by Caro Feely
At Château Cadet-Bon Antoine led us into the barrel chai, a semi-underground cellar carved into the limestone with a woodpanelled roof shaped in a sensuous curve. The ancient stone and modern, organic roundness finished in natural material were a perfect blend of old and new and it was filled with fabulous wine in beautiful French oak barrels.
Antoine explained how he made the wine, the ageing and his barrel selection process – a fine art. For each vineyard and each grape type he had preferred oak forests and preferred barrel makers based on years of careful selection.
Since our first year with a badly behaved Merlot that had us chewing our nails and me breaking out in eczema and insomnia, I knew that ageing in oak could truly change a wine. It helped soften the tannin through micro-oxygenation and made the wine weightier and a little creamier so it could match slightly heavier food. Aromas of barrel ageing can include vanilla, chocolate, toast, sweet spices and even coconut, depending on the origin of the wood, how it was dried and how much 'toasting' (the burning of the inside of the barrel) the wood has had.
As winegrowers we were aware that one kind of oak was different to another but, with the price of six new barrels equivalent to a new small car, Seán and I were not experts in the field. Here at Cadet-Bon, on the other hand, it was a high art. With his consultant, Antoine assessed the barrels they purchased each year, comparing barrel maker, toasting and forest with overall quality, taste and effect on the wine. With at least 30 new barrels each year, they had the luxury of comparison.
'Well, enough talk about barrels. What about some tasting?' said Antoine as he dipped his glass pipette, called a 'wine thief', into a honey-coloured barrel. It slowly filled with deep purple wine then he closed it with his thumb over the small hole in the top, lifted it and released a sample amount into my glass before stopping the flow with a deft thumb over the top and doing the same for Chris and Dave.
My nose descended into the glass; the aroma was deep and mineral with liveliness of fresh fruit and rich spiciness of plum pudding. When I tasted, there was a marked difference to their usual Merlot on limestone: the tannins formed two parallel lines on my tongue, more spicy and astringent than usual. I lifted my eyebrows then moved towards the spittoon at the end of the row of barrels.
'Delicious,' said Chris.
'Jupille forest,' said Antoine. He closed the bung and moved to another barrel.
'This barrel is the same wine, the same barrel maker, the same toasting as the other limestone Merlot, but the oak is from the Tronçais forest,' said Antoine, filling the barrel thief again and serving us.
'Incredible,' I said after sniffing and tasting the sample. 'The tannin is completely different. It's more integrated and less sappy.'
'I am blown away,' said Dave. 'I would never have thought the forest the barrel came from could make such a difference.'
'Yes, on the whole I prefer,' said Antoine, skipping the 'it' in the French way like he sometimes did. 'But I like to have a little Jupille. It adds to the blend.'
The Tronçais forest was close to Jupille – they were both in the central part of France. We could taste their terroir talking.
'It takes all the different parts, the different barrels, grapes and soils to make the final blend. Two Merlots planted just a few hundred metres apart can be totally different. The Merlot on limestone gives us a wine that is long and taut, filled with freshness and vivacity, while the Merlot on the deeper clay is round, full and rich but a little shorter. We need to use them all in the right combination to make a beautiful finished wine. So now we will taste two examples of the finished wine.'
He lifted an unmarked open bottle that had been left on the upturned barrel that served as the tasting table and poured.
'So how old do you think it is?' he asked after we had observed and tasted.
'I really don't know,' said Dave.
'Don't even look at me,' said Chris. 'I'm just here to enjoy the ride.'
'Six years old?' I asked.
Age would bring certain signs that help ascertain the vintage but telling two successive vintages apart many years later is often a matter of knowing the vintage conditions.
'Perhaps. It could be seven,' said Antoine. 'Mr Richard left it out and I am not sure what it is. I will go and check.'
'Chapeau,' he said on his return, a term that meant 'I lift my hat to you', and gave me a look of respect.
'How did you do that, Caro?' asked Chris.
'The colour and nose gave me an idea of the age range, then there was a clear fresh note to the wine I associate with the year of the early frost, the year we lost almost half our harvest,' I said. 'This year we had bad weather at flowering and lost almost half the Merlot. The weather gods like to shake it up a little.'
We all laughed. Antoine finished the visit with his favourite vintage, a beautiful wine that had won the Coup de Cœur award from the Guide Hachette, one of the most respected wine guides in France, alongside the hallowed Château Ausone, an estate that sold their top vintages for thousands of euro a bottle. Chris and Dave bought a couple of bottles and we said au revoir to Antoine before driving carefully home at under 80 kilometres per hour on the biscuit tyre.
A couple of days later, after a hectic but successful harvest weekend and a tyre change, I said goodbye to the Drakes with tears in my eyes. In a short and manic week we had become part of their lives and they had become part of ours.
On their return home, Chris sent me photos of their celebration for her mum's ninetieth birthday in Hawaii, of Dave preparing the hall with one of our T-shirts on. Over the months Chris sent intermittent emails. Each one came at the right moment with the right message. I did her ten deep breaths each time I felt stress overcoming me and thought of her. After the breaths I felt renewed, calm and at ease.
CHAPTER 9
CANCER UP CLOSE
I needed more than ten breaths to digest Seán's mum's news.
The radiation was the start. I need chemotherapy now. When life knocks you to your knees it's not a bad time to start praying, said Mum Feely in an email.
Mum Feely had been treated with radiation for a cancer spot on her lung. When she first told us about it, the cancer was an 'out there' idea, something like flu. It was bad but it would be fixed soon. Both our dads had had prostate cancer and both recovered after radiation. I hadn't even looked up the details of what it meant to be radiated. I was a wimp when it came to medical issues. This was serious cancer – it needed chemotherapy. I had heard people talk about it but never experienced it in my immediate circle.
Mum Feely's email included a link to a website with a twopage summary of what chemotherapy was and the side effects it could create. I read through half a page and felt so horrified I couldn't continue. I closed it down, tears in my eyes. I felt sick that anyone should have to experience what I read. The side effects sounded worse than anything I could imagine. It was torture, not treatment.
That night I explained what I had read to my mum, who trained as a nurse a lifetime before.
'Darling, they have to put all the side effects into documents like that. Not everyone will feel them,' said Mum.
She was trying to downplay it but I saw the look on the faces of chemotherapy survivors on documentaries I found online. It was a dark side of their lives that they could barely talk about. I didn't know enough about the 'treatment' but, as a medical simpleton, treating an illness with powerful poisons that also gave you cancer didn't seem to make sense.
Mum Feely started the treatment. She had swelling, exhaustion, pain in her joints, nausea – in fact, almost every side effect that had been outlined, and in spades. She put a brave face on it and tried to be positive.
When I first met Seán's mum, Peta-Lynne, we had a slightly uneasy relationship – often the case between a girlfriend and a mother. We were very different. Peta-Lynne had trained as a nurse, like my mum. When her four kids were growing up, she was a traditional stay-at-home mum for whom family was everything. Later she started a sideline bu
siness typing up recordings of court proceedings that allowed flexible hours and being at home for her family.
I was a career girl. I didn't even foresee myself having kids at that time. In spite of this discordance Peta-Lynne went out of her way to welcome me. I loved raw cabbage and she would buy it for me when I came to stay. She was mad about animals and cats in particular. I painted a cat for her and she gave it pride of place on the wall in the lounge.
In our first year on the farm Mum and Dad Feely visited us for six weeks. She and I started their long stay with a deep sense of unease. We hadn't seen each other in a while and I could tell that she didn't approve of how little attention our daughters got, how little cooking I did and the cleanliness of our house. I could see her and my dad shaking their heads in shared disgust at what he called the 'Corridor of Crisis', aka our house, a normal house for a couple working long hours, with two kids under three – even without changing country, career and language.
A few weeks into their visit Seán chopped a third of his finger off on the harvest trailer. After that everything changed. We pulled together. I felt like we were seeing each other more clearly; for what we were and what we were doing right rather than what we were doing 'wrong'. I felt very close to my parentsin-law after that baptism of fire.
Now Mum Feely was fighting for her life. The number of cancer lesions increased after the first go of chemo then reduced after the second. The oncologist felt it was worth it to continue. He upped the dose to a 'doublet therapy', a treatment of two chemicals, carboplatin and taxol. Even the names didn't sound good. They were administered by a slow drip that took five hours to feed into her body. Her hair started to fall out. She felt awful but she still sent upbeat messages to us and kept in regular touch with Sophia and Ellie, exchanging photos of cats and jokes. They found a wig maker.
'You should go for a visit,' I said to Seán. 'Perhaps waiting until next year is too long.'
We had been saving up for our family trip to South Africa and hoped to do it the following year for Mum and Dad Feely's fiftieth wedding anniversary.
'I think it's OK to wait,' said Seán. 'My mum is positive. She's going to get better.'
Seán's mum kept her emails coming. With the cancer lesions reducing, we began to feel upbeat about her progress.
For years we had been waiting for the final part of the financial aid for our tasting room and new Wine Lodge to be paid. I had jumped through so many administrative loops that I was ready to give up. For a period my nightmares were about deadlines for signed copies in triplicate and incomprehensible letters in French. The last letter required another special trip to the accountant because the summary spreadsheet had rounded off the cents on some of the invoices listed. Given that the original signed invoices included the cents and were included in the same signed-in-triplicate package and that the rounding had no impact on the total value, it was a step too far for me.
I was almost ready to cry, 'Mercy! Keep the f'ing money!' when it hit the bank account. It was the green light we needed for the swimming pool and the work on the exterior facades of the property to go ahead. We elected for a long rectangle that would almost look like a water feature rather than a classic swimming pool and for saltwater rather than chlorine. I enjoyed planning and dreaming about the pool so much I wondered if the reality could ever be as good as what I had imagined.
'Now staying at home in the summer will be like being on holiday,' said our pool constructor.
'Once our fourteen-hour work days are done,' I said and laughed.
'Oh, you'll find the time,' he said.
We had chipped a small section of the concrete off the house over the years so we knew there was stone underneath it; we just didn't know how much and in what state it was. Tomas, the mason that did the stonework on the Lodge, returned for this new restoration work. Each part uncovered whispered a little more of the history of our house. The oldest part of the main house was the central section with a rounded cornice below the roof, thought to be a 'lookout' built during the English rule of Aquitaine. Rounded cornices carved from stone were replaced by genoise, small bricks that look like a row of orange teeth, around the sixteenth century. Most of the rest of the house was from the 1700s before the Revolution. We wished the stones could talk, although in a way they were, telling us via the methods they were cut and constructed the era they were from.
'I think this double-storey part is older than you thought,' said Tomas as the work progressed. 'The stonework suggests sixteenth century. It looks like a fortress house, the sort they built during the religious wars. I can't wait to do the rest.'
I couldn't wait either but we needed patience. We had to follow the cadence that time and budget allowed, and at that moment we could only do the first small section. Seán and I had decided that I couldn't go through another season without help and our reworked budget that included the cost of an apprentice salary meant the next phase had to take a back seat.
I waded through CVs and interviewed candidates, recalling Francine's advice on how important selecting the right person was. I asked two candidates to come back for second interviews and to do a few exercises to see how they handled some of the activities that were part of our daily fare. We made our selection, a young local woman who had done one year of university and wanted to change to tourism with an apprentice alternance contract. She accepted and we prepared for our first experience of hiring someone in France.
It was the 'hungry gap' time of year; a moment when creating good food despite the dearth of ingredients, and doing outdoor activity despite the miserable weather, were key. Christmas was long past and spring seemed far, far away. I formulated a few tricks to keep my sanity.
First, I ate kale. Years before when I tasted kale for the first time it was 'No thanks for me'. We had a rule in our house that Sophia and Ellie were not allowed to say 'That is disgusting' or similar about food so anything they didn't appreciate had become 'That's no thanks for me'. But kale cooked right could taste superb. Organic kale was also vitamin- and antioxidant-packed. Our potager was bursting with a purple cabbage kale that was delicious and helped us through the hungry gap.
Sophia, Ellie and I noticed that even when it wasn't Seán's night he was inspired to cook on Wednesdays. He would spend hours in the kitchen. We were served sculptured towers of vegetables, delicious combinations and imaginative impressions of single vegetables such as kale imagined three ways: as chips, with mashed potato and stir-fried. Wednesday couldn't come around quickly enough. We had spinach mousse, Jerusalem artichoke chips, hummus three ways – made with chickpeas in the classic way, with chickpeas and fists of fresh coriander leaves, and with beans instead of chickpeas. Seán's ideas seemed endless and his gourmet plates were Michelinstar quality in presentation and taste.
We discovered that Seán had found the French version of Top Chef, the professional chef competition reality TV series. The three-hour show on Tuesday night meant he spent most of Wednesday thinking about what he would create. We looked forward to that special day with our taste buds on high alert.
Sophia took to cooking. She turned out a round of potato soufflés worthy of a professional. Seán was impressed – and that was truly high praise. He was hard to please. Ellie started baking, making magnificent doughnuts, cheesecakes, hot cross buns. Seán was over the moon.
But no matter how high I set the bar on my cooking night, it wasn't good enough. I had to admit I didn't get to the heights that Seán reached at times but some nights I was pretty impressed with my efforts, as were Sophia and Ellie. Seán's constant criticism was a thorn in my side. The next time Seán went off the deep end about the failure I had created I let rip.
'SF, if you don't like my cooking and you don't like me any more, we should just call a halt. I'm working as hard as I can. Sorry I don't have time to spend hours in the kitchen turning out wonders,' I said crossly.
'Just because you're busy doesn't mean you can behave like a monster and serve up slop. We're all busy,' he threw
back.
'I don't know what you're staying with me for – all you do is criticise. You don't greet me in the morning; you don't say goodnight to me. I've had enough. We have to fix this or I want out. I will not have it, SF,' I said, getting more furious and upset with each word.
'Don't you talk to me about criticism,' he said. 'All you ever do is criticise me. You can't just throw a few roast vegetables together and call it dinner.' Seán's eyes flickered with anger.
'Stop fighting!' said Sophia. 'I can't take it any more!' She started crying.
'Well, SF should think about that next time he lambasts me and my efforts in the kitchen. I have had enough.'
I got up, slammed the door and stormed out into the night, full of bitterness and angry tears. I wanted to run away and especially to get away from Seán. I didn't like who he was at that moment; I was losing respect for him. I felt like he was driving me away, that the wall between us grew daily.
