Le Couvent Diary

 

Yesterday we picked the white grapes. We don't have the right equipment to make white wine - you need a method of chilling the grapes quickly and as we have so few it simply isn't worth the outlay.




So we picked our Muscat petit grain, along with a few black and white eating grapes,  just for juice.  Ali & I were joined by four of our lovely guests; Nicolette, Frances, Kristin & Justin. (For one moment this morning we had Justin Gosling and Justin Swan in the house.)

 

 The pre-squish footwash

 

 De-stemming the grapes

 

Waiting to squish

 

 Treading the grapes

 

 The pre-sieved gloop

 

 Bottled

After removing the stems and treading the grapes we ended up with about 50 litres of juice which we gave to our B&B guests at breakfast and to any of our pals who'd take some. It's absolutely delicious, but only lasts a few days in the fridge before it would start to ferment. So we glug it merrily while it's around. Last night we had it with champagne. Nicky named the cocktail a Le Couvent Grappellini.

 

It's been so hot that guests have been spending whole languorous days by the pool. I suspect that no-one wants me there gardening while they're trying to relax, so the garden is looking rather relaxed itself.

 

Recently lovely Kate-The-Human-Fish and her kind husband Darren came to stay. I was apologising for the fact that the garden looks a tad dishevelled. Today professional gardener Kate sent me this fab photo, with the reassuring words "I wanted to send this photo of the garden by the pool because you sounded so worried about how it looks. This is how it looks to guests - gorgeous! So stop worrying!"

You see what I mean? People who come to stay at Le Couvent are just So Very Lovely.

Thank you Kate.

 

Crikey, is it that long since I last found a moment to write? With less than a month to go before we re-open for the season we have a ton of things to do. I love the improving weather and so I enjoy working on the garden here at Le Couvent. With all the rain of this past winter everything has grown like triffids, so big chopping is involved. I and my full trailer are a regular sight at the local tip. But the garden is coming on a treat and we'll be taking the winter cover off the pool in the next fortnight. Frankly getting in the water is unthinkable at the moment, but it will soon warm up as the sun gets to work.

Meanwhile Ali is repainting large swathes of the house and generally making sure everything is in tip-top working order. She fastidiously checks every light, tap, flush, hairdryer, shower and bed-leg to make sure they're up to scratch. The boiler has been serviced ready to supply oceans of hot water for the showers. Every sheet, duvet, pillow, curtain and towel has been to the laundry and each sits wrapped in cellophane waiting for its debut.

Yesterday we made dozens of pots of strawberry jam ready for the breakfast table. It was also the day of the Roujan Foire. Traditionally it rains, but yesterday was dry and so there were squillions of people wandering up and down the eighty or so stalls selling everything from cheap watches to goats.  I already have a great watch so I wasn't tempted, but the goats almost won me over until I remembered one we had the misfortune to live with when i was six. It ate everything including the washing from the line. And it was hideously aggressive. So no goats.

 

 

Tomorrow we set about bottling and labelling our last vintage. We have two different wines this year - Cuvée Solèsio, a straight peppery Syrah and Cuvée Chocolat, an assemblage of Carignan and Cinsault which tastes like those maraschino cherries, dipped in kirsch and wrapped in chocolate.  Our lovely wine writing pal and Master of Wine, Rosemary George, has declared them delicious so I'm choosing to believe her, since I can't be objective. We lost one of our wines to a leaky chapeau flottante that let the air in when the tube deflated. I had hoped I'd caught it before the air did any damage, but I hadn't so our meagre harvest has been further reduced. Lesson for next year - check the cuves every day - even in winter.

 

 

 

 

 

A thousand thanks to the illustrious and delightful Henry Steadman for designing our wine labels for us.

The vines are looking fantastically strong and healthy and are just beginning to throw out their first leaves. It's lovely to see those first signs of the next year's fruit on its way, but I do dread the constant round of fortnightly spraying. It's a very long walk with a back pack sprayer full of organic treatment against mildew. I find it exhausting. Just thinking about it. Anybody up for lending a hand?

 

 

Our vegetable garden is groaning with cauliflowers so, as our joint imaginations haven't come up with anything more interesting, we've had a cholesterol-rich diet of nightly cauliflower cheese for over a week and I'm not sure I can face it again for a while. Roll on the salads, cherries and asparagus.

 

 

 

Oh, and thank you to nice Anthony Peregrine, whom we've never met, for giving us a kind mention in the Sunday Times. Just in case he reads this blog.

 

 

 

Happy Easter everyone.

Le Couvent doesn't open in the winter. Not ever, never. However we make two exceptions - one week for our volunteers and another for a wonderful group of writers who come here each March. They are all members of the Tricycle Theatre Black & Asian Writers' Goup and the week is sponsored by generous Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York.

 

 

 

All twelve of them have a lively breakfast round the kitchen table, then as soon as we've cleared up, the table is festooned with wires and laptops. Apart from the clackety clack of all the keyboards, you can hear a pin drop. Occasionally someone will get up to put the kettle on. Roy stands up to think. A couple prefer to write in their rooms and one likes to write in Mother Sup's, whilst going through our music collection. So far this afternoon I've heard Gorecki, Madame Butterfly and a bit of Nina Simone filter through to our apartment.

 

 

 

All this quietness makes Ali and I quiet too. I have spent much of today going through cadastral plans trying to work out which tiny piece of land we bought as an adjunct when we purchased our vines. No-one ever actually walked us round the boundaries, so we simply know that there's a small area somewhere en route to our vineyard which stands untended and neglected. I called a friend in the village who's married to a five generation Roujanais. I'm hoping he'll be able to tell me.

Were I not in silent mode I would be continuing my chipping of old wine barrel staves. I dismantled a beautiful oak barrel the other day and have been in the process of making signs for the vineyard. I'm hoping to do one for each parcel giving the name of the grape variety and when it was planted. I've done three so far, just five to go.

 

 

 

 

By the way, we are already fully booked for considerable chunks of the summer, so if you're dithering over when to come, tarry no longer or your dates might have been swallowed up. (See, I'm just picking up discarded words from the kitchen floor.)

The guests have all gone home, the rooms are cleaned for winter, the cooling fans await their winter home in the loft, but the pool's still swimmable. Yesterday was our first day without guests for five months and I felt truly ill after a rather-too-long lie-in. 

However, today has been magical. I woke at 6.19 am, just as I have all summer - one minute before the alarm, although it is now turned off. I felt fit as a fiddle and zipped off to the market in Clermont l'Herault. My basket crammed with plants, 20 Christmas cauliflower, 2 basil, 15 oak leaf lettuce, 3 celery, along with finely cut jambon sec, a paillasse loaf, tiny coffee meringues, yellow courgettes, five different types of tomatoes, leeks, french beans, pork loin and the crowning glory - huge cep mushrooms from the hills in Lozere, I was home again by 10am.

 

 

I'd be very happy to spend this winter gardening, so this afternoon found me planting all that I'd bought this morning. The potager has been easy to prepare this autumn, thanks to a fantastic attachment made by Wolf tools. It hoes and breaks up the soil to a fine tilth like nothing I've ever used before. God knows what it'd be like in wetter, heavier soils, but here, in the dry, fast draining bauxite of our vineyard it is brilliant. 

 

 

 

The potager is so packed with winter vegetables that I've started filling up the extra space with Australian everlasting flowers. I have no idea how they'll do, but we'll see.

 

 

I sit here on another sunny morning that portends a perfect day for the guests who love to read and snooze by the pool. We've been full-on with guests, leaving no time for blogging, so I'm playing catch-up.

Our main news is that we've decided to move our wine-making mini-operation to Le Couvent, so we've been clearing out the cave and buying new tanks in preparation. It'll mean that we can keep a closer watch on our wines, and guests will be able to learn a bit about the process, and to taste the wine in all its stages.

Last year's wine is just about ready for bottling and we're hoping to get that completed in the next three weeks before this year's harvest. If you're coming to stay at Le Couvent towards the end of August, or the beginning of September, it's highly likely that you'll be able to witness the harvest and wine-making first-hand. Unless we have another hail storm, that is.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, guests continue to arrive from all of Europe, the Americas and Australia, except England. We have far fewer guests from England this year. We still have lots of Irish and Scottish. So what is it about the financial crisis that it appears to have affected Les Anglais more than anywhere else in the world? I don't suppose the media could have fuelled it at all - could they? Very bizarre. But for us it is all the more rewarding to have a house full of different nationalities. This morning we have Swiss, Irish, American, Scottish, Colombian - and English - around the breakfast table. It inspires wonderful conversation.

Having said that, the weather appears to have taken a turn for the worse in the UK if the flurry of late booking enquiries is anything to go by. And receiving an e-mail asking for four rooms for next week does sometimes drive me to mentally conjure a response slightly less polite than the reply that I actually send. Ho hum.

The weather's been hot and gorgeous, so the ice-cream machine's been put to good use. It's hard not to when the hens are producing such luscious eggs at the moment, thanks to leftover croissants, pains au chocolat and fruit.

This week saw the Roujan fete, with four nights of music, food, wine and dancing and a carnival procession through the streets of the village. I'll leave you with some photos of the jolly events of the day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This last photo's here because I love the small dog, eager for the chap in the yellow jacket to move so he can see the action. 

We have two broody hens at the moment and broody hens don't lay. With nine hens in total that leaves seven potential layers. We have eight guests staying today and boiled eggs are a favourite, so at their laying best the hens are struggling to keep up.

Some guests take matters into their own hands. I came down to prepare breakfast this morning to find two eggs 'bagged'.

 

 

This is a dilemma because I can't bring myself to buy eggs when our hens lay the best in the world- it feels disloyal to the hens and it misses the point. I'll just have to serve boiled eggs on alternate days. Or pray the broody girls see the pointlessness of their nest-squatting given that we don't have a cockerel. Otherwise we have a wait of up to three weeks.

A few years ago we had a lovely jazz singer to stay.  She has a friend who lives close by here who makes soap and she told us that her friend's soap was exceptional.  Now, I don't know about you, but to me the notion of making soap seems somehow rather arcane.  It's a process I know practically nothing about, I just know that like anything that's good, it takes effort, knowledge and skill to make it terrific as opposed to ordinary, and, hey, we all know that most bars of soap do the job in a wet and suddy kind of way but, basically, ordinary is missing the point.  Isn't it? 

So.  Ripple, lather, dissolve.  For the last couple of years we've bought our delicious organic soap from the Savonnerie de Saint Privat.  (Her lavender soap, by the way, is the very same gorgeous, purple stuff sold by Neal's Yard.)  Anyway I phoned the savonerie yesterday to find out if she or her partner were going to have a stall at Clermont market.  She told me she'd just had a baby and wasn't going to be making any soap for the next year or two.  Eekamouse.  PANIC.   

So today, on her advice, I headed for the Olive Oil Co-operative at Clermont l'Herault which is where all the local growers take their olives to be pressed.  I discovered that it also has rather a fantastic shop, which apart from olive oil also sells regional artisanal products like wine, pottery, honey and wine.  And soap.  Lots and lots of soap.  And also our girl's soap. 

I bought it out.

 

 

 

So, when you arrive, you may find in your soapdish:

Lavender (lavendre)

Honey and Geranium  (miel et geranium)

Rosemary and Spirulina (romarin et spirulin)

or

Orange and Cinammon (orange et cannelle)

I drove back with the car heavily, headily, drowsily pungent with all of the above.  Oh my, oh my, it smelt good. 

We can't actually afford to give you a whole big bar of these soaps because, like most things good, they're pretty expensive and it would be enormously wasteful to throw out almost all of a bar each time.  So we hope you enjoy trying a taste of something that couldn't be more real or more local. 

 

 

Halfway through last season we decided to take the plunge and use a commercial laundry.  On the face of it this doesn't seem much of a leap.  Sheets need laundering.  Laundry exists.  QED take sheets to laundry. Plus, four years of ironing huge cotton sheets in the height of summer isn't one of my happiest memories though it may be my hottest.  There is a hurdle to leap on the road to laundry-heaven though, and the hurdle is size.  It does matter. 

If the laundry already has a week's laundry which takes a week to process, and the house is full of two night stays, how many sheets and pillowcases does that come to?  Well, the pillowcase answer is 144 and the sheet, 80 (assuming there are no twins and no duvets.)   This, of course, is a "worst possible scenario," though in a world where "worst possible scenarios" usually involve earthquakes or famine, my laundry list obviously doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Nonetheless it is MY hill of beans and with not a shop selling super king-size sheets this side of Oxford Street, we just didn't have enough, not nearly enough, to go round.

So last year we bought more sheets.  And pillowcases.  Then more sheets.  And pillowcases.

 

 

 

And now at least once a week I head off to the lovely CATAR in Pezenas, the blanchisserie behind Lidl.  CATAR is a work scheme for people with learning difficulties which is run, usually like clockwork, by Monsieur Tall (grey curly hair and blue eyes,) Madame Roland (blond hair and glasses) and Madame Short (enough said.)  The only times the clockwork goes lumpy is when M. Tall breaks his leg or a machine breaks down. (M. Tall I'm thrilled to say is now back in harness after 5 months.) 

 

 

 

Each Christmas Lizzie and I drop off a huge gift-wrapped tin of Quality Street.  The resulting sugar-high makes me enormously popular with the troops and accounts for my name of Madame Ballantyne-Bonbon.  Despite the Everests of laundry being scaled each week, I've never been sent home with someone else's candy-striped flannelettes or surgical scrubs for which I'm enormously grateful.  Mille mercis to all at CATAR for making our lives cooler and cleaner.

The Yanks are coming back to France. (Is it rude to say Yanks?) For a few years we have had three or four American couples each season, but this year we have dozens. So what's changed? I've been talking with our current American guests and we are unable to decide. Is it that liberal Americans are travelling now that they are proud of their President? Has the US media stopped saying, erroneously, that the French were anti-American? It surely can't be the dire exchange rate. Either way, we are thrilled to have you here. Thank you.

However, despite our bookings being just as high as last year, we do have far fewer guests coming from the UK. Is it as a result of the forecast of a heatwave in Britain? Or the media endlessly talking up the financial 'crisis'? Or shame at a government in disarray? I really don't know, but we'd be very happy to see more Brits taking their hols in this lovely part of France.

Yesterday was a 'stay in front of the computer all day' kinda day. It was raining, so the garden maintenance was out of the question. There's always plenty to do to get ready for the new B&B season which starts on 1 May each year. So yesterday we trawled through websites looking for new bath sheets. Big fluffy Egyptian cotton ones. We'd already searched in more local shops, but no-one had the 18 we need so we settled on the lovely John Lewis in Oxford Street, London. Maria, my new friend in the export department,  has secured us a big parcel and they are on their way. A mere 500 quid including delivery.

 

 

That's the problem with a B&B. Everything you need to buy comes in large numbers. When we were setting up six years ago we would find a really beautiful bedside lamp at £100, then realise we needed ten of them. Eeek. And things wear out fast. For example, we have struggled to find good poolside sunbeds. I'll guess that in the past we have bought at least a dozen that were absolutely hopeless after one season. So last year we went to the people that supply all the sunbeds they use on the big beaches here on the Mediterranean. We bought a dozen - more than the number of people we have staying - and they were cripplingly expensive. But, mercifully, they look the same now as they did at the beginning of last season. So, the moral of this whingeing tale is, spend the money, buy the best. Don't hesitate. It's a saving in the long-term and you'll enjoy the item so much more.

Yep, it's my fault. I'm responsible for the rain here in Languedoc today. Yesterday was bright and sunny so I was eager to take the cover off the pool to start its pre-season warming-up. Ali and I spent the entire day working on it. Ali jet washed the paving - a long and noisy job, while I set to cleaning the pool. It looks fantastic and the sun shone so brightly I was tempted to take a dip. I'm guessing it's around 16 degrees so it'd feel like the Arctic. I resisted.

Still, the vegetables in the kitchen-garden are happy.

Today we're going to do repair jobs round the house. You know, all those niggly little jobs you don't do unless someone's coming. And we have lots of people coming - all through the summer, to Le Couvent, Roujan - the best bed and breakfast in Languedoc. There, the day isn't going to be entirely wasted. I managed to get in another shameless plug.

 

 

 

The sun's shining, the wind's dropped, my sickly hens are looking better, we're off to prune vines this afternoon and all's well.

Over breakfast this morning Ali and I were discussing the terrible exchange rates and decided we'd do our bit for your holiday plans by reducing the room prices for next year.

So for 2009, a double room is now reduced to 90 euros per night and a single room 80 euros per night. Of course this includes a luscious breakfast, a bottle of delicious Le Couvent wine, free wireless internet, use of the bikes, freedom to swim, read or sleep all day long, aperitifs and assorted other treats as they come to mind.

Have a very merry Christmas and a healthy, happy 2009.

Lizzie & Ali xx 

In an idle moment yesterday I was meandering through Youtube videos and came across this one. The chap's name is Michael Schulte. I like it a lot. Click on the big arrow, sit back with a coffee and think happy thoughts.

 

 

Ali and I wish you a very Happy Christmas and a peaceful, healthy and happy 2009. We hope to see lots of you next summer.

Bisous à tous de Lizzie et Ali du Couvent, Roujan.

Six hens weren't enough to keep up with demand for luscious boiled eggs for all the guests this summer, so we bought five more today. The new girls are Light Sussex and should lay creamy pale eggs to go alongside the brown ones our older biddies produce.

 

 

Although they are just babes at 5 months old, they will look like this in a few weeks' time, but for the moment they look like this:

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, the old girls are looking mean and moody, ready to jump the new ones when they're released. We currently have the babes in their own quarters until they've settled in.

 

 

 

It'll be a week at least, by which time the old ones will have forgotten the new ones are new. This morning one of the white ones rewarded us with an egg. Just 16 hours after moving in. I guess that means she's happy enough.

I'm thinking of naming them after small Sussex villages. So we'll have Firle, Glynde, Ripe, Chiddingly & Cowbeech. God knows which will be which - there's not much difference between them yet.