Read Ebook: Claret and Olives from the Garonne to the Rhone Notes social picturesque and legendary by the way. by Reach Angus B Angus Bethune

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the more quickly over my first initiation into the plucking of the grapes. But I passed a merry day, and eke a busy one. There are no idle spectators at a vintage--all the world must work; and so I speedily found myself, after being most cordially welcomed by a fat old gentleman, hoarse with bawling, in a pair of very dirty shirt-sleeves and a pouring perspiration--with a huge pair of scissors in my hand cutting off the bunches, in the midst of an uproarious troop of young men, young women, and children--threading the avenues between the plants--stripping, with wonderful dexterity, the clustered branches--their hands, indeed, gliding like dirty yellow serpents among the broad green leaves--and sometimes shouting out merry badinage, sometimes singing bits of strongly rhythmed melody in chorus, and all the time, as far as the feat could be effected, eating the grapes by handfuls. The whole thing was very jolly; I never heard more laughing about nothing in particular, more open and unblushing love-making, and more resolute quizzing of the good man, whose grapes were going partly into the baskets, tubs, pots, and pans, carried every few moments by the children and old people out of the green alleys to the pressing-tub, and partly into the capacious stomachs of the gatherers. At first I was dainty in my selection of the grapes to be chosen, eschewing the under-ripe and the over-ripe. A damsel beside me observed this. From her woolly hair and very dark but merry face, I imagined her to have a touch of Guadeloupe or Martinique blood. "Cut away," she said; "every grape makes wine."

"Yes--but the caterpillars--"

"They give it a body."

"Yes--but the snails--"

"O, save the snails, please do, for me!" said a little girl, holding out her apron, full of painted shells.

"What do you do with them?" I inquired.

"Boil them and eat them," said my juvenile friend.

I looked askance.

"You cant think how nice they are with vinegar!" said the mulatto girl.

I remembered our own appetite for periwinkles, and said nothing; but added my mite of snail-flesh to the collection.

"So ho!" thought I; "a strange reminiscence of the old Gascons." But on the morrow, my respectable entertainer had a bad headache, a yellow visage, and an entire forgetfulness of how he had got home at all.

CLARET--AND THE CLARET COUNTRY.

That our worthy forefathers in Guienne loved good wine, is a thing not to be doubted--even by a teetotaller. When the Earl of Derby halted his detachments, he always had a pipe set on broach for the good of the company; and it is to be presumed that he knew their tastes. The wines of the Garonne were also, as might be expected, freely imported into England:

"Whit wyn of Oseye, and of Gascoyne, Of the Ruele, and of the Rochel wyn."

"Bold and erect the Caledonian stood, Firm was his mutton, and his claret good; 'Let him drink port!' the English statesman cried. He drank the poison, and his spirit died!"

But enough of this painful subject. As Quin used to say, "Anybody drink port? No! I thought so: Waiter, take away the black strap, and throw it out."

And now look particularly at the vines. Nothing romantic in their appearance, no trellis work, none of the embowering, or the clustering, which the poets are so fond of. Here, in two words, is the aspect of some of the most famous vineyards in the world.

A strange feature in the wine country is the wondrously capricious and fitful nature of the soil. A forenoon's walk will show you the earth altering in its surface qualities almost like the shifting hues of shot silk--gravel of a light colour fading into gravel of a dark--sand blending with the mould, and bringing it now to a dusky yellow, now to an ashen grey--strata of chalky clay every now and then struggling into light only to melt away into beds of mere shingle--or bright semi-transparent pebbles, indebted to the action of water for shape and hue. At two principal points these blending and shifting qualities of soil put forth their utmost powers--in the favoured grounds of Margaux, and again, at a distance of about fifteen miles further to the north, in the vineyards of Lafitte, Latour, and between these latter, in the sunny slopes of St. Jullien. And the strangest thing of all is, that the quality--the magic--of the ground changes, without, in all cases, a corresponding change in the surface strata. If a fanciful and wilful fairy had flown over Medoc, flinging down here a blessing and there a curse upon the shifting shingle, the effect could not have been more oddly various. You can almost jump from a spot unknown to fame to another clustered with the most precious vintage of Europe. Half-a-dozen furrows often make all the difference between vines producing a beverage which will be drunk in the halls and palaces of England and Russia, and vines yielding a harvest which will be consumed in the cabarets and estaminets of the neighbourhood. It is to be observed, however, that the first-class wines belong almost entirely to the large proprietors. Amid a labyrinth of little patches, the property of the labouring peasants around, will be a spot appertaining to, and bearing the name of, some of the famous growths; while, conversely, inserted, as if by an accident, in the centre of a district of great name, and producing wine of great price, will be a perverse patch, yielding the most commonplace tipple, and worth not so many sous per yard as the surrounding earth is worth crowns.

Two old men, very much of the general type of the people of the country--that is, tall and spare, with intelligent and mildly-expressive faces and fine black eyes, were discussing together a sober bottle. One of them had lost an arm, and the other a leg. As I glanced at this peculiarity, the one-legged man caught my eye.

"Ah!" he said, "looking at our misfortunes; I left my leg on Waterloo."

"And I," chimed in his companion, "left my arm at Trafalgar."

"And I," rejoined the other, "was at the fourth main-deck gun of the Pluton when I was struck with the splinter while we were engaging the Mars. But we had our revenge. The Pluton shot the Mars' captain's head off!"--a fact which I afterwards verified. Captain Duff, the officer alluded to, was thus killed upon his quarter-deck, and the same ball shattered two seamen almost to pieces.

The old sailor, who was evidently by no means so keen a hand as his comrade, nudged him; a hint, I suppose, in common phrase, to draw it mild; but the ex-lancer of the 10th was not to be put down.

"Well, and if you are, what then, eh? I say I would like to have another brush with you."

My modest exculpation on behalf of Great Britain and Ireland was listened to with great impatience by the maimed lancer, and great attention by the maimed sailor, who kept up a running commentary:

All this, it is to be observed, passed without the slightest feeling of personal animosity. The lancer, who, I suspect, had passed the forenoon in the cabaret, every now and then shook hands with me magnanimously, as to show that his wrath was national--not individual; and when I proposed a bottle of rather better wine than they had been drinking, neither soldier nor sailor had a word to say in objection. The wine was brought, and very good it was, though not, of course, first-class claret.

"What do you think of that?" said the sailor.

"I wish I had as good every day in England," I replied.

"And why haven't you?" said the fierce lancer. "You might, if you chose. But you drink none of our wines."

All this time, the old sailor was tugging his comrade's jacket, and uttering sundry deprecatory ejaculations against such unnecessary vehemence. The Trafalgar man was clearly a take-it-easy personage; not troubled by too much thinking, and by no means a professional grievance-monger. So he interposed to bring back the topic to a more soothing subject, and said that what he would like, would be to see lots of English ships coming up the Gironde with the good cottons and woollens and hardwares we made in England, and taking back in exchange their cheap and wholesome wines--not only the great vintages for the great folk, but the common vintages for the common folk. "Indeed, I think," he concluded, "that sitting here drinking this good ten sous' wine with this English gentleman--who's going to pay for it--is far better than fighting him and hacking him up, or his hacking us up, with swords and balls and so forth."

"But," said the sailor, "there is death in glory!"

I have introduced this episode principally for the purpose of showing the notions entertained by the small proprietary as to the boasted superiority of the large vineyards; but the plain truth is, that the great growers are perfectly in the right. I have stated that the quality of the soil throughout the grape country varies almost magically. Well, the good spots have been more or less known since Medoc was Medoc; and the larger and richer residents have got them, by inheritance, by marriage, and by purchase, almost entirely into their own hands. Next they greatly improved both the soil and the breed of plants. They studied and experimentalized until they found the most proper manures and the most promising cultures. They grafted and crossed the vine plants till they got the most admirably bearing bushes, and then, generation after generation, devoting all their attention to the quality of the wine, without regard to the quantity--scrupulously taking care that not a grape which is unripe or over-ripe finds its way to the tub--that the whole process shall be scrupulously clean, and that every stage of fermentation be assiduously attended to--the results of all this has been the perfectly-perfumed and high-class clarets, which fetch an enormous price; while the peasant proprietors, careless in cultivation, using old vine plants, anxious, at the vintage, only for quantity, and confined to the worst spots in the district, succeed in producing wines which, good as they are, have not the slightest pretence to enter into competition with the liquid harvests of their richer and more enlightened neighbours.

THE VINTAGE AND THE VINTAGERS.

So much, then, for preliminary information. Let us now proceed to the joyous ingathering of the fruits of the earth--the great yearly festival and jubilee of the property and the labour of Medoc. October, the "wine month," is approaching. For weeks, every cloud in the sky has been watched--every cold night breeze felt with nervous apprehension. Upon the last bright weeks in summer, the savour and the bouquet of the wine depend. Warmed by the blaze of an unclouded sun, fanned by the mild breezes of the west, and moistened by morning and evening dews, the grapes by slow degrees attain their perfect ripeness and their culminating point of flavour. Then the vintage implements begin to be sought out, cleaned, repaired, and scoured and sweetened with hot brandy. Coopers work as if their lives depended upon their industry; and all the anomalous tribe of lookers-out for chance jobs in town and country pack up their bag and baggage, and from scores of miles around pour in ragged regiments into Medoc.

And now a word as to wine-treading. The process is universal in France, with the exception of the cases of the sparkling wines of the Rhone and Champagne, the grapes for which are squeezed by mechanical means, not by the human foot. Now, very venerable and decidedly picturesque as is the process of wine-treading, it is unquestionably rather a filthy one; and the spectacle of great brown horny feet, not a whit too clean, splashing and sprawling in the bubbling juice, conveys at first sight a qualmy species of feeling, which, however, seems only to be entertained by those to whom the sight is new. I looked dreadfully askance at the operation when I first came across it; and when I was invited--by a lady, too--to taste the juice, of which she caught up a glassful, a certain uncomfortable feeling of the inward man warred terribly against politeness. But nobody around seemed to be in the least squeamish. Often and often did I see one of the heroes of the tub walk quietly over a dunghill, and then jump--barefooted, of course, as he was--into the juice; and even a vigilant proprietor, who was particularly careful that no bad grapes went into the tub, made no objection. When I asked why a press was not used, as more handy, cleaner, and more convenient, I was everywhere assured that all efforts had failed to construct a wine-press capable of performing the work with the perfection attained by the action of the human foot. No mechanical squeezing, I was informed, would so nicely express that peculiar proportion of the whole moisture of the grape which forms the highest flavoured wine. The manner in which the fruit was tossed about was pointed out to me, and I was asked to observe that the grapes were, as it were, squeezed in every possible fashion and from every possible side, worked and churned and mashed hither and thither by the ever-moving toes and muscles of the foot. As far as any impurity went, the argument was, that the fermentation flung, as scum to the surface, every atom of foreign matter held in suspension in the wine, and that the liquid ultimately obtained was as exquisitely pure as if human flesh had never touched it.

"And so they all sleep here together?"

"Every night. I find shelter and straw; any other accommodation they must procure for themselves."

"Rather unruly, I should suppose?"

"Not a bit. They are too tired to do anything but sleep. They go off, sir, like dormice."

"A sort of living frontier?"

"Truly; and he allows no nonsense."

"He need be," replied her employer. "He allows no loud speaking--no joking; and as there are no candles, no light, why, they can do nothing better than go quietly to sleep, if it were only in self-defence."

Yet, discipline and control it as you will, the vintage will ever be beautiful, picturesque, and full of association. The rude wains, creaking beneath the reeking tubs--the patient faces of the yoked oxen--the half-naked, stalwart men, who toil to help the cart along the ruts and furrows of the way--the handkerchief-turbaned women, their gay, red-and-blue dresses peeping from out the greenery of the leaves--the children dashing about as if the whole thing were a frolic, and the grey-headed old men tottering cheerfully adown the lines of vines, with baskets and pails of gathered grapes to fill the yawning tubs--the whole picture is at once classic, venerable, and picturesque, not more by association than actuality.

As you traverse the high road from Bordeaux to Pauillac, some one will probably point out to you a dozen tiny sugar-loaf turrets, each surmounted by a long lightning-conductor, rising from a group of noble trees. This is the chateau St. Jullien. A little on, on the right side of the way, rises, from the top of a tiny hill overlooking the Gironde, a new building, with all the old crinkum-crankum ornaments of the ancient fifteenth century country house. That is the chateau Latour. Presently you observe that the entrance to a wide expanse of vines, covering a series of hills and dales, tumbling down to the water's edge, is marked by a sort of triumphal arch or ornamented gate, adorned with a lion couchant, and a legend, setting forth that the vines behind produce the noted wine of Leoville. The chateau Lafitte rises amid stately groves of oak and walnut-trees, from amid the terraced walks of an Italian garden--its white spreading wings gleaming through the trees, and its round-roofed, slated towers rising above them. One chateau, the most noted of all, remains. Passing along a narrow, sandy road, amid a waste of scrubby-looking bushes, you pass beneath the branches of a clump of noble oaks and elms, and perceive a great white structure glimmering garishly before you. Take such a country house as you may still find in your grandmothers' samplers, decorated with a due allowance of doors and windows--clap before it a misplaced Grecian portico, whitewash the whole to a state of the most glaring and dazzling brightness, carefully close all outside shutters, painted white likewise--and you have chateau Margaux rising before you like a wan, ghastly spectre of a house, amid stately terraced gardens, and trimmed, clipped, and tortured trees. But, as I have already insisted, nothing, in any land of vines, must be judged by appearances. The first time I saw at a distance Johannesberg, rising from its grape-clustered domains, I thought it looked very much like a union workhouse, erected in the midst of a field of potatoes.

THE LANDES--THE BORDEAUX AND TESTE RAILWAY--NINICHE--THE LANDSCAPE OF THE LANDES--THE PEOPLE OF THE LANDES--HOW THEY WALK ON STILTS, AND GAMBLE.

Turn to the map of France--to that portion of it which would be traversed by a straight line drawn from Bordeaux to Bayonne--and you will observe that such a line would run through a vast extent of bare-looking country--of that sort, indeed, where

"Geographers on pathless downs Place elephants, for want of towns."

Yes, sir, a comfortable railway-carriage; and the railway in question--the Bordeaux and Teste line--is the sole enterprise of the kind undertaken and achieved in the south-west of France.

"Niniche," said the patriarch, "what does Monsieur Tetard do when he comes home late?"

The dog immediately began to stagger about on its hind legs, sometimes losing its balance and then getting up again, looking all the time with a sort of stupid blinking stare at its master. It was clear that M. Tetard, when he came home late, did not come home sober.

"And now," said the old gentleman, the poodle's proprietor and instructor, "what does Madame Tetard do when Monsieur Tetard comes home late?"

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