Le Couvent Diary

 

 

Adopt twelve vines for a year in a romantic French vineyard and watch your grapes grow and ripen into twelve bottles of wine labelled with your sweetheart's name.

 

All through the summer, when our B&B is full of lovely guests, one question pops up all the time - 'What do you do in the winter?'

With bright blue skies most of the time, much of it is spent outdoors. Until recently that meant the gardens here at Le Couvent. However, with the acquisition of the new vineyards Ali and I are more than fully occupied with bringing our neglected vines back to full bloom. We have until the end of February to prune as many of these unruly beauties as we think we can keep.

They are in a shocking state having been untended for three years. Ali's keeping a diary of our derring-do with heavy machinery and sharp implements on our other website Chateau Mal Au Dos.

The rest of the time we see the friends we neglect during the summer, catch up on house repairs, visit places guests tell us about, lug logs upstairs to our apartment, write and re-write websites and market Le Couvent B&B, oh - and sleep. Well, I would if the cat, Gouttiere, didn't think 6am was a good time to scrape the bedroom door. Anyone want a fat, cantankerous, wilful and greedy cat? She came with Le Couvent when we bought the house and never left. She treats us with utter malevolence most of the time.

Actually, the winters here are fantastic. For the most part the sun shines, and when it doesn't I'm grateful if it means we can fill the pool next summer, and the skies are glisteningly clear. We can see for miles and it rarely gets bone-chilling. What else could one want?

With 20 huge old olives to prune, I set off for our bit of land shortly before lunchtime today. A nip in the air and a lifetime of pleasure in real fires had me setting up a heap of burning vine stocks in the fireplace of our little mazet.
Armed with a flask of coffee, a saw and some shiny new secateurs (thanks Mum) I was set to do a few hours work. After giving lots of air and light to two of the olives I noticed the odd flake of something kind of wet. Surely not sleet? It was 17 degrees last week. After a few more minutes the olives looked like this:

Oh crikey, we have another vine-pruning lesson tomorrow, after which lots of people are going to be coming to the mazet for lunch and a bit of work in the vines. At the moment it looks like this and Ali tells me tomorrow's supposed to be worse. Ho hum. I'll let you know how we get on.
Meanwhile, we've had my Mum and her husband, John, here for a fortnight. Thankfully, they are happy to sit around and witness our lives rather than have us chauffeur them all over the place. At one point I brought in a chainsaw and strimmer to mend. It was cold out so I put them on newspaper on the kitchen table. "I'm rather glad you left home" observed my mother.

We've been busy for a while, so no blog entries. First of all Ali and I took a short week in England to attend our friend Ingrid Thomas' book launch. She's written the most gorgeous, definitive book about shells called, for some obscure reason, The Shell. The perfect Christmas present for someone who loves beautiful books.

While we were in London we did a huge shop for silly things the English here miss, like curry spices and horseradish, and also for English Breakfast tea which is requested daily all through the summer by our B&B guests. A very happy day was spent ambling along the South Bank and around the Tate Modern. Another night we were on our pal's alpaca farm - a haven in the middle of Oxfordshire.

But the prize for the most comfortable bed goes to Nick Kent, who oh-so-sweetly lent us his divine house in Maida Vale. Yes, we are very lucky people. Thanks Nick.

But the really big news (to us that is) is that we have paid the deposit on 10.5 acres of vineyards and forest just ten minutes from Le Couvent. We've signed the papers and would cough up right now, but we have to wait a couple of months for the agricultural organisation S.A.F.E.R. to decide they don't need the land more than us. After that it's ours. Meanwhile, the current owner, the sparkly-eyed 87 year old M. Gineste, has given us permission to start work on the land. As a result Ali and I, along with my family comprising Justin (aka Freddie), Michelle, Poppy & Josh plus Teddy and Nicola, have been working our socks off.

The vines have not been tended for nearly three years, so are pretty overgrown but, according to our expert pals who've been tending vines all their lives, they're rescuable. We're only going to look after the best of them, many will be grubbed up to make way for a new forest. (Freddie and I were, after all, children of the New Forest in Hampshire) Our purchase includes shares in the Cave Cooperative in Roujan, so with luck we'll be able to take our grapes there.

A couple of things make this land extra special. The views are absolutely superb - on almost any day you can see all the way to the sea at Sete. Secondly, there is the most delightful small building (known as a mazet) which has been used over the years as the centre of fun for the whole Gineste family. Oh, and I forgot the huge reservoir that doubles as a swimming pool.

Here we are with M Gineste and Christiane & Michel Rouille, plus Freddie & Poppy.

For the want of a decent-sized tractor, or any tractor at all, Josh had to clear the first vineyard using a domestic lawn-mower. He's young, it only took all day, and there're just 9.75 acres to go, so what's the problem?
Apart from producing some grapes to go off to the co-op, we intend making some oil from our olive grove and using the mazet as a place where we can bring guests to play during the summer. The walks are superb - a walk in the wild herbs is better than aromatherapy, the pomegranates, pears, figs, kiwi, table grapes and cherries are all divine and will appear on the Le Couvent breakfast table during their seasons. As Michelle said yesterday - I can't wait.