So
we are on our grand tour of France, cutting a swathe from South
Brittany to the Ventoux, calling on French friends and English
friends, and annoying them equally in turn with our demands for food
and shelter and entertaining banter. The French friends (and indeed
French relative strangers, some of them) are morbidly depressed by
the state of France, at the same time as they acknowledge the French
Paradox: France may be in a condition of historic decline, but the
French, by and large, still live well. Hours go by during which they
mournfully drink delicious and affordable wines and pessimistically
slurp up outrageous cheeses while the evening crickets buzz away in
the scented gloaming and the country goes to the dogs. 'Where is our
Meesis Thatcheur?' they ask. 'Well, ours is dead', we answer,
sometimes in French, 'and interred just off the King's Road.'
And
the wines? I was getting into a flap, shortly before going away,
about how to get my (I assumed) inevitable haul of drink back to
England without cooking it in the back of the car or otherwise
ruining it on the trip through rough handling or inattention. The
result? We are now two days from the end, and I still haven't bought a
thing.
As
it happens, we are staying in a Chambre
d'Hôte
deep in the Aube, not far from Troyes. Two things. First, the Chambre
d'Hôte is
determinedly eccentric, every room crammed with violently French
bric-à-brac,
including, in the sitting-room, a life-sized model of a horse made of
driftwood, a 1950's radiogram in the kitchen, and a broken foot spa in
the bedroom. 'There are two dogs and nine cats living in this house,'
our host tells us, 'three of the cats live only on the top floor.
They never go out.'
Secondly,
we are on the southern flank of champagne country; not in the famous
bit, around Reims and Épernay, but in a serious producing region
nonetheless. Our host proves this by pouring us some terrific cold
fizzy stuff whose name absolutely escapes me, as well as offering a
plate of home-made macaroons. This is our apéro
for the day. He reveals that Moët & Chandon have bought up a
chunk of the neighbourhood, for millions of Euros. 'Three-quarters
of the pinot noir we grow here ends up with the big houses. The rest
we make into champagne ourselves.' His extremely short wife comes in,
her head only just visible above the furniture. 'The macaroons are
delicious,' we say, our mouths so full that no-one can understand us.
The
next day we drive through hectares and hectares of vineyards. Unlike
the woollier, more intimate vignobles
we've come to know around Ventoux and Beaumes de Venise, these are
industrial: ruthlessly organised, pinstripe-regular, marching across
the undulating terrain far into the distance.
'We
should really get some champagne,' my wife says, as we idle through
an oversized village, passing one small producer after another.
'This
is all pink,' I say. 'Do we want pink?'
'It's
not all pink,' she says. 'We should get a case. Let's just get some.'
But
where? Which? There are so many makers, all offering dégustation
et vente,
many with boxes of geraniums around their windows, and rusty metal
silhouettes of bunches of grapes, and tidy gravel drives, and other
bourgeois inducements, that I can't think where to start. Apart from
which, we are running out of time to visit Troyes, the whole point of
getting in the car in the first place. It is like being in an
American supermarket, trying to choose a pack of breakfast cereal
from the scores on offer and not miss your flight at the same time:
the nightmare of endless possibility.
'Just
buy some fucking champagne,' my wife reiterates, seeing the end of
the village approaching.
'I
will not,' I say, suddenly deciding that I have always hated
champagne and wouldn't buy it if someone paid me, and anyway, there
isn't enough room in the car.
'This
is ridiculous,' she says. 'We're practically drowning in it. Just
stop and get some.'
That
evening, having not bought any wine, still or sparkling, we drink
another fantastic apéro,
different
champagne, no macaroons. We then eat dinner in the kitchen, seated
between the radiogram and an enormous bowl full of abandoned glass
stoppers, while our host refuses to join us in the meal, but sits
instead on a high chair - a kind of Dickensian clerk's stool - a few
feet away, and watches us, intently.
It
is the end of the French trip, and we have acquired en
route
a fancy red handbag, a humorous tin tea tray, some second-hand
paperbacks, a lot of flyers from the Avignon Festival, and a bottle
of cheap Scotch whisky (Baird's Original) made for the French market.
I don't think of myself as wilfully perverse, but it takes some doing
to drive from one end of the world's greatest wine-producing country
to the other, and back again, without purchasing a single bottle of
wine. If this trip has proven at least two things, they are: a) that
I don't know myself as well as I think I do; b) that, given
sufficient headroom, it is possible to fit a horse into a lounge.
CJ
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