by Caro Feely
We caught a lift back to Saussignac with Gaby and Julien Cuisset, two young locals in the process of taking over the family vineyard business from their father. Cécile made friends easily and by the end of the trip was exchanging contact details with them. In a few short weeks I felt like she was part of the farm, part of Saussignac.
Late spring temperatures hit 35 degrees. It was the hottest month on record of what turned out to be the hottest year on record. On a day that was designated 'fruit' on our biodynamic calendar, I walked alongside our fig tree on my way back up from the vineyard. It was radiating such a strong smell of fig that I felt like lying down in its shade and drinking in the scent but I needed to get to school for Ellie. Once there I stood under the fig tree that grew along the fence line of Natalie's garden. Natalie had been Ellie and Sophia's teacher at one time and she lived across the road from the school. I loved the feeling of knowing these good people around me; there was a sense of security in it. I sniffed a leaf hanging close to me and was engulfed in the scent of the fig, cool and deep. It had positioned itself alongside Natalie's old well, a clever fig that had its roots deep in limestone and a water source. The fruits were still hard and scent-free but the leaves respired dense figginess.
At home Ellie and I picked cherries in the heat of the evening, swaying in the tree like sloths – one for the basket, one for me. Filled with cherries, I walked Dora down to the bottom of Garrigue Merlot. The sunset across the hills to our west was a profusion of golden glory. Cut grass, rows of trees, wheat ears undulating in the soft warm breeze. The hills drifted away like dunes alternating gold and green. As I passed a walnut tree I stopped and reached for a luminescent lime-green leaf. It was smooth and satiny. I inhaled above the leaf and was engulfed in the smell of walnut oil. Like the fig, its entire being was respiring, radiating its fruit aromas. I felt so happy, so filled with gratitude and joy for this beautiful place, for the wonders of the nature that surrounded me.
Cécile was proving to be a gem. She was on the ball and I soon discovered that we shared a passion for figs. We moved from spring to late summer in a whirl of guests. With the figs now ripe, Cécile made it her mission to pick fresh figs every day for the lunch served as part of our visits. Clients loved it and so did we.
The luscious purple fruits were sweet and plump. We ate and ate. Each day there were some left and I took them inside, finishing my day with a few, and then starting the next with a few more. The season was extremely long; the ripe figs ran and ran. Then Cécile discovered the green figs at the southern end of the farm. Fully ripe they were even more heavenly than the purple ones and we gorged on figs once more.
The following day I woke up with my palate transformed and not in a good way. Nothing tasted right, not my tea, nor – more importantly – the wine we served in the tasting room. What had caused it? Had I done permanent damage? Given that my job involved tasting wine every day it would be a catastrophe on a professional level, not to mention on a personal one for my own eating and drinking pleasure. Food was bland, tea was horrible and wine was worse.
I visited Antoine at Cadet-Bon in St-Émilion, the winemaker who had come to my aid when I had the puncture. As we walked down to taste the grapes in his vineyard, he pointed to a fig tree filled with bounty.
'They look good but don't eat them. When I first started with Derenoncourt Consultants I remember Stéphane saying to me, "Never eat figs when you are tasting grapes. They mess up your tasting capability."'
'Holy smokes, Antoine,' I said. 'I have that exact problem. I never heard this before and now you tell me the very week when I'm wishing I copied Robert Parker and insured my palate for a million bucks. My taste buds are banjaxed and now I know why: too many figs!'
'No way. For real?' said Antoine.
'Yes,' I said, laughing a little crazily.
I was worried. When would my palate come back?
Cécile had a similar feeling but less pronounced, and in two days hers was gone while mine was worse. I went searching on the internet for more information. Figs could attack the lining on your mouth, a bit like tannins. The white of the skin of the fig, much more pronounced on green figs, was responsible. The effect was far worse in and after menopause – which was why mine had persisted and Cécile's was gone. I had thought that I had almost licked that unpleasant phase of my life, that I had got the upper hand over its violent and suicidal effects, but now it had hit me with a nasty sting in the tail. I faked it through the wine-tasting classes, talking based on what I knew about the wines but unable to taste; my mouth was like sandpaper.
Just when I thought my mouth would never be the same again, my taste buds returned. I hadn't touched figs for a week. I didn't touch them for a few more days then I gingerly started again, peeling each one carefully before eating it, avoiding the green ones and vowing to eat the rest in moderation. Menopause had had the last laugh on this figaholic.
Sandrine was due back soon. I followed up with emails and phone calls over the weeks, asking about her baby and when she would be back. Eventually, a couple of days before she was supposed to be back with us, she emailed to say she was sorry but she would not be returning after all. We paid the required notice period and closed the chapter with relief.
Cécile was already doing half-day visits on her own, handling small groups with skill. By the following summer she would have experienced a full growing cycle and be able to talk even more knowledgeably about our organic vineyard. She researched new organic producers, slowly changing our lunch and cheese platter suppliers from large-scale organic producers to small local organic producers that we knew first-hand, then created pairing sheets to make it easier for our visitors to follow the wine and food pairing.
The ferocious heat meant an early start to harvest. We arrived back from a few days at the campsite near St-Jean-de-Luz and realised that our whites were more than ready. We booked the team and harvested ten days earlier than ever but our Sauvignon Blanc juice still displayed a hefty 14 degrees of potential alcohol. I worried that we had missed that elusive balance, the perfect harmony between alcohol and acidity.
'Perhaps we should have picked earlier?' I said to Seán.
'We went as fast as we could,' he replied. 'Anyway, if we had, it would have been too acidic and we would have had green notes. Look at the lime and grapefruit character it has as it is, and the level of acidity. We couldn't have gone any earlier. As the vintages get hotter we'll be walking a tightrope.'
'More than we are already?' I said, eyebrows raised.
Then it was the waiting game for the red grapes and we debated 'Will we harvest or won't we?' With each splatter of rain I felt butterflies in my stomach. Then it poured. I visited St-Émilion with clients and Antoine said they had had no rain. I felt jealous. Perhaps we should have picked before the deluge.
On Thursday I collected more clients from the station. There was so much rain that the road from Gardonne was like a small river. I could barely concentrate on our guests' questions. The amount of rain we were having could damage our red grapes and make picking a nightmare.
'What will this mean for the quality?' said Mary, one of the new arrivals.
'Oh, we hope it will be OK for us since we're up on the hill,' I said, thinking meanwhile, We're toast.
That evening I attended my first yoga session with my friend Isabelle. The yoga room was spacious and peaceful, with large windows looking on to a starry sky. At first I felt a little out of place; some of the French words for specific body parts were not familiar to me, like clavicule or collarbone. Most of the moves were unfamiliar and I lagged behind but the teacher quickly put us all at ease: 'It doesn't matter what the others are doing. What is important is that you feel comfortable, listen to your body, take your time.' It was totally unlike a city gym studio: there were no mirrors, no music; there was calm. We ended with ten minutes of relaxation. I realised that the classes would offer more than yoga. I had not sat consciously doing nothing in so long it was strange, but at the end of
the session I felt relaxed – truly relaxed – an unusual sensation in the midst of harvest time.
The following days I toured St-Émilion with my guests and did the day visit at our farm. More rain fell. What had promised to be a good vintage was looking like it could be a failure. Seán walked the vineyards again and assured me there was no problem. Between deluges I had another set of clients for the Wine Adventure day.
'When it comes to winemaking, how we pick and when we pick are key. It's a time of great joy and community but also of great angst. Our whole year's work hangs in the balance,' I said as we started the afternoon part on the winemaking.
'Isn't that right,' said Karen. 'My family have a vineyard in New Zealand. We checked a parcel of Shiraz and it was perfect. Three days later when the pickers arrived, two thirds of it were rotten. It was that fast. I couldn't believe it.'
I felt a twist of fear. I don't know how I continued the rest of the afternoon but I did. At the end of the session I took a walk with my friend Laurence to find perspective. En route I checked the Merlot where the hail had hit hardest three years before and realised that Seán was right: the grapes still looked good. My long walk and talk with Laurence helped to ease my stress. Afterwards we sat in the courtyard of Saussignac Castle enjoying the last rays of sun and I felt a sense of peace.
I was always a little edgy at harvest and perimenopause made it worse. I needed to calm down. Back home I decided to do some brainless chores, starting with moving the packed-up boxes from the Cottage to our side of the house. The Cottage was due to undergo a renovation that winter and we were emptying it of its contents. As I carried a box of linen I noticed the duvet cover bought decades before when Seán and I first moved in together. For ten years it had been in service in the Wine Cottage and we had survived with my old sleeping bag thrown over darned sheets.
I pulled the cover out of the box. The cream linen with a simple embossed border almost looked like new. It would look great on our bed. The find was a catalyst to tidy the tiny bedroom Seán and I shared. Our room had some shelf space but no hanging space and our shoes were stacked neatly on the floor in Château Feely boxes. I cleared the surfaces then shook my old sleeping bag into the cream cover. The small gesture of taking back the cover was liberating; it felt like freedom, like I was taking a little of our life back from our all-consuming enterprise. It felt like a grand moment, a realisation. We could not sacrifice everything to follow this dream. We had to find a better balance. I put the matching pillow covers on to our pillows and then placed a cushion with lavender sprigs embroidered by Mum Feely on top. I thought of her for a moment then wiped my tears away. With the new covers and the cushion, our tiny bedroom looked beautiful and cared for, like it had had a makeover.
Back in the Cottage I measured up the walls of the end room for the new kitchen and a memory washed over me. Two tiny girls propped up in a double bed against the back wall, wrapped in winter clothes and blankets for a bedtime story. Sophia was three and Ellie one. The four of us had lived in this end room for almost a year as we renovated the first part of the house so we could rent it out as a self-catering cottage. That was a decade before; now they were like young women.
Sophia wasn't quite a teenager but she behaved like a reliable adult. She would wake at 5.45 a.m. and then wake the rest of the house at their requested times. She made her own breakfast, her homework was done, her bag was packed for the day and there was never a rush. She called me when it was time to go to school so I didn't have to clock-watch. Ellie was also top of her class or close to the top, but when it came to the morning she was grumpy and in need of prodding. They had both become fashionistas. They helped with the lunches and cleaning the accommodation to earn money for clothes.
I still wore clothes bought with one of my first pay cheques nearly 30 years before. Now I hit the high street of Bergerac with my fashion-conscious daughters and found it was fun.
The following day as Ellie and I walked to school she recited a poem about vines. It was beautiful, lyric and sensory. Dressed in new black skinny jeans, grey boots and her bright red coat, a hand-me-down from our friend Chiara Wilson, she looked so chic and grown up, like she could have walked out of a Vogue magazine. She took my breath away.
We picked the red grapes and my worries proved unfounded. The juice was beautiful and the subsequent wine looked like it could be another grand millesime, the French word for 'vintage'. By November the light and the mist were like nothing I had ever seen. The unusual heat gave a quality to the scenery reminiscent of Chinese etchings.
With the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris I read more about the out-of-control train coming down the track. It seemed insurmountable. I was struck by how little the journalists talked about what each of us could do to contribute to the solution. It was all about the big picture: talks about what governments could do with carbon trading; massive, complex solutions. There was a lot of 'we hope to' in the final agreement and not a lot of consequence for those who didn't. The consequences would be for all of us but worse for those already living precariously, close to sea level, in semi-desert and in storm belts. I was surprised that the talks didn't include much on how agriculture could contribute to the solution. Organic natural farming sequesters (captures and stores away) carbon dioxide, while chemical farming generates carbon dioxide and toxic nitrate gas.
My yoga sessions with Isabelle were becoming a sacred part of my week. She offered wisdom on school in France, the age of adolescence – her sons were a couple of years ahead of our daughters – and administrative challenges. En route we chatted non-stop; I enjoyed the time to chat with a girlfriend almost as much as the yoga. We signed up for a special extra session that was being proposed, a full Sunday of yoga. I wondered if my mind and body would be able to handle it but went ahead anyway.
CHAPTER 15
ONE YOGI AND FIVE TIBETANS
'In this silent moment of "now", of being fully present, we feel a great sense of peace,' said Xu Yen.
His round face radiated happiness and belied his age. Yoga was clearly doing something for his longevity, health and state of mind. He chatted warmly, initiating the session with words of wisdom.
'Enjoy every moment of life. In the depths of the ordinary moments we find the extraordinary.'
Every few minutes his discourse lightened up and he exploded with mirth. It was so infectious I laughed, even without understanding all of what he was saying in his heavily accented French. Then, almost without us noticing, he started a sequence of yoga moves and we followed.
'You see, we are doing nothing here. Nothing,' he said.
It felt like nothing the way he presented it but I knew it was something. He was a master yogi. As the day progressed we realised our concerns had been misplaced; instead of not coping physically or mentally, I felt energy building within me. Even after a luxurious lunch in the tradition of auberge espagnole, the French saying for 'bring and share', I felt energised. We feasted: a large vegetable soup made by Michèle, the founder of the Eveil du Souffle Yoga Association; quiches, breads, cheeses and salads; then fruit and sweet tarts to finish. To ease our digestion we took a walk around the farm lake, looking in on the dairy cows and vines of Michèle's organic family farm. Her 20-year-old son joined us for part of the day. At lunch he displayed the healthy appetite of a young farmer.
'So we will start slowly,' said Xu Yen. 'I will give your stomachs time to digest. For some of us that is more necessary than others.'
He gave Michèle's son a knowing look and then reverberated with mirth. 'Yes, I see everything. He he he.'
As the sun began to set, I felt a lightness of being, a joy in my core. We had done yoga all day but there was no pain and no stiffness. I was a yoga convert. I made it my mission to do a couple of yoga moves at home a few times a week in addition to my evening of co-voiturage with Isabelle for the one-hour session at Eveil du Souffle. Xu Yen's state of health and happiness was proof of what yoga could do but it was more than that. I had less backa
che; I was more supple. I felt better than I had in a long time and I was sleeping better. Yoga felt right. It felt like part of what we were about.
Our network of like-minded people was growing. Sandra and Santi Bontisane of Simply Permaculture and Simply Canvas joined us for soup and a sandwich the day our brother-in-law Bruce arrived for the Christmas holidays. Sandra, originally Dutch, and Santi, French Sri Lankan, had met at Plum Village, a Buddhist monastery founded by Thích Nhất Hạnh less than ten minutes from our farm. They followed the life of a Buddhist monk and nun for years and independently decided to return to secular life. Later they met up in Ireland, where Santi had settled, fell in love and decided to come back to France to set up a smallholding in the same region as Plum Village. Their glamping holidays smallholding had recently added a permaculture garden open to visitors. We always met in winter to exchange ideas on self-sufficiency and tourism. As usual, they were bursting with new initiatives.
Bruce Bristow had arrived from Mauritius that morning. His children and Glynis, Seán's sister, would follow a few days later. We hadn't seen him in eight years. I recalled that when we met 20 years before, he had assured me that glyphosate (the most widely used chemical herbicide) was non-toxic – so lovely, in fact, that I could drink a glass of it no problem. Now Bruce had barely stepped through the door for his Christmas holiday and we were already in a heated discussion about whether organic agriculture could feed the world. I knew it could and that the chemical option would starve the world by leaving land unfit for agriculture and desertified after a couple of decades.
