Vintage

by Rosemary Friedman

  ‘I can look after myself.’

  Having spent more than two hours in the cellars, using his basic French to suggest to Jean – to whom current scientific concepts such as pH, oxidation-reduction and colloids were a closed book, but who listened to the oenologist with respect – that new vats would be the first step in putting Château de Cluzac on the map in the shortest possible time, and personally getting to work with the hose, Halliday told Clare that what she really had to do was to declassify part of her 1993 vintage.

  Clare hadn’t the foggiest idea what the oenologist was talking about. He explained that, since she was strapped for cash, the choice was one of financial responsibility, and this would be eased considerably by the creation of a ‘second’ wine. To do this she would have to make use of her ‘reserve’; take wine from the main blend and mix it with that which had been dumped, not because it wasn’t good enough but because it would have spoiled the balance.

  ‘Balance?’

  ‘When the constituents are in the right proportions the wine is well-balanced – good fruit flavours and a positive after-taste or “finish” in the mouth. Not enough fruit and your wine’s too dull: too much fruit and it’s too simple or “jammy”. Insufficient sun means acidic “green” tannins. Too much sun and not enough rain, you get cold stewed tea. A good winemaker will use his equipment and his palate to compensate for the shortcomings of nature.

  ‘Your château wine matures in the bottle. Your second wine will be for early drinking. Balance it from the start and you can do what you like with it. Sell it on the Place de Bordeaux, stick it in quarter bottles with screw caps and flog it to the airlines. Your neighbours will kill you. You can’t sell it under the Château de Cluzac label. You’ll have to find another name for it.’

  ‘How about Château de Cluzac Inférieure…?’

  ‘It won’t be inferior. Just different. Not made to last as long. Even the most fastidious airline will fall over themselves to buy it. What you decide to call it is a mega decision. Just remember that the English have black belts in snobbery when it comes to wine. The top ten best sellers are bought not on quality but on the name on the label and the price.’

  ‘And the French?’

  ‘The French just get on with it. Seventy per cent of what they drink is bought in supermarkets; they take no pride in their wines. Give your average Pom a wine list and it’s a different story. Ri-oja, Lam-brusco, Chianti, Val-pol-icella, Pouilly Fuissé, Pouilly-Fumé – they can’t even tell the difference – Gewürz-traminer, Puligny-Montrachet, Chassagne-Montrachet, Châteauneuf-du-Pape… They like the way it sounds.’

  ‘Am I allowed to declassify?’ Clare asked, as they came out of the gloom of the cellars into the sunlight and, accompanied by a subdued Rougemont, walked through the iron gate towards the formal gardens where Aristide Louchemain, son of old Monsieur Louchemain, was tending the miniature orange trees, which spent their winters under canvas, in their square white tubs.

  ‘You can do anything you damn’ well like. There’s a whole new generation of wine drinkers out there. Bordeaux means nothing to them. It means less than nothing. They’d just as soon drink wines from the Midi, from eastern Europe, from the New World. Heavily promoted “bargain basement” wines don’t do anyone any favours. The retailer makes nothing, the producer gets shafted, and the consumer goes more and more down-market. We call it “the supermarket effect”. As far as Bordeaux is concerned, the expensive stuff is overpriced and the sub-five-pounds claret market is stuffed with lean, green wines you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. A “second” wine from a second growth Bordeaux château – under a fiver – and the supermarket buyers will be beating a path to your door.’

  ‘Why hasn’t Château de Cluzac declassified before?’

  ‘From what I hear, your father would have died first.’

  Halliday picked up a yellowed tennis ball which lay on the path and tossed it from hand to hand.

  ‘Ever been to Australia?’

  Clare shook her head.

  ‘We make some great wine.’

  ‘I’ve heard.’

  ‘Two per cent of the world’s output and seventy-five per cent of the world’s know-how. We’ve just signed a two-hundred-page agreement. Took five years to draw up: Australia to stop using European wine names – champagne, burgundy, chablis, port, claret and so on – and the EU recognises our winemaking techniques and renounces the right to geographical names such as Coonawarra…’

  ‘No more Coonawarra claret?’

  ‘Right, mate.’ Stooping, Halliday rolled the tennis ball along the tended path, where it was studiously ignored by Rougemont.

  ‘What’s up with him?’

  ‘He still misses my father.’

  ‘In Australia we arrange our wineries differently. It doesn’t make any sense to build the same high-tech processing plant in a dozen different locations, so we truck our grapes – hundreds of miles sometimes – for pressing. It’s like trucking the grapes from Burgundy to Bordeaux. Only back home it’s not illegal.’

  ‘You travel a lot?’

  ‘You could say I collect a good few air miles. It’s damned hard. Ill-equipped locations, five time zones, not much sleep, no weekends off, no lunchbreaks, a workforce that doesn’t speak the language… August I’m in California for the early white sparkling wine varietals, then it’s back to Europe for the long vintage sessions. I usually finish up in Germany with the late-harvested November grapes. With the northern hemisphere wrapped up by early December, I’ll take a Christmas break. January, I’ll start again with the southern hemisphere. Fortunately the South African harvest is in March. Wines in other parts of the world may have bigger extractions, stronger flavours, more powerful body, but none of them has the elegance of Bordeaux.’

  ‘What exactly do you do?’

  ‘Fly in before the harvest. Tell the growers how, when and in what order the grapes are to be picked. Clean out the winery, supervise the vinification, maturation and bottling.’ Taking a coin from his pocket, he spun it in the air before catching it and turning it over on the back of his hand. ‘Most growers look for safety. The winemaker takes risks.’

  ‘You really like making wine.’

  ‘It’s a good job. Wine makes people happy. It’s like fine food, good music, a beautiful painting. Tell you a secret, Clare. I’ve just bought myself a half-share in a vineyard in Chile…’

  ‘Why Chile?’

  ‘Five thousand kilometres of coastline to temper the sun and keep the rainfall low. No restrictions, no Appellation Contrôlée, you’re free to express your ideas. It’s always been my dream…’

  Taking his wallet from the back pocket of his sun-bleached jeans, Halliday took out a bunch of business cards and gave one to Clare.

  ‘Any problems, send me a fax. Barossa will know where to find me…’

  The oenologist was as condescending with his doubts about her ability to cope as was Big Mick with his ‘little Clare’.

  ‘Hang on.’ Clare stood stock still. ‘I just thought of something. How does “little Clare” grab you?’

  ‘“Little Clare”?’

  ‘“Petite Clare”. Château de Cluzac’s second wine?’

  ‘Brilliant! Clare. Claret. Couldn’t be better. Now all you have to do is market it.’

  As Halliday replaced the rest of the business cards in his wallet, Clare caught a glimpse of a small boy’s face, mischievous eyes peering out from the photograph slot.

  ‘Your son?’

  ‘Billy. He’s just turned five. I’ve taught him to do card tricks. He could read a newspaper when he was four.’

  ‘He looks like you.’

  ‘More like his mother.’

  ‘You must miss him.’

  ‘You can say that again.’ The wallet was snapped shut.

  Clare changed the subject.

  ‘When’s your next visit?’

  ‘I’ll be in and out. I keep a pad in Bordeaux. The Rue Ferrère. I’ll be here for the marathon�
��’

  ‘Marathon?’ Light on his feet, Halliday looked like a runner. There had been no marathon in the Médoc when Clare was a child.

  ‘Châteaux du Médoc et des Graves. Beginning of September. Pauillac, St Julien, Beychevelle, St-Estèphe… Last year there were more than six thousand runners. I came fifth.’

  ‘I must tell Jamie.’

  ‘Tell him if he wants to run he has to register.’

  Little by little, feeling her way, taking one day at a time, Clare was coming to terms with the château. Conscious that she was surrounded by cynics such as Halliday Baines and Big Mick, by several jealous neighbours who preferred the status quo, and by declared enemies such as Claude Balard and Philip Van Gelder, her once micro-thin skin, susceptible to every pinprick from her father, was becoming as thick as that of the grapes.

  By dint of her working in her new office from 6.30 a.m., beating Monsieur Boniface to her desk, and very often not crossing the courtyard to her bed before the small hours of the following morning, everything at Château de Cluzac was now ready to receive visitors. She confidently expected the coaches, carrying tourists from Europe, the United States and Scandinavia, which would shortly be criss-crossing each other on the Route des Châteaux, to relieve her cashflow problems and swell the severely depleted Cluzac coffers.

  The new pancarte had been erected, this time protected by barbed wire. A section of the park had been designated an ‘aire de pique-nique’ (to the dismay of Monsieur Louchemain) and was furnished with litter bins as well as wooden chairs and tables. The room adjoining her office, under the supervision of Petronella, had been set up as a shop, and she was going to call on Hannah to collect the ‘Château de Cluzac’ T-shirts. The cellars, Jean Boyer notwithstanding, were ready for inspection. She had her own spiel ready. And the moat, home previously only to swans and water lilies, had been stocked with trout for paid fishing.

  In the calm before the storm, for she would not be able to get away again before the harvest, she had come back to England not only to see Jamie and to visit Grandmaman, but to talk to David Markham, a senior director of Christie’s, about including several lots of Château de Cluzac among the Château Mouton-Rothschilds and the Château Petrus, in the next fine wine auction.

  By the time Jamie opened the door of the cottage, the Tatler had slipped on to the floor, and Clare was asleep on the sofa. She was dreaming that Claude Balard had vandalised her sign once again and was threatening to drive her out of the Médoc. When Jamie put his lips to her forehead, she screamed and pummelled him in the chest.

  ‘Steady on!’ He grabbed her hands.

  Clare sat up.

  ‘It’s you. Sorry darling. I thought I was in Bordeaux.’

  ‘Who were you hoping to kill?’

  Before they had said hallo, Clare unburdened herself to Jamie about Claude Balard, and about Big Mick and Halliday Baines, and her trouble with the sign, and her troubles with her staff, and her cashflow problems, the true nature of which she had only indicated to him during their nightly telephone conversations.

  ‘Sorry to dump on you.’

  ‘That’s what the man’s here for.’ Squatting in front of the fridge in the kitchen, Jamie removed a bottle of Chardonnay.

  Watching him, through the open door, Clare said, ‘If I see another bottle of wine I’ll scream…’

  ‘Not again!’

  Pouring out two whiskies, Jamie brought them over to the sofa.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?’

  ‘I didn’t decide until this morning. It’s the last opportunity before the vendange…’

  ‘I’m not complaining…’ Jamie outlined the contours of her features with his hand before pulling her face to his own. ‘I ache with missing you. It’s the best surprise in the world. I must make a quick phone call. I promised Miranda I’d be at Quaglino’s at nine. It’s Barnaby’s birthday…’

  ‘Barnaby?’

  ‘Barnaby Muirhead.’

  Remembering the Formula One driver for whom Miranda had left Jamie, Clare picked up the pieces of her past.

  ‘It’s only quarter to seven.’

  ‘I thought you looked too knackered to party. Wouldn’t you rather go to bed?’

  Removing Jamie’s glass from his hand, Clare put it on the tiled hearth together with her own.

  ‘We can do that before we go.’

  Twenty-eight

  Barnaby Muirhead, recently headline news over his dispute with the Formula One authorities concerning pit-stop refuelling equipment, not only held sway over the premier table in Quaglino’s (once the haunt of Edward Prince of Wales but now a media mecca), but drew clandestine glances from other diners who recognised the popular racing driver from his pictures in their daily papers.

  By the time his birthday cake, a Benetton-Ford in appropriately coloured icing bearing thirty-one flickering candles, was brought in, on the shoulder of a waiter, his guests were decidedly merry and making a very great deal of noise.

  Regarding them all – the red-headed Miranda inhaling the smoke from a slim cigar – Clare realised not only how much she had missed Jamie and her friends, but the tremendous strain that she had been under during the past weeks in Bordeaux.

  Relieved temporarily from her responsibilities, she had thrown caution to the winds, together with her Château de Cluzac persona, and was rapidly becoming more than a little drunk.

  At one end of the long table Barnaby was explaining how, following Ayrton Senna’s fatal crash into the concrete wall of Imola’s Tamburello curve, a short wooden plank bolted to the underside of grand prix cars now prevented them from cornering at G-forces for which most circuits were not designed. Clare, at the far end, encouraged by an equally drunk Jonty Griffiths, Barnaby’s alter ego and fellow Formula One driver, unravelled the mysteries of wine.

  ‘Wine…’ Her voice was only slightly slurred. ‘Wine, Jonty, is like people. There are tall people and there are short people. There are thin people and there are fat people. There are big people, and there are little people. Not that you can judge by appearance. Wine has to have character. Some wines have good character. Some wines have bad character. Others have absolutely no character at all. When a wine is very young’ – she was getting into her stride – ‘it has a dark purplish colour…’

  It was Jean who had explained to the eight-year-old, sitting on an upturned barrel in her father’s chai, that the appearance of wine was defined by four elements: limpidité, the absence of deposit; intensité, the all-important density; nuance, the evolution of the colour from the blue of fermentation to the brown of extreme age; brillance, the refraction through the wine of light.

  ‘After anything from five to ten years,’ Clare went on, ‘the wine reaches maturity and can continue to improve for anything up to fifteen years. A touch of brick colour at the rim…’ She held her glass of Nuits St-Georges up to the light and tilted it slightly. ‘A touch of brick colour at the rim is a funda… fundamental sign that it is ready to drink.’

  ‘What I’d like to know,’ Jonty Griffiths said as she proceeded to do so, ‘is why, when you consider the cost of a bunch of grapes, any half-way decent wine has to cost an arm and a leg.’

  Picking up the bottle of the most expensive Burgundy Barnaby had been able to find on the wine list, and watched with pride by an amused Jamie, Clare said, ‘You’re not talking South Africa or Portugal here, mate. You’re not talking your Liebfraumilch or your Lambrusco. Early-drinking wines that can be bottled and sold young – that’s ninety per cent of your reds – are many times cheaper to make than wine which has been matured in small oak barrels, which are not only expensive to buy but ext…extreme…very costly to maintain. I’ll let you into a secret…’ Clare now had the attention of the table. ‘A top-quality, new, French oak barrel – none of your oak chips – amortised over three years’ harvest, can add between thirty and sixty pence to the price of a bottle…!’

  Hearing Alain Lamotte’s patient voice in her ears as he we
nt over the costs involved in wine production, and moving her chair (its design said to be inspired by the contours of Betty Grable’s buttocks) closer to the blond young racing driver, who was getting more than he bargained for, Clare leaned towards him.

  ‘First of all your “bunch of grapes”, my dear Jonty, has to be grown. A well-tended vineyard is like a well-tended garden. It takes an experienced vine worker the entire winter to prune only thirty thousand – out of a total of maybe seven hundred thousand – vines, each of which bears anything from ten to fifteen bunches, which eventually have to be picked, bunch by bunch, by a whole army of pickers, who have to be housed and fed. Take your production costs. In addition to cellar techniques, which involve expensive labour and equipment…’ Holding up her hand with the gold engagement ring, she enumerated on her fingers. ‘You’ve got the basic cost of your wine. You’ve got your bottling and packaging. You’ve got your transport. You’ve got your retail margin. You’ve got your duty. You’ve got your VAT…’

  ‘You’ve got no more fingers!’ came a voice from the other end of the table.

  ‘You’ve got your marketing to consider.’ Clare was undeterred. ‘And finally, in the case of a restaurant, you’ve got your mark-up, in some cases up to three hundred per cent!’

  Leaving Quaglino’s well after midnight, Barnaby, who got his kicks both from living dangerously and being constantly surrounded by a crowd of admirers, insisted that everyone join him and Miranda for a glass of champagne and some music at Annabel’s. While the rest of the party, pleading weariness or work, declined, Clare, who was now getting her second wind, persuaded Jamie, who was so happy to see her that he was unable to refuse, to accept the invitation. Banged up, day after day, in her Bureau d’Acceuil at Château de Cluzac, it seemed an age since she had let her hair down.

  Dancing with Jamie – although it was more a case of ambling round the packed floor of the nightclub, the lowered lights of which helped protect the anonymity of its members – her arms entwined about her fiancé’s neck, Clare felt his body, warm against hers.