We let the three hounds out, and they loped off, baying with excitement. It was an extraordinary, doleful sound, not a bark or a howl but a lament, like an oboe in pain. Faustin shook his head. “They’ll be gone for days.” He himself didn’t hunt, and regarded hunters and their dogs as intruders who had no right to be nosing around his precious vines.
He had decided, he told us, that the moment had come to pick the table grapes. They would start as soon as Henriette had finished servicing the camion. She was the mechanically minded member of the family, and every September she had the job of coaxing another few kilometers out of the grape truck. It was at least thirty years old—maybe more, Faustin couldn’t remember exactly—blunt-nosed and rickety, with open sides and bald tires. It had ceased to be roadworthy years ago, but there was no question of buying a new truck. And why waste good money having it serviced at a garage when you had a mechanic for a wife? It was only used for a few weeks a year, and Faustin was careful to take it on the back roads to avoid meeting any of those officious little flics from the police station at Les Baumettes, with their absurd regulations about brakes and valid insurance.
Henriette’s ministrations were successful, and the old truck gasped up the drive early one morning, loaded with shallow wooden grape trays, just deep enough for a single layer of bunches. Stacks of trays were placed along each line of vines, and the three of them—Faustin, Henriette, and their daughter—took their scissors and set to work.
It was a slow and physically uncomfortable business. Because the appearance of table grapes is almost as important as their taste, every bunch had to be examined, every bruised or wrinkled grape snipped off. The bunches grew low, sometimes touching the earth and hidden by leaves, and the pickers’ progress was in yards per hour—squatting down, cutting, standing up, inspecting, snipping, packing. The heat was fierce, coming up from the ground as well as beating down on the necks and shoulders. No shade, no breeze, no relief in the course of a ten-hour day except the break for lunch. Never again would I look at a bunch of grapes in a bowl without thinking of backache and sunstroke. It was past seven when they came in for a drink, exhausted and radiating heat, but satisfied. The grapes were good and three or four days would see them all picked. I said to Faustin that he must be pleased with the weather. He pushed back his hat and I could see the line sharp across his forehead where the burned brown skin turned white.
“It’s too good,” he said. “It won’t last.” He took a long pull at his pastis as he considered the spectrum of misfortunes that could occur. If not storms, there might be a freak frost, a plague of locusts, a forest fire, a nuclear attack. Something was bound to go wrong before the second batch of grapes was picked. And, if it didn’t, he could console himself with the fact that his doctor had put him on a diet to reduce his cholesterol level. Yes, that was certainly a grave problem. Reassured at having remembered that fate had recently dealt him a black card, he had another drink.
IT HAD taken me some time to get used to having a separate purpose-built room devoted exclusively to wine—not a glorified cupboard or a cramped cavity under the stairs, but a genuine cave. It was buried in the bottom of the house, with permanently cool stone walls and a floor of gravel, and there was space for three or four hundred bottles. I loved it. I was determined to fill it up. Our friends were equally determined to empty it. This gave me the excuse to make regular visits—errands of social mercy—to the vineyards so that guests should never go thirsty.
In the interests of research and hospitality, I went to Gigondas and Beaumes-de-Venise and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, none of them bigger than a large village, all of them single-minded in their dedication to the grape. Everywhere I looked, there were signs advertising the caves that seemed to be at fifty-yard intervals. Dégustez nos vins! Never has a invitation been accepted with more enthusiasm. I had dégustations in a garage in Gigondas and a château above Beaumes-de-Venise. I found a powerful and velvety Châteauneuf-du-Pape for thirty francs a liter, squirted into plastic containers with a marvelous lack of ceremony from what looked like a garage pump. In a more expensive and more pretentious establishment, I asked to try the marc. A small cut-glass bottle was produced, and a drop was dabbed on the back of my hand, whether to sniff or to suck I wasn’t quite sure.
After a while, I bypassed the villages and started to follow the signs, often half-hidden by vegetation, that pointed deep into the countryside where the wines baked in the sun, and where I could buy directly from the men who made the wine. They were, without exception, hospitable and proud of their work and, to me at least, their sales pitch was irresistible.