Peter Mayle - A Year In Provence

Uncle Edward turned on the light and closed the doors against the heat. A long trestle table and half a dozen chairs were placed under the single light bulb with its flat tin shade. In a dark corner, I could make out a flight of stairs and a concrete ramp leading down into the cellar. Crates of wine were stacked on wooden pallets around the walls, and an old refrigerator hummed quietly next to a cracked sink.

Uncle Edward was polishing glasses, holding each one up to the light before placing it on the table. He made a neat line of seven glasses, and began to arrange a variety of bottles behind them. Each bottle was accorded a few admiring comments: "The white monsieur knows, yes? A very agreeable young wine. The rosé, not at all like those thin rosés one finds on the Côte d'Azur. Thirteen degrees of alcohol, a proper wine. There's a light red-one could drink a bottle of that before a game of tennis. That one, par contre, is for the winter, and he will keep for ten years or more. And then…"

I tried to stop him. I told him that all I wanted were two cases of the white, but he wouldn't hear of it. Monsieur had taken the trouble to come personally, and it would be unthinkable not to taste a selection. Why, said Uncle Edward, he himself would join me in a progress through the vintages. He clapped a heavy hand on my shoulder and sat me down.

It was fascinating. He told me the precise part of the vineyard that each of the wines had come from, and why certain slopes produced lighter or heavier wines. Each wine we tasted was accompanied by an imaginary menu, described with much lip smacking and raising of the eyes to gastronomic heaven. We mentally consumed écrevisses, salmon cooked with sorrel, rosemary-flavored chicken from Bresse, roasted baby lamb with a creamy garlic sauce, an estouffade of beef and olives, a daube, loin of pork spiked with slivers of truffle. The wines tasted progressively better and became progressively more expensive; I was being traded up by an expert, and there was nothing to be done except sit back and enjoy it.

"There is one more you should try," said Uncle Edward, "although it is not to everybody's taste." He picked up a bottle and poured a careful half glass. It was deep red, almost black. "A wine of great character," he said. "Wait. It needs une bonne bouche ." He left me surrounded by glasses and bottles, feeling the first twinges of an afternoon hangover.

"Voilà." He put a plate in front of me-two small round goat's cheeses, speckled with herbs and shiny with oil-and gave me a knife with a worn wooden handle. He watched as I cut off a piece of cheese and ate it. It was ferociously strong. My palate, or what was left of it, had been perfectly primed and the wine tasted like nectar.

Uncle Edward helped me load the cases into the car. Had I really ordered all this? I must have. We had been sitting in the convivial murk for nearly two hours, and one can make all kinds of expansive decisions in two hours. I left with a throbbing head and an invitation to come back next month for the vendange.

Our own vendange, the agricultural highlight of the year, took place during the last week of September. Faustin would have liked it to be a few days later, but he had some private information about the weather which convinced him that it would be a wet October.

The original party of three that had picked the table grapes was reinforced by Cousin Raoul and Faustin's father. His contribution was to walk slowly behind the pickers, prodding among the vines with his stick until he found a bunch of grapes that had been overlooked and then shouting-he had a good, carrying bellow for a man of eighty-four-for someone to come back and do the job properly. In contrast to the others in their shorts and vests, he was dressed for a brisk November day in a sweater, a cap, and a suit of heavy cotton. When my wife appeared with a camera, he took off his cap, smoothed his hair, put his cap back on and struck a pose, waist deep in vines. Like all our neighbors, he loved having his portrait taken.

Slowly and noisily, the rows were picked clean, the grapes piled into plastic crates and stacked in the back of the truck. Every evening now, the roads were busy with vans and tractors towing their purple mountains to the wine cooperative at Maubec, where they were weighed and tested for alcoholic content.

To Faustin's surprise, the crop was gathered without incident, and to celebrate he invited us to go with him to the cooperative when he made the last delivery. "Tonight we will see the final figures," he said, "and then you will know how much you can drink next year."

We followed the truck as it swayed off into the sunset at twenty miles an hour, keeping to narrow roads that were stained with fallen, squashed grapes. There was a queue waiting to unload. Burly men with roasted faces sat on their tractors until it was their turn to back up to the platform and tip their loads down the chute-the first stage of their journey to the bottle.

Faustin finished unloading, and we went with him into the building to see our grapes going into the huge stainless-steel vats. "Watch that dial," he said. "It shows the degrees of alcohol." The needle swung up, quivered, and settled at 12.32 percent. Faustin grunted. He would have liked 12.50 and an extra few days in the sun might have done it, but anything above 12 was reasonable. He took us over to the man who kept the tallies of each delivery and peered at a line of figures on a clipboard, matching them with a handful of slips of paper he pulled from his pocket. He nodded. It was all correct.

"You won't go thirsty." He made the Provençal drinking gesture, fist clenched and thumb pointing towards his mouth. "Just over one thousand two hundred liters."

It sounded like a good year to us, and we told Faustin we were pleased. "Well," he said, "at least it didn't rain."

THE MAN stood peering into the moss and light undergrowth around the roots of an old scrub oak tree. His right leg was encased up to the thigh in a green rubber fishing wader; on the other foot was a running shoe. He held a long stick in front of him and carried a blue plastic shopping basket.

He turned sideways on to the tree, advanced the rubber-clad leg, and plunged his stick nervously into the vegetation, in the manner of a fencer expecting a sudden and violent riposte. And again, with the rubber leg pushed forward: on guard, thrust, withdraw, thrust. He was so absorbed by his duel that he had no idea that I was watching, equally absorbed, from the path. One of the dogs went up behind him and gave his rear leg an exploratory sniff.

He jumped- merde! -and then saw the dog, and me, and looked embarrassed. I apologized for startling him.

"For a moment," he said, "I thought I was being attacked."

I couldn't imagine who he thought was going to sniff his leg before attacking him, and I asked what he was looking for. In reply, he held up his shopping basket. "Les champignons."

This was a new and worrying aspect of the Lubéron. It was, as I already knew, a region full of strange things and even stranger people. But surely mushrooms, even wild mushrooms, didn't attack fully grown men. I asked him if the mushrooms were dangerous.

"Some can kill you," he said.

That I could believe, but it didn't explain the rubber boot or the extraordinary performance with the stick. At the risk of being made to feel like the most ignorant of city-reared dunces, I pointed at his right leg.

"The boot is for protection?"

"Mais oui."

"But against what?"