‘What has the fisc got to do with it?’
‘My father owes a small fortune in back-taxes.’
‘Call them up.’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘Seriously. There’s no one more greedy than a tax man. Tell the fisc what you’ve been telling me and they’ll back off in the expectation of all the millions of francs which will be coming their way when you’ve put Château de Cluzac on the map.’
‘What I really want to do,’ Clare said, warming to her theme, ‘is turn the Orangerie into a salle de reception, for weddings, conferences, that sort of thing. Jamie’s going to sound out the drug companies. I want to pull negociants, businessmen, restaurateurs, wine buffs, people who will really appreciate the privilege of being in such surroundings, as well as tourists, from all over the world. I want to create a rural embassy for great wine.’
Alain Lamotte refilled his glass with wine from one of Assurance Mondiale’s châteaux.
‘An efficient retail operation is going to eat money. How do you propose to raise the necessary cash?’
‘Have you any suggestions?’
‘Your father kept a large bottle stock.’
‘Bottle stock?’
‘It’s always been standard practice for leading châteaux to sell off the total récolte, with the exception of a small percentage for later sale or for drinking, within a year of the vintage. This is to finance the next year’s crop. Your father’s policy, possibly to spite our friend Balard, was to hold back a substantial proportion even of the more modest vintages. Possibly he had his eye on the increasing number of “collectors”. Those rambling cellars of yours must hold fifty thousand bottles at the very least – representing every vintage produced on the estate – many of them lovingly cared for by your grandfather. Releasing a judicious quantity of your bottle stock would go some way to financing you…’
‘Could you repeat that in words of one syllable?’
‘OK. What you want to do is to put some of your wine into a Christie’s fine claret sale. London is still the wine capital of the world.’
‘How do I go about that?’
Alain extracted a business card from his wallet. ‘David Markham is a personal friend of mine. Have a word with David and tell him exactly what you’ve got, and how much you’re willing to put on the market.’ Alain signalled for the bill. ‘Selling your bottle stock, however, is not going to cover the capital cost of new winery equipment. I would like to lend you the money…’
‘You!’
‘For one year. With a two-way option…’
‘Meaning?’
‘If at the end of the year you can pay back the loan, all well and good. If you can’t, Assurance Mondiale can buy Château de Cluzac at the market price.’
‘You mean go into partnership with Assurance Mondiale?
‘These days family ownership is not always in a wine-grower’s best interest. Suppose we say twenty-six per cent?’
‘Why are you doing this?’
Alain could hardly explain to Clare that by lending her money, which, despite her grandiose plans for Château de Cluzac, he thought it extremely unlikely she would be able to repay at the end of a year, he might yet secure the estate for Assurance Mondiale. He leaned across the table.
‘Let’s say because your eyes are extraordinaire…’
Taking the young PGD seriously, Clare said, ‘Cut it out!’
Driving back to Cluzac, she wondered how she could have been so crass as to imagine that Alain Lamotte, who had talked about nothing but Delphine, the children and Assurance Mondiale throughout the meal, was interested in anything but the 150 hectares of her prime wine-growing land.
Turning left at the Château de Cluzac pancarte, on which Alain Lamotte had congratulated her, she thought how her father – who looked upon himself as a landowner, rather than a businessman, who believed in aristocratic segregation and in keeping himself and his affairs to himself – would have been shocked beyond belief at the mere sight of it.
Fortunately he had not stayed around long enough to see the flagrant arrows of the sign, indicating the once well-guarded citadel of his ancestral home. Three weeks from now, when he returned from Florida to arrange for the transport of his cars, would be time enough.
Charles-Louis’ leavetaking had been anything but harmonious. A long session with Van Gelder had led to the South African’s storming out of the château swearing eternal vengeance. Clare, who had been closeted with Monsieur Boniface in his office at the time, had looked out of the window and almost felt sorry for Papa.
‘A handshake is a handshake.’ Van Gelder’s raised voice could be heard across the courtyard. ‘That’s not the way we do things in South Africa.’
Having presumably said as much as he was prepared to say to the disappointed would-be purchaser of Château de Cluzac, Charles-Louis, who had never been one to explain, did not reply. Stony faced, hands in his pockets, he accompanied Van Gelder to his car.
‘This place has cost me money, Baron. A great deal of money. My lawyers are not going to like it. Don’t think for one moment you’re going to get away with this…’
Watching impassively as Van Gelder slammed the door of his Mercedes and drove angrily away, Charles-Louis, followed obediently by Rougemont – to whom Laura Spray categorically refused to give houseroom – strolled towards the stables, where Clare suspected that her father had his eye on a curvacious new groom.
Laura Spray, wearing a pink pantsuit and matching pink Alice band and almost asphyxiating Clare her with her liberally applied scent, had taken Clare’s arm confidentially during a stroll round the moat as she attempted to make her see sense.
‘How could you do this to your father?’
‘I rather think,’ Clare said, ‘that the shoe is on the other foot.’
‘I am trying to tell you something. Don’t try to be smart. Charles-Louis wants out of this place. Frankly, he needs the money. He has a lifestyle to support…’
‘He’ll get his money. We’ll all get our money.’
‘You are doing this to your father out of spite.’
‘If you say so.’ Clare was not going to get involved with Laura Spray.
‘I suggest you take your share of the sale and go back to England. Forget the whole thing. You’ve made your point.’
‘And I suggest you mind your own business, Mrs Spray.’ Withdrawing her arm, Clare turned towards the Orangerie for the renovations of which she held rough drawings in her hand. ‘Stop meddling in things you know nothing about.’
‘You’ve upset Laura,’ Charles-Louis said later over his whisky in the library. ‘I will not tolerate rudeness to my future wife.’
‘Then tell your “future wife” to keep out of my hair.’
‘I’ll thank you to act in a civilised fashion towards Laura until we leave.’
Standing on the château steps amid a sea of Laura Spray’s Louis Vuitton luggage, while the local taxi driver loaded the station wagon, on the day of their departure, Charles-Louis had kissed Clare coldly. Any emotion was kept for Rougemont who, looking more depressed than usual, as if he knew what was going on, clung like a limpet to his side. Having shaken hands with Sidonie, who dropped the Baron a brief curtsey, he squatted on his haunches and put his arms around the dog.
‘We’re going to be late, Charles!’ Laura tapped her foot impatiently, pushing Rougemont away roughly as he tried to follow them into the car.
In a moment of panic, as her father vanished through the archway, leaving her alone with her bravado, Clare turned to Sidonie, in her white apron, for solace as she had done as a child.
For the first time that she could remember, Sidonie avoided her gaze. Turning on her heel and leaving Clare alone, a solitary figure on the moss-covered steps, the cook disappeared through the portico, to be swallowed up by the gloomy interior of the château.
Twenty-five
Sidonie’s grandfather, Fernand Malbec, had joined the estate as a coachman and carter in 19
10. Her father, originally an apprentice tonnelier (in the days when the barrels were constructed on site), had later changed direction and eventually become maître de chai. Her two older brothers, Marcel and Arnaud, had worked as vignerons for Baron Thibault, and later for Charles-Louis. Sidonie herself had been employed in the château since she had been a girl of fourteen.
The tragic death of Baron Thibault, the departure of Baronne Gertrude for the Pas-de-Calais, and the taking over of the reins of the château by the young Baron de Cluzac, had had little effect in the kitchens, where the menus, which faithfully echoed the seasons, continued to be sent upstairs as before.
Charles-Louis had been down from Oxford for only a few months, when Sidonie – who thought that, with his thick brown hair and his roving eyes, he was the most attractive man she had ever set eyes on – realised that her employer was looking at her in such a way, each time their paths crossed, that she thought she had forgotten to put on her clothes. When he waylaid her in the linen-room – where he had no business – pinned her against the wall and began to fumble with his trousers, she was too terrified to protest. As the young Baron withdrew his thrusting body from her own rigid one, she thanked him politely, before running out of the house and into the orchard, where she flung herself on the ground among the bruised and fallen apples, and burst into mortified tears.
Six months later, after the linen-room incident had been repeated on several occasions and she began to look forward to it, she found she was enceinte with the Baron’s child. She had been conveniently married off to Jean Boyer – who had had not only his fingers but his testicles blown to pieces during the German occupation – then a young apprentice in the chais. When the child, a boy whom she had planned to christen Fernand (after her grandfather) was born with the cord round his neck and buried on the estate, Sidonie, never very articulate, had retreated into taciturnity. She did not blame Charles-Louis, who even now, in her eyes, could do no wrong, but took her hostility out on her long-suffering husband, and unloaded her maternal feelings on to Clare. Irrational as it was, Sidonie blamed her erstwhile charge – rather than Laura Spray and the fact that the estate was to be sold – for the Baron’s precipitate departure from Château de Cluzac.
Sidonie’s was not the only stone wall Clare found herself up against. Calling on her neighbour, the Comtesse de Ribagnac, at the behest of Baronne Gertrude, and taking tea on her stone-balustered terrace, with its magnificent view over the Gironde and its islands, she had noticed hordes of pickers moving in dark lines through the Ribagnac vineyards. They appeared to make a careful study of each vine from which they assiduously removed surplus bunches of unripe grapes.
‘La vendange verte,’ the old Countess said, following Clare’s gaze. ‘Summer pruning. It costs my son a small fortune but it ensures the maximum concentration of flavour and gives us the best wine.’
By dint of keeping her eyes open, as she drove up and down the Route des Châteaux chasing builders and craftsmen in pursuit of the various innovations she had planned, Clare was surprised to discover that the vines of Château de Cluzac were the only ones of note from which a proportion of the tight bunches were not being removed.
Seeking out Albert Rochas, who made no secret of his lack of confidence in his woman boss, and seemed miraculously to disappear, with his team, deeper into the vineyards each time Clare put in an appearance, she finally caught up with the chef de culture as he was ploughing for the fourth, and last, time to remove the summer weeds.
Shuffling her feet to shake the freshly turned earth from her shoes, she put a hand to her eyes to shield them from the midday sun, and looked up at the cabin of the vibrating tractor. Pulling on the handbrake, Albert Rochas stared down at her.
‘Bonjour Albert.’
‘Bonjour Mademoiselle.’
‘Could I have a word?’
Albert stared. Clare stood her ground. She was not going to stand for any nonsense.
Switching off the engine and wiping his hands on a rag, the vineyard manager, in his heavy, dust-covered boots, climbed down from the cabin reluctantly.
‘Ribagnac is carrying out a vendange verte, Albert.’
‘The Ribagnac vines are young. These are old. Comme moi.’ He allowed himself a wry joke.
‘You’re not thinking of pruning?’
‘Non, Mademoiselle.’
‘Aren’t there too many bunches?’
‘No more than the Appellation Controlee will permit.’
‘I thought a lower yield meant higher concentration. This year the vintage has to be special.’
‘Oui, Mademoiselle.’
‘Château de Cluzac has to make a genius wine. We cannot afford to be pipped at the post.’
Albert stared at her. Everything he stood for was being impugned.
‘We will carry out a vendange verte.’
Despite the fact that no love had been lost between himself and the Baron, Jean Boyer, blessé de guerre, a troglodyte in his own cellars, was even more resentful of the new chatelaine than was the chef de culture. Oblivious of what was going on in the vineyards, the maître de chai spent his life in the semi-darkness among his vats and his barrels, which represented the most important moments in the clandestine life of the wine.
The new wine was stored in the first-year cellar, where the cellarmaster carried out the numerous rackings (transferring the wine from one cask to another), and finings, which were necessary to remove the unstable elements. After twelve months, during which the barrels were regularly topped up, and turned ‘three-quarter bung’, the wine was transferred to the chai de conservation, the second-year chai, where it was left on its own to mature for anything up to eighteen months.
The maître de chai was responsible for these and many other important procedures, as well as the eventual assemblage of the wine. Calling on his expertise, and taking wine which had come from different parts of the vineyard, he blended and mixed it like colours on a painter’s palette.
Jean Boyer, wearing a blue plastic apron, and ankle-deep in discarded egg shells, was in the first-year cellar carrying out the tirage au fin (the second fining), which had occupied him and his assistants for several weeks, when Clare sought him out. Watching the cellarmaster, as he stood with his balloon whisk in his mutilated hand, carrying out the traditional technique which would preserve the integrity of the wine, took her back to the time when he had first shown her how, with a flick of the wrist, to separate the yolks (later to be discarded) from the whites of the eggs. These whites would be poured through a funnel into the barrels where, spreading out like the filaments of a spider’s web, they would sink slowly to the bottom, drawing down with them the unwanted impurities in the wine.
‘What’s for dinner, Jean?’ Clare teased him, as she had done when she was a child.
‘Mayonnaise with fifteen hundred egg yolks!’ had been his habitual response. Today none was forthcoming. Under the stewardship of Charles-Louis, Jean Boyer had been in sole charge of both the chais and the assemblage. He did not take kindly to interference.
Clare decided to take the bull by the horns.
‘I have ordered some new vats, Jean.’
For a long moment all that could be heard in the gloom of the cellar was the regular thump-thump of the wooden whisk upon the time-blackened bowl beneath Jean’s arm.
‘There’s nothing wrong with the old vats.’
‘Temperature-regulated inox…’
The whisk went faster. ‘We have our own style. We don’t need to imitate others.’
‘Château de Cluzac has to move into the twentieth century. It needs a more modern system, an analytical laboratory. We have to get the right balance between tradition and technology…’ She heard herself echoing Alain Lamotte.
‘Technology!’ The whisk stopped. Jean Boyer tapped his head with his two remaining fingers. ‘Here is my technology, Mademoiselle Clare, my analytical laboratory. The next thing, you will be making your grand vin by informatique…’
‘Don
’t you think I know as well as you do, Jean,’ Clare addressed the cellarmaster’s back as he pointedly removed the bung from a barrel into which he would pour the whipped egg whites, ‘that a great wine, like a great symphony, cannot be made by computer?’
Jean Boyer in his cellars, Albert Rochas in his vineyards, Sidonie in her kitchens, and the pining Rougemont who refused to leave Clare’s side, were not the only ones to miss the Baron. When Clare had taken the cheque for the chapel roof to the Convent of Notre Dame de Consolation, it was to find that her aunt not only harboured no bitterness towards Charles-Louis for the fact that he had tried to cheat her, but had even made excuses for her brother’s reprehensible behaviour.
‘I’m sorry my father has done Notre Dame de Consolation out of so much money, that he has double-crossed you,’ Clare said, giving the Reverend Mother the money Charles-Louis had given her, ostensibly for her art gallery.
‘He hasn’t double-crossed us, child. The wine market collapsed so your father had no cashflow. The poor man was unable to pay his taxes…’
‘Only because he’d salted all the profits away in Switzerland.’
‘If Loulou had brought the money back from Switzer-fraud. They would put him in jail. Charles-Louis was caught, you see!’
Clare was thinking of Tante Bernadette (and the charitable scenario her aunt had superimposed upon the Baron’s actions) with some amusement, as she drove out of the château gates and bumped over the potholes towards the main road. In response to an urgent need to get away for a while from the hostile atmosphere that pervaded the château, she was going to Bordeaux to call on Beatrice Biancarelli. After visiting the boutique she would spend a couple of hours in le Gaumont in the Georges Clémenceau where, no matter what was showing, she would forget her troubles in the darkness of the cinema.
As she approached the junction and turned her head automatically to admire the new sign, she did a double take. Where before had stood the giant pancarte which had so distressed Claude Balard, there was an uninterrupted view across the Château Martin vineyards.
Vintage Page 20
