Le Couvent Diary

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.