6000 Bottles of Wine

Mary Roblee Henry

A VOGUE editor and her French husband, a United Nations diplomat rearranged a seventeencentury rubble of stones on a hillside in southern France into La Serafine, a t’ounlry place “afloat in a sea of vineyards.'' The grape harvest when it came teas superior, the occasion for an international convergence on Ihe village of Seguret and for this pleasant interlude from i vitMiitn si; IN PROVENCE, a book by Mary Roblee Henry to be published this month by Alfed A. Knopf. Inc.

SUMMER after summer we marveled at the miracle of our vineyard in Provence as the undulating slopes turned from grubby brown to a broadloom of tender green. The first tendrils pushed up in little clumps like lonely pale lettuces in too vast a bed. Under the magnanimous sun of the Vaucluse and the gentle prodding of our vintner. Monsieur Verdeau, they soon became vines, stretching, reac hing for the sky, their arms jeweled in lucent leaves. To give them air and light, Jean-Pierre Verdean, Ins son, strung ribbons ot wire, taming, training the branches to interlock until their leaves entwined, wave after wave of vines darning an eternal ballet to the music of the wind. Finally, we saw the first waxen fruits in golden clusters on the boughs and Monsieur Verdean assured us that in the autumn our vineyard would yield its first grapes for wine.

“The grapes are bursting on the vines ... a fantastic year for the Rhone Valley wines, you must come for the vendange,” Monsieur Verdean wrote with unaccustomed verve, urging us to drop everything and fly to Seguret to harvest our vineyards. There was a shortage of labor, and our grapes, as the best in Seguret, had been left to mellow in the sun until their juice ran with the highest degree of alcohol. Most of the vineyards had been stripped before October, but ours, curved as they were around an amphitheater of hillside lacing south, could risk an extra week of sun. Our wine would be only of the ruvee des gourmets, of the top tjuality. What a splendid idea to have a reunion of the entire family for our first great vendange. It was, after all, the culmination of out dream, the vie un y of the land, the triumph of La Serafine, to he plucking our first purple fruits, to watch the blood ot our grapes flow into vats to age for our first heady wine. On the spur of the moment, I decided to fly over for the grape harvest. I sent a Hurry of cables all over the world. Beau-pere could lake the train from Bayonne to Avignon. Jacques and Nicole had not yet started classes and could drive down from Paris. My husband, Pawl-Mare, was on a United Nations mission in Kenya en route to Rome, where friends would motor him up to Provence. My sister, Peggy, in Madrid would be putting her girls into Marymount School in Barcelona and could meet me in Marseilles. I took the Air France night flight from New York and joined her at Marignane airport, where we were met by Monsieur Verdean.

It had been raining and cold in New York, but the air was as soft as silk in Provence. At Salon, the first welcoming bower of plane trees locked horns over the main street, and we stopped in the shadow of the bronze figure of Nostiadamtis. I bad spotted an irresistible market and was aching to finger the glossy aubergines and bite into a waun, ripe Provençal tomato. The produce was set out in baskets, a marvelous still life of green peppers, watercress, pink-and-white radishes, gritty mushrooms, lemons, yellow onions, and mounds of field salad, la doucette, as the Provencaux call it. inside, where chandeliers of garlic hung and buckets of black olives shone, we heaped up a carton of food.

October is the oyster season, so we stocked up on a supply and bought a knife to open them. Boursin with fines herbes, chèvre, and caprices des Dieux were our cheeses. At the butchers, we found white veal and a gigot of three pounds, and at the bakery, two wands of bread and a bag of butter croissants. Doing the marché made us feel we were really back in Provence.

At our village of Séguret, Madame Verdeau, her da ugh tet Simone, and Beau-pere were waiting at the Verdeau house. Monsieur Verdeau had paved his graveled terrace with flagstones and bought new blue deck c hairs, and there we chatted as though we had never been away. As Paul-Marc would not arrive until the lollowing day, Monsieur Verdeau lent us a 1950 Deux Chevaux, which I ground and bounced and urged up to La Serafine, our stony farmhouse cliffhanging above the Plain of God.

We got our bags and groceries inside, and after changing, we walked down to have a look at the vines. Indeed, they were bent and heavy with grapes, great dusters weighing down every branch. We plucked a basket for the house, some of the tawny pink grapes for the rose wine and some of the deep purple for the red. They were sweet and warm from the sun and tasted delicious after the feast of oysters we had on the terrace.

On the horizon we could see dark clouds forming, and by nightfall ominous peals of thunder cracked the sky. A fearful storm was brewing. Streaks of lightning lit up the valley, and suddenly we heard a great barrage of gunfire, as though God’s Plain were being bombed. Small bursts of orange flashed against the black clouds. I rushed to our new telephone to ask Monsieur Verdeau what was happening, but he assured me all was normal. Seguret owned seventeen bazookas, which were fired into threatening skies to break up the hail, far more dangerous to the vines than rain. Thunder and lightning and the barrage went on and on. We brought in logs from the guesthouse cellar and lit a fire in the library. Beau-pere went about battening down the blinds, mumbling Avc Maria, calling on lost saints remembered. ”Après nous, le déluge,” he exclaimed, as a gust of wind hurled him through the French doors and the rain suddenly came down in rivers.

The storm was fierce, too driving for us to go outside and dose the kitchen shutters. We could see forks of lightning splitting the heavens as we gathered around the stove, nervously slicing auber-gines peppers, onions, and tomatoes for a ratatouille that spicy ragoût of Provencal vegetables. One of my favorite and most accomplished dishes, it is something I always resort to cooking in moments of stress. We kept our spirits up by singing and gulping down goblets of gold-medal red.

As we were about to settle at the table, we noticed the kitchen tiles sinking in water, which rose with alarming speed, so that all the kitchen floor rags and sponges we applied failed to stem the flow. We were beginning to panic when Beau-pere decided there must be an unseen leak. By pulling out the refrigerator, we discovered a stream of water gushing in from a hole the size of a tennis ball. We plugged it with an empty wine bottle and disconnected the flimsy extension cord to which the refrigerator, for some inexplicable reason, was attached. Then the lights went dead as a bolt of blinding lightning flashed, thunder roared on its heels, and we knew the storm was right on top of us. We crowded together into a corner near the doorway as the house was struck. A ball of fire, glistening, yellow, rolled in from the open circuit, danced over the red tiles by our feet, careened through the entrance hall and out the door. We were paralyzed with fear; acrid smoke filled the air.

“The house is on fire,” Peggy screamed. Thank God she’s alive, I thought, dashing to douse the flaming dtistcloths under the sink. Thunder, lightning, wind, and rain howled about the house. The entire countryside was plunged into darkness. The ratatouille was still bubbling on the gas stove. We lit the candles and settled down at the long shadowy dining table—a white-haired patriarch with two trembling women. Out of hysteria and terror, we ate ravenously, overcome with relief at our good fortune to be alive. The rain still washed the roof above our heads as we crawled into bed, leaving the doors open between the rooms, spent with fatigue and foreboding that the storm had cut our grapes from their stems or reduced our wine to water.

THE next morning when Paul-Marc arrived, we investigated the damage. Monsieur Bonell, our electrician, came up to say that every house on our hillside had been struck by lightning. The hole in the wall from which the water gushed had been my fault. Monsieur Bonell had left it for my dishwasher, that hypothetical mechanical helper that would never arrive. All the telephone wires were down. What concerned us most, however, were the vines.

The storm had been a disaster for the vintners with vineyards in the plain. At the cooperative Monsieur Lebrun was bringing in his grapes, soggy and reduced to eight degrees. Everyone was praying for a good cold whip of the mistral, a wind that blows away clouds and illness, un vent sain , a healthy wind, as they say in Provence. We expected Monsieur Verdeau to be in despair because of the storm, but he showed his usual sang-froid. The rains had rolled off our rocky hillside like water off a swan’s neck, he assured us, and we had better all be up and in the vineyards at six the next morning.

It was my turn to feel like Marie Antoinette at her petit hameau. We set the alarm and got up at daybreak. By the time we had coffee and arrived at the vineyards, Monsieur Verdeau was there with his orange tractor and his team of vendangeurs. Simone worked fastest and best, like a round dark gypsy in her pale-blue smock. She had been picking fruits and grapes since the age of fourteen. “C’est dur,” she said, lopping off bunch after bunch of Grenache grapes with her sharp knife. There were others working too: Benoit, a young Spaniard of sixteen; Claude, whose father owned the nursery where we bought our plants and shrubs; Jean-Pierre Verdeau, handsome and strong, who picked grapes until eight, when he went to work at the cooperative for the rest of the day.

I had brought gardening scissors for our team, and Monsieur Verdeau provided us with plastic buckets. Each cluster had about fifty grapes. Monsieur Verdeau explained, as he taught us how to snip the largest number of bunches in the quickest possible time. You hold the clump of grapes in your left hand, cut with the right, and drop the fruit into the bucket in a kind of one-two-three movement. When the bucket is filled, you take it to the tractor and then on to a trailer to be carted to the cooperative.

Our first load weighed well over a ton, and Monsieur Verdeau drove it down to the entrance to the cooperative. After he had dumped the grapes into a huge grinder, Madame Estève, the wife of the superintendent, tested the juice in a refractometer for the degree of sugar and alcoholic content. Our first batch read eleven degrees, which meant it would come to twelve. The grapes were then pressed. The wine is stored in concrete vats to age for the vin ordinaire, but for the cuvée des gourmets, such as ours, it rests in huge oaken vats. In the room of the dégustation, Jean-Pierre was offering the best of the cellars in small round glasses.

Everyone took special pride in the tasting, because our wine had just achieved the honor of a village classification. No longer would the wine of the cooperative of Roaix-Séguret have merely an appellation Côtes-du-Rhônes. We were now vignerons, with a special label, one equal in quality to that of Tavel or Gigondas. This merit had been bestowed because the wines of Roaix-Séguret had won a silver and a gold medal at the Paris Fair of Vintners; a grand prize, a gold medal, and two first prizes at Mâcon; a gold medal at Orange.

In order to achieve the privilege of vignerons, proof of the long history of the plantation had to be presented. As vice president of the cooperative, Monsieur Verdeau had helped unearth the document in the Inguimbert Library in Carpentras dating from 1746, stating that Séguret and Roaix had always grown vines of superior quality. Now the brochures read. “Les Vignerons de Roaix Séguret vous offrent leurs ‘Côtes-du-Rhones’ rosés,” agreeable, nervous, and subtle, and “leurs ‘Côtes-duRhônes’ rouges,” aged in oak, heady, full-bodied, with delicate bouquet.

As members of the cooperative we were entitled to a special rate, but even for consumers all over Frame, or the world, the price for the best gold medal was about ninety cents a bottle, and as little as forty cents for the lesser vintages.

Jacques and Nicole arrived, and we all worked in the vineyards from morning until night for three days. Beau-père wore a straw hat against the sun and had his special system, which made him a champion. From the top of the slope, Jacques communicated by walkie-talkie with Nicole, who wore a bikini to renew her suntan as a vendangeuse.

I loved being a grape-gatherer. The sun shone down hot and strong, and my back ached from bending over the vines, but the air glistened and the sky opened blue and clear above. We were all working together, and there was a wonderful spirit of comradeship.

We planned a party celebrating the final day of our grape-gathering. Everyone climbed the hill to the terrace, all of us hot and tired and strangely exhilarated, for no matter how arduous the labor of the vendange, it is, above all, a labor of love. It is the raison d’être of the village of Séguret, and there is not one villager who does not rejoice in a good harvest. At dinner there were exuberant toasts and teary speeches, unprecedented outbursts of emotion for the reserved Provençaux, as we congratulated each other on the success of the season. For the Verdeau family and for us, the vendange sealed a bond, confirming our future, crystallizing our friendship as partners irrevocably rooted in the same land. Monsieur Verdeau lifted his glass ceremoniously, praising the yield of our property, sixty hectoliters of wine from six tons of grapes. We were delirious with joy. At last we counted as true citizens of Séguret with our own cru. The cellars of the Clos de La Sérafine overflowed. We could drown in rosé and rouge. Our five acres of vineyards had produced six thousand bottles of wine!