But visiting smaller private vineyards is a very different experience, even though the visit-tasting welcome signs are beautifully hand-painted. When people tell me about their holidays in France or Italy or Spain where they, oh, you know, drive through the countryside, stopping here and there in these tiny rural places, tasting as they go, picking up marvelous boxes of a little known red or white or sparkling, a little part of me writhes in embarrassment.
I would no more zip, out of the blue, down the rural lane to someone’s house than I would knock on your door tonight and wait for you to give me my tea. How about feeding a dying kitten with a pipette? Make love to someone irresistible but totally unsuitable? Attacking fractions to forever remain a genius in the eyes of your 10-year-old child? I wouldn’t want my desire for a cheap but versatile rosé to get in the way of all this, so sorry to bother you, sorry, I’ll go now. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
But a few summers ago, an oenologist friend recommended a local producer to me who made a very good Muscat. It wasn’t one of those places either, so the risk of a kitten/eyedropper situation was negligible. On the last day of our holiday, between taking the dogs to the vet for their £40 pats on the head (seriously, in the days of pet passports I always wondered if two minutes on a table and a scribble in a book was all it took to stop rabies), buying punnets of peaches for jam at a roadside stall and running to the supermarket for cheap sea salt, Marseille soap flakes and boxes of duck confit, I broke the holiday habit and gave in to My first cave visit as a civilian.
We settled into the neat car park of an office block so bland that in England it might have been the headquarters of a place selling air conditioning or paper goods. It was clear to anyone with eyes that there were no dying kittens at the scene. Good.
Inside, bottles shimmered on pristine, well-lit glass shelves. A young woman (tight white shirt, tailored pants, killer heels, hair oppressively slicked back – one of those people who, just by inhaling and exhaling, has the ability to make you feel dirty) tapped on a keyboard. It was very quiet – the slap-slap of our flip-flops on the stone floor sounded indecent.
The murderous woman in the heels looked up but didn’t move. “Can I help you?”
My husband mumbles something about muscat. “Do you want to TASTE it?”
No, I want to juggle that, I’m thinking. But I realize that we have set in motion a series of events that could easily end with me shouting, “Let’s buy all the wine!” Everything!” My moment, Julia-Roberts-in-Pretty-Woman. That’ll show her.
In the end, because I married a good, reasonable man, we bought a single case of wine that wouldn’t save face, but neither of us liked it but, as my grandma would have said. -mother, I was sure it would be useful to her. And no kittens died, which under the circumstances is the best we could hope for.
I still haven’t been to another vineyard. We have an excellent wine shop in the village, less than five minutes walk from the house. I once sent my husband to buy them a bottle and he returned two hours later refreshed and carrying a jar of golden mustard – a gift, he says. Properly gold, like something you might manage to gild a clock with. (It’s now, given the national mustard crisis, the only jar of mustard we have left. All my salads are shiny, all my ham is browned.)
I go to the wine shop to tell them what I’m serving, and we have a nice conversation about whether faugères will go better with lamb than fitou, or the delicate problem of knowing what to drink with a lemon tart. Sometimes I leave with a recipe or a restaurant recommendation too. Everyone’s dignity intact, no condescending looks, no dead animals. Like it should be.
Read last week’s column: I saw with my own eyes how the French are coping with the worst drought on record
Comments are closed.