiar with. In France everything is regulated down to exactly how bread must be made to be called 'traditional'.

  Christophe pointed to uncovered neon lights. 'With liquids being pumped at high pressure winery lights must have waterproof covers. And all this wiring must go.'

  Even to my untrained eye the old cables snaking round the roof looked in need of replacement.

  Christophe took measurements and disappeared with a desultory wave. The next day the fax spewed out a devis for ten thousand euro. I was staggered. The work didn't even include digging up half the courtyard to lay the new electri
city cables in the ground, which he said had to be done by someone else.

  At that price there was no way we could afford to redo the electricity but we didn't want to wind up another winemaker fatality. Bernard Barse, our old friend with the B&B and a qualified electrician as well as a vigneron, whistled when I mentioned the amount, but when he came round later and had a close look he confirmed the price was right.

  Meanwhile, despite the lack of funds I went ahead and asked a local roofer for an estimate for the renovation of the tasting room. He estimated that a quick repair of the roof would be a couple of thousand. Ignoring completely how little money we had to put towards the project he recommended a total replacement of the entire outbuilding roof, as a 'quick' repair would not be guaranteed since it would be attached to structural parts of the old roof that would not be replaced. Soon I was perched in front of his boss looking at a quote for twenty thousand. The tasting room renovation was looking as likely as the electricity. I felt desperate. Our operating budget was disappearing way faster than planned and the renovation budget had been eaten up by the house. There was no way we could afford to do these critical renovations.

  A few days later, just after I had resigned myself to potential electrocution and no tasting room, we got a letter from the taxman saying he owed us several thousand from the previous tax year. God clearly wanted us alive. I called Christophe, the electrician, in jubilation and asked him to find a way to halve his quote. He pared it back to the most crucial parts and the electricity work was soon underway.

  Through our first heatwave Sean lifted then relaid several tons of concrete for the cable and a drainage course alongside the house. Sweat pouring off his face and ears ringing with the noise of cutting cement, he struggled through blistering 40-degree heat, wishing he was back in an air-conditioned office.

  With the underground cable safely installed, Christophe's two electricians appeared in another new Mercedes van, ready to rewire the winery in cool, peace and calm. In the process of doing the winery work they disconnected the lights of the upstairs section of our house. Convinced that they were going to leave the house in darkness, Sean demanded that I verify that the house lights were going to be reconnected before they left.

  'Don't worry. We leave a gift of candles when we go. It's all part of the service,' said Manu.

  'Oh, and matches too,' said Serge, his partner.

  They were both doubled over with laughter by the time my lamentable French caught up with the joke. By late afternoon everything was reconnected. We would have to do the tasting room roof repairs ourselves as there was no way to stretch our tax refund to include that. While the renovation work was coming together, the work in the vineyard was getting away from us. Spring was powering ahead and leaving us behind.

  Chapter 6

  Shark Attack

  On supermarket shelves back home almost all baby food was organic. In France, in our area at least, there appeared to be no organic baby food. Bio, short for biologique, the term for organic, was far from accepted. Despite this, since coming to France we were even more convinced of the benefits of organic.

  The more we read about the toxic chemicals used in conventional farming, the less we liked them. They were bad for the land, the people applying them, the wildlife and the consumers of the result. Labels that stated 'do not enter the vineyard for 48 hours after you have sprayed this product' could not be good. Why would we want to put them onto grapes that were going into the food chain?

  On the opposite side of our valley, a couple of kilometres away, was a vineyard that looked like a desert. Sean nicknamed the incumbent 'Napalm Nic'. He sprayed herbicide over the entire vineyard, leaving not a blade of grass standing.

  'He does it to save doing the work of mowing the grass and ploughing,' said Cécile. 'It encourages erosion and is bad for the soil. Eventually it will be as lifeless as a desert.'

  Up close, the soil looked sick. Later in the season we saw Napalm Nic using a chemical spray for vine shoot removal. He was doing it to cut costs so he could supply cheap wine but also ensuring carcinogenic chemical residues for the consumer.

  With spring underway we needed an alternative to herbicide fast if we were to stick to our organic principles. Sean was up to his eyes with work in the vineyard – mowing, ploughing and raising the wires of the trellising – so it was up to me to find a weeding solution. We mow and plough alternating rows to prevent the competition, from plants like grass and weeds that grow between the rows, hampering the vines' growth. The new weeding solution needed to remove these plants from under the trellising and around the vine trunks.

  Cécile, my secret weapon, appeared with a yellow book of equipment and supplies for vineyards that included descriptions and price ranges for all available mechanical weeders. At first Cécile had been sceptical about us going organic but now she fully supported our conviction. At the start she was worried we wouldn't cope, even farming conventionally. She had seen how committed we were to learning but also to our organic philosophy.

  We liked the look of a relatively simple, hydraulically operated mechanical hoe that attached to the tractor and worked the soil between the vines where a regular plough could not reach. The salesman invited Sean to a demonstration at a nearby farm owned by Thierry Daulhiac. We had never met Thierry but we knew he was the president of the Saussignac appellation union. He probably had a reliable view on machinery. We also heard that he farmed organically. Sean still struggled with French – being an independent winegrower in France was a lonely job – and Thierry's English being little better, they communicated as only fellow farmers can. Sean was desperate for male company. He spent his days farming alone and his nights with his wife and very young daughters. Even his weekends were completely consumed by the vineyard. We had bitten off a lot more change and risk than we expected back in the heady days of planning our move.

  Sean saw the machine in operation at Thierry's farm and was impressed. We ordered the hoe and waited. The weeds were growing with more vigour than the vines. Even Cécile was ruffled. The weeds grew. We waited some more. The weeds grew faster.

  'Perhaps we should do one pass of a chemical herbicide to keep control of the vineyard,' said Cécile, struggling to see anything but weeds. We hadn't started organic certification yet as we had missed the annual cut-off, but we could not stomach using herbicide. I harassed the supplier again.

  In the intervening four weeks since we ordered the hoe Sean had more trips to Monsieur Bonny. The vine sprayer we had bought with the property was broken. Monsieur Bonny estimated that to fix it would cost almost the same as getting a more modern second-hand one. The second-hand one he proposed cost more than Sean had budgeted in equipment costs for the entire year but we needed a working sprayer tout de suite. In our region mildew poses a potentially lethal risk to the grape crop and preventative sprays are obligatory. The cash budgeted for our first year's expenses was diminishing much faster than planned. We were way outstripping the costs expected even after the vineyard accountant's judicious adjustments.

  We collected the bulbous spraying beast with eight arms from Monsieur Bonny. He was his usual bouncy self, showing Sean how it worked with me listening in for the odd bit of translation while trying to control the girls. I was almost unnecessary; although Sean's everyday French was pitiful, he already knew far more French agricultural machine terms than I did.

  'Be very, very careful to keep the power-take-off shaft in position otherwise it will break because of the height of the connector,' said Monsieur Bonny as we prepared to leave. It meant little to me, but Sean reassured him he'd be fine; all was clear.

  I waved goodbye and set off for home. Sean followed with the beautiful sprayer behind the tractor. As he drove into the courtyard at Haut Garrigue I knew something was wrong. I rushed out to find Sean almost in tears.

  'I was concentrating so hard, Carolinus. It was a split second of inattention as I drove through Saussignac village and hit a bump.'

  The power-take-off sh
aft was broken.

  That evening Sean read the entire tractor manual from cover to cover, discovering in the process that a simple twist of a button would have saved the breakage. Thereafter Monsieur Bonny always checked we had understood by asking the same thing in different ways, but that didn't help the broken shaft. We had so much to learn: I felt inadequate. It was yet another expense we didn't need. We were drowning financially but also in the work in the vineyard.

  Our neighbour, Sonia, agreed to look after Ellie for a few days so I could help Sean with shoot removal. Like roses, vines send out sucker shoots at the base of the vine that need to be removed. This can be done by hand, by machine or with chemicals. We didn't have a machine, so hand-work it was. It was tough work but it felt good. We were alone together for the first time in weeks, laughing and making better time than we would have working alone. There was something deeply satisfying about physically demanding work outside in a beautiful place with someone who you love. It wasn't easy but I glimpsed how fulfilling it could be, following this, our passion.