Ten Trees and a Truffle Dog (6 page)

  
'Ça va, merci.'

  
'Et Tanya, et Elodie?'

  
'Tout va bien.'

  We exchanged farewell kisses and I shuffled forwards, trying to comprehend the consequences of such a heightened sense of insecurity. Society was promiscuous. Like loving food and wine, having affairs had become an intrinsic part of being French. However, far from living in a permanent state of euphoric ardour, French women, theoretically the world's greatest lovers, appeared to exist in a state of terror, ever fearful that they would lose their man. This daily agitation seemed to explain another until now unsolved enigma of life in France – the abundance of lingerie shops.

  There was scarcely a street in a town where the plastic nipples of a mannequin didn't protrude through a lacy embrace. Until this moment I'd assumed that Provençal men had insatiable appetites and that after a hard morning picking pumpkins or pruning vines, they rushed to spend their hard-earned wages on the very latest edible thong, crashing through the door to their home in a fit of raging passion, wolfing down a daube and spending the remaining hour of their lunch licking an
île flottante
from their wife's heaving breasts.

  Instead, I now appreciated lingerie was a defensive female purchase. It might never be worn, but it was there in a drawer, ready and waiting, a threat and a temptation. And the beauty of it all for the lingerie shop owners was that a woman could never have enough. These shops fed an insatiable arms race between wives and mistresses, each faction desperate for the reassurance of another pair of suspenders, just in case they were ever needed.

  Madame Parmentier slipped the pizza into the bag and the warm topping immediately clung to the paper.

  
'Merci beaucoup, bonne journée.
'

  We parted company. For once Madame Parmentier sheepishly averted her eyes.

  Back at home Tanya was busy trying to reassemble a breast pump and Elodie was lying on her back in her cot, wailing with hunger. My mind was still turning over the eavesdropped conversation as I placed breakfast on the table. The photos at Pertuis hospital with the mums in their finest underwear now also made sense. They were a timely reminder to the husband of what he'd been missing and a warning not to stray. Imagine the hassle, though; you've just given birth, you're tired and exhausted, all you want to do is sleep and yet instead you commission a photographer and put on your finest bra, posing artfully to reveal a heavy post-pregnancy cleavage. Such dedication took a special kind of distrust of one's husband.

  'It must be exhausting being a French woman,' I said without thinking.

  Tanya's raised eyebrow said it all – gave birth three weeks ago, up every night breastfeeding, the pump which you were supposed to fix doesn't work, I'm still doing all the washing and the cooking and you want to discuss the plight of French women.

B
y the beginning of February I was back at work selling wine. In the corner of my
cave
(wine cellar) I came across a box of rosé from a'Beckett's vineyard in Wiltshire. I'd ordered some out of curiosity following a lunch the previous summer with the wine expert and
Decanter
columnist Steven Spurrier, and now this English pink gave me an idea.

  In 1976 Steven had organised a blind tasting of the best French wines against the best American wines. The premier tasters in the world had lined up, sniffing, swilling, tasting and pontificating over the lingering finish of Cabernet on the tongue. Then, in a result that shocked oenophiles everywhere, the tasters scored the American wines higher than the most famous French clarets. The sporting equivalent of this result would be the Faroe Islands beating Brazil 5–0 at football, in Rio de Janeiro with a Brazilian referee, and with the Faroe goalkeeper having been sent off in the first minute. According to the French mindset, the second coming of Christ was more probable than their best wines being judged inferior to foreign muck. And yet it happened.

  The tasting became known as the Judgement of Paris and at the time caused outrage in the wine industry. Steven was temporarily ostracised by major vineyards, who criticised the methodology employed, and such was the legacy of the event that there are now two Hollywood films in production on the subject.

  Much of the rest of the lunch with Steven had been spent discussing the nascent English wine industry. Steven's new project was the creation of a vineyard in Dorset. He'd had experts over from Champagne and Chablis to examine the soil and they'd pronounced his prospects to be good. Global warming had led to longer hotter summers and the UK climate was now similar to that of northern France a decade ago. The same band of chalky soil that gave rise to the steely whites of Chablis and lent the finesse to champagnes resurfaced in the UK as the North, South and Dorset Downs. Technically there were no obstacles to the UK beginning to produce fizz, whites and even reds of the highest quality and Steven was determined to be one of the new generation of growers.

  These memories returned as I regarded the box of Wiltshire rosé. I needed an event to create a buzz and it would be fun to find out whether Steven was right about English wines. Why not organise a mini Judgement of Paris and see whether in a blind tasting the locals preferred English or French pink? At the very least the tasting would garner some much needed publicity for my business and gain me a few new customers.

  As always, it was best to check any new idea with a local.

  Born in the house we lived in, Manu, our landlord, was a typical Provençal peasant: dark hair, dark eyes, and arms like anvils. I'd watched him labour for hours unaided by machine, picking olives in the bitter December cold, or harvesting lavender in the heat of July. His body had the durability of an ox and he used his vast bulk to eke money from the land in whatever way possible. Deeply distrustful of strangers, he'd at first refused to allow us to rent the other half of his farmhouse. Our worlds were just too different. To him we were effete intellectuals selling a luxury product (bottled as opposed to pumped wine) to the region's second homeowners. Such people, in Manu's eyes, had the social status of leeches and he would love to have stuck a lighter up their Parisian derrières.

  However, once the estate agent had suggested doubling the deposit, Manu's moral stance weakened and finally he relented. Now, after three years living next door to each other, we'd developed a mutual friendship, sharing occasional drinks of the moonshine liquor he produced and talking about politics. Manu was the archetypal French socialist: an ardent advocate of the poor, supporter of strikes, of working shorter hours, retiring early and higher taxes for the rich. In his eyes Tanya and I were the political enemy, capitalists whose belief in profit would bring the world to its knees. A hundred or so years ago he would probably happily have seen us guillotined; these days he had to be content with the occasional dramatic gesture of disgust and some more shared moonshine.

  As well as being a reliable barometer of local opinion, Manu was also a vigneron. He'd reclaimed the field of old untended vines outside our kitchen window. The rows now stretched neatly towards the horizon. French winemakers have a saying, 'the wine speaks of the people', implying that the most important element in a wine is the love and care of the person who makes it. By dedicating himself to the land, the winemaker becomes at one with his terroir. I'd never fully understood the concept until I watched Manu work, monotonously, unyieldingly bending his back to the elements harvesting whatever the land offered. If I wanted to know whether the local producers would submit a representative wine to my blind tasting, Manu was the person to ask.

  The sound of metal grinding against metal meant that our landlord was at home. Whether it was a hobby or a business I was never quite sure, but Manu spent days dismembering and then reconstructing old cars. They wheezed up the drive or arrived on the back of trailers and a line of vintage Renaults and Citroëns now awaited his attention. Some of the cars had been around for so long that they had become part of the garden. In the summer wild flowers grew out of the windows, in the winter just weeds. I'd persuaded Tanya to view them as art installations, the type of stuff the Tate Modern would pay thousands for – a retrospective on the role of the car in French society.

  As I approached, Manu lifted his visor and extinguished the blowtorch. He did most of his mechanical work in an old barn which divided the two sides of the farmhouse. Various pieces of equipment hung from the beams – a yoke for a donkey, heavy iron chains and a plough. In one corner there was a rusty tractor and the barn as always smelt heavily of diesel. Nails, screws and other pieces of metal covered every surface. Rakes, hoes and a scythe fit for the Grim Reaper rested in a bundle against the wall. A severed finger or toe was only a misplaced hand or foot away.

  
'Bonjour!'

  
'Bonjour.'

  
'Tout va bien? Est-ce qu'Elodie est toujours sage?'

  Having a baby in his house hadn't been part of Manu's thought process when he rented it out to us. Although the walls were thick and the division between the two sides of the
mas
well constructed, he was still paranoid about Elodie's crying. Hence the first question every time we met these days was, '
Est-ce qu'Elodie est toujours sage?'
– 'Is she still behaving and sleeping well?' Only once his mind had been put at rest could we continue.

  
'Toujours sage,'
I reassured, catching a strong whiff of garlic, a foodstuff which Manu insisted was
'très bon pour la
santé'
. The smell was sometimes so overpowering that I wondered whether, in private, he chewed on raw bulbs.

  We moved outside into the bright sunlight. A small stream had sprung up outside our house. After years of drought this winter's rainfall had exceeded all records. Rocks in the hills wept and water played along forgotten riverbeds. Jumping over the stream, Manu opened the door to his chicken coop. Ten birds immediately huddled around his legs, clucking hungrily. As Manu tipped seed to the ground I explained my idea for a tasting. Ducking into the hen house he began collecting eggs; only the odd grunt reassured me that he was still listening.

  'And so that's it – a blind tasting of an English rosé against a local French one. We'll hold it on market day for a bit of fun.'

  Thousands of small white snails clung to the fence which enclosed the chickens. Manu casually plucked them and tossed them to the birds. He still hadn't said a word.

  'What do you think?' I prodded.

  Ten more snails met their end.

  'You'll be wasting your time,' Manu finally confided. 'The people here know their own wines.'

  'But you don't object.'

  Manu shrugged his shoulders, indicating indifference or perhaps even a little hostility to the idea. After the chickens it was the turn of the hunting dogs. Manu kept three of them in a large cage. In the season he would depart before dawn, and I often saw him returning home in the misty half-light, gun cocked over his arm, dead game slung over his shoulder and dogs circling adoringly around his ankles. Such was his command of the animals that he could silence them with a glance.

  'We'll enter Christophe's wine,' Manu grunted as he forked leftover meat into the dogs' bowls. 'It won a silver medal at the Orange Concours des Vins.' He might not have let it show but secretly I believed Manu was looking forward to the tasting, hence the sudden change of mind: rugby, football, tennis – beating the old enemy was always amusing and here was an opportunity for the Provençal vigneron to add to the glory of France.

At just before midday on the following Wednesday morning I stood in the village square. Underneath my jacket my woollen jumper had absorbed the water from the air and the knitted cloth was wet against my skin. I shivered with the cold. The plane trees that bestowed a dappled effect on the marketplace in summer had been pruned back, and now the stunted branches reached heavenwards in supplication, like the upturned fingers of a penitent. Puddles from the previous night's rain dotted the gravel and forgotten Christmas decorations creaked in the wind. The breeze shifted and the smell of burning damp leaves replaced wafts of strong tobacco. The morning was drawing to a close and the agreed hour for the tasting approaching.

  On the table in front of me were the two competing wines, French and English, both shrouded in tissue paper. When poured, one had the colour of ripe cherries, the other vibrant pink coral, but neither showed that well against the grey sky. The two were notably different in taste. The a'Beckett's estate rosé from Devizes in Wiltshire was light and fruity and relatively low in alcohol at 10 per cent. Made from a mixture of Pinot Noir and Reichensteiner, its closest comparator in France was a Marsannay rosé, which many in Burgundy regarded as the country's finest. The Côtes du Ventoux by contrast, a Syrah and Grenache mix, was a much more robust wine, more aggressive on the palate and a better accompaniment to food. Choosing between the two should have been easy.