Journalist has heart attack while turning turn-of-the-century wine mill

When we last left our hero, he’d just finished the vendange, filling four of Mr. Marty’s colorful plastic barrels with grapes, most red, with a few exceptionally sweet green grapes he’d found high up in Mr. Marty’s vines thrown in, plus a few drunk bees and scattered weeds. That was Thursday, October 22. The next steps, Mr. Marty said, were to turn the grapes in the mill and then leave them to ferment in the big square blue bath-tub in the barn.

I started to get worried when Bernard told me, a week later, that the grapes would rot if Mr. Marty left them in the barrels too long, so I’ve been bugging him since then to get them into the mill, always adding that I’d do the heavy lifting. I felt a little guilty about practically harassing him, but didn’t want the sweat I’d put into the vendange to go to waste. (Plus, okay, I was looking forward to tasting the cru.)

So finally today, when I knocked on his door around one after returning from the village, he said to come by in an hour. I had a quick lunch of the butcher’s house-made pate mixed with some of my apples cooked up and walnuts toasted up, plus a little mustard, all blended with my ’60s-era ‘mixer-baby’ and served over country tourte bread from the Boulangerie Margot.

“I’m not sure if I have the cork,” Mr. Marty said doubtfully, looking at the broken cork that was stopping up the sky blue fermenting vat, when I came by after lunch. “I have some wine bottle corks,” I suggested, helpfully I thought, but he explained that for this he required a special, pointed cork. He went to look for it and emerged from his home a few minutes later.

“Une petite gout, our remontre le morale?” he asked with a petite twinkle in his eye. Far be it from me to say no to a ‘petite gout’ of Mr. Marty’s eau de vie and it did indeed re-mount my morale. It also helped that he’d found a pointed cork.

Fortified by the eau de vie, I helped Mr. Marty wheel out the wooden mill — which looked like it might date from the turn of the last century, at the latest — and put it on top of one of the barrels. It looks like a wheel-barrel, except that what would be the levers protrude from the bottom of the barrel. Inside it are two cylinders through which the grapes pass, ad on the side is the wheel with lever which turns the cylinders. First we emptied one barrel into the mill and, with Mr. Marty pressing its grapes down and I turning the wheel, squeezed the grapes. We repeated this three times. Some of the juice had already naturally come out of the raisons and that fell easily through the two cylinders. For the rest, the pressing was tough — a real work out. I had to take a pause after two, and couldn’t help seeing the headline, “Journalist has heart attack making wine in southwest France.”

After each barrel-full was pressed through the mill into another barrel, we lifted it and emptied it into the blue vat. When we finished, Mr. Marty urged me, “Get a glass and taste it!” I ran home across the path and got a couple of my ’50s-vintage Pastis 51 glasses, lifting them to show Mr. Marty, but he said, “No, just for you!” We waited for the grapes to settle in the last barrel before I dipped my glass in, scooping up some raisons with the juice. Here goes! It was dense and sour — reminding me of fermented plums I’d once tasted on a Mandarin class field-trip to a Chinese movie theater in junior high which surprised me with there salty sour taste.

“Kind of lemony,” I said, my lips puckered, to Mr. Marty. I had to ask if it would taste like that once it was done, but he said the taste would go away once the wine fermented. “Usually you leave it for 15 days, but because it’s so little, eight will do.” Afterwards, as we sat on his stone border wall talking about the day when the neighborhood was full of vines and everyone made their own eau de vie, I started feeling nauseous. N’impeche que I didn’t say no when he offered me to come in for another ‘petite gout.’ I also asked for some of the lemon soda he poured for himself, and that helped the stomach, but at the first trés petit gout I felt the wine coming up again. “Would it derange you if I saved this for later?” “Pas du tout!”

Tch-tch-tchin!

Sour Grapes: Time to stop my whining and start making wine

Much as I’m hankering to be back in a city and resume my search (I almost wrote ‘cherche’; thinking in French, translating into English) for la femme de ma vie, I’m at least conscience that for many Americans (and even some French city denizens) the idea of a guy living in a medieval stone house in the south of France surrounded by green pastures, 100 yards from a river, and looking up at magnificent limestone cliffs dotted with pre-historic caves trying to get out of there might seem a bit *fou.* And I hate not living in the present. So, where I can, I try to take advantage of what’s unique and and typique in my experience, be it that of living in the country, living in the country in France, living among (to a degree) paysans, living in duck country, or other unique aspects of this milieu. (Never been much on pre-history, so that I’m writing you 300 yards from the first cro-mag discoveries, made back in 1860 when they were building the railroad bridge that crosses the river, is wasted on me.)

Saturday night, it was the hunting. Not me hunting — I cringe even hearing the rifle fire resound off the cliffs, or, worse, seeing a hunter toting a rifle over his shoulders in my backyard — but the booty of my pal Stephan’s hunting. The crisp autumnal day was already heading towards perfect. I’d been bugging Bernard to bring his electric saw over and cut up the long branch I’d extracted from the petit woods in the ‘yard.’ (More than a yard, really a field, and which used to house a roof tile factory, ergo the terra cotta fragments that encrust the soil, and the name of my ‘hood, le Tuilerie, not to be confused with one of my favorite endroits in Paris, le jardin des Tuileries.) Of course, being Bernard, after he’d swiftly disposed of the branch on the terrace, he insisted we tramp down to the woods and cut up some more wood. After Bernard had reduced about a dozen branches into logs, he commanded me, “Now clear them out!” In the process, I spotted what looked like a sort of lever peering out of the ground. Removing some of the dirt around it, I found a small semi-oval steering wheel. When I yanked at the lever, they separated. Feeling around the ground, I discerned what seemed like the rusted carcass of some sort of metal apparatus — perhaps a mill for grinding up corn? It turned out to be what looked like a child’s car, complete with pedals and engine.

“Vient voir!” I urged Mr. Marty, the retired farmer who lives across the path. “I think I found Bernard’s first car!” He was impressed. “C’est un vraie antiquité! Tu peut le vendre!” I couldn’t wait to show Bernard, who’d said he’d return in the evening to see how I’d progressed on the wood. I was lying around listening to “Our Miss Brooks” when he drove up at around 7 with Stephan. “I have a surprise for you!” I announced. “I found your first car.” “Mais oui, c’est ca,” he confirmed, but all it provoked was a smile, no marvel, and he was not interested in taking it with him; he only laughed when I proposed he show it to his daughter Mathilde. Bernard and Stephan had other business; they’d brought over deer liver and heart from a deer Stephan had shot that morning.

I hadn’t had venison since we lived in the country in Northern California in the late ’60s, and the taste lingered still; I was salivating already. Mr. Marty rushed over to see Stephan, whose matrimonial future he continues to worry over. (“Mais, quand est-ce que il vas se marrier?!”)

“Got garlic?!” asked Bernard.

“Mais oui!”

“Chop it up and let it cook first before you add the meat.”

“I have even better!,” I said, pulling out the grater.

“Pepper?!”

“Bien sur!”

If you’ve seen the kitchen/dining room, most of which is taken up by a mahogany picnic table and benches, the rest by a large armoire set on cinder blocks (to protect its contents from the annual flood), a long counter, an over-stuffed easy chair, a range, a bicycle, and half of a huge two-piece late ’50s era rose and off-white formica cabinet-armoire (40 Euros at the Emaus ((or Salvation Army)) in Perigueux, later spotted in the identical model for 400 Euros at a Menilmontant brocante), you’d know that adding four people to this space, running excitedly around, two cooking, two commenting on the cooking, makes for a bit of an obstacle course, but to me it felt festive).

After the liver had started already started cooking, Bernard, taking in the dozens of apples strewn over the picnic table (more local booty, along with the walnuts strewn in even more quantity) and the 1/2 of the ’50s cabinet suddenly said, “Ah, I should have said, add apples!”

“I’ll add them now!”

“And if you have panaché…” Bernard said hopefully, referring to the beer lemonade which is the only liquor he can drink… Unfortunately I’d drunk up my last bottles. “Mais…offer Stephan something!” I offered wine all around but none of the (French) men were into it.

Usually, the French undercook (by my standards) meat. In the case of the liver, though, whenever I’d ask Stephan if it was time to take it out, he answered, “Pas encore. Laisse!”

Finally, when the meat — and, as important, the garlic and the apples — was nice and crispy and dark brown, it was ready, and Bernard, Stephan, and Mr. Marty stood around watching me eat. (None wanted to join me.) It was succulent — perfect. And it was as much the apples taking in the juice of the liver that made it as opposed to the other way around. (Of course, I had to ask if they’d mind if I added ketchup, and Bernard grimaced.) A perfect cap to a perfect day.

Before Mr. Marty left, I’d wrassled him into accepting that I’d do the vendange Monday. I’ve been pestering him about this for weeks, always with the proviso that I’d do the work, he’d just need to direct me. Mr. Marty — as is his right; he is, after all, retired — has sort of let the vines in back of and next to his house go. While he did clear out the sarmantine — dead branches — from last year, he only half cleared the weeds. But as this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for me — yes I know, there’s supposedly a vineyard in the Belleville neighborhood of somewhere, but I’ve never found it, nor that in Montmartre — I’ve permitted myself to insist. (I also think it will make me feel less guilty when I ask for a third bottle of his famous eau de vie, made from previous harvests, this winter.)

The moment finally arrived Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Marty found four barrels, and his sharp clipper, and I set to working my way through the seven rows, clipping the grapes and tossing them into a red plastic basket. It was harder going that I’d anticipated. Because the branches were lower than me, with many bunches of the fruit close to the ground, I did a lot of bending and, then, sitting, and I wasn’t starting out with a back in full form. I’d also assumed — remembering a previous experience with sour new wine — that I should pick only the sweet grapes, so I did a lot of taste-testing. After four hours without pause (and without getting stung; my desire to make wine in the Bordeaux region tromped even my phobia of bees) (contrary to what you may have heard, the bees are not disappearing, they’ve all become grape tasters in the southwest of France), I’d amassed close to three (medium) barrels full, in each of which swarmed about half a dozen bees. Physically tired as I was, I was ready to continue to get it all done in one coupe (I had three rows left), but Mr. Marty appeared at the base of the fields and said, “Time to stop for today Paul.” As tired as my dogs were, the physical work had also left me exhilarated, so, rather than turn in chez moi, and taking courage from Boo-bah, the Belgium shepherd — collie followiing me, I decided to walk to the railroad bridge, stopping to collect walnuts from Bernard’s trees. The stark grey autumn evening sky and the magnificent setting of the valley surrounding me, the crisp air made for another perfect ending to another perfect day. Until the night anxiety of the solitaire set in, anyway.

I resumed the vendange yesterday. This time what threatened to do me in was the taste-testing. I must have tasted from at least one bunch of every little grape tree, and as about half seemed to be sour, I was starting to get nauseous. After close to three hours, I’d pushed it to three barrels and was, I thought, finished. But when I checked in with Mr. Marty an hour later, he indicated the heights of the rows and said, “There are still grapes to pick.” I explained that all those that were left were sour. “Mais, c’est rien! C’est l’eau!” (It had been raining more or less constantly since the previous night.) Just to be sure, I picked a bunch with some sour grapes, and asked him to taste one to verify. “Mais c’est bon!” In effect, I could pick all. Now that I also know that I don’t need to taste them, I’m all right with this.

On Tuesday, Mr. Marty had offered me some of his eggs after I finished working. These are farm eggs, of course, and are the yellowist eggs you’ve ever seen and fluffiest I’ve ever tasted. Yesterday, and for the first time in the two years we’ve been neighbors, after he’d straightened me out on the grapes he proposed, with a glint in his eyes, “Un petit Ricard?” “Avec plaisir!” said I. Later, when I noted that one of the things I liked about pastis was that, “It’s natural,” he reposted, without missing a beat, and indicating the bottle of cold water, “Except for the water!”

The Big Prune

When I tried to get my Parisian bouquiniste (Seine bookseller) pote Luc to come down here this summer, one of the excuses he gave me was, “Ah, you know, down there, in the country, they eat mostly meat.” (Sounds better in French: “Ah, tu sais, la-bas, c’est que le viande qu’on mange.”) Luc is a vegetarian. (Though definitely not a vegan, judging by his predilection for the camembert Le Petit; he even saves the red cartons.) (Camembert secret: Open the box — yes, in the supermarket — and press down on the cheese. If it bounces back, don’t buy it. Unless of course you’re planning on using it for the eight-day Simenon diet.) Okay, c’est vrais que the great southwest of France, surtout the Dordogne, is known as the capital of foie gras. And, yes, my neighbor Mr. Marty did just knock on my door this morning with a big bloody chunk of raw sanglier (wild boar) meat. And I’m certainly not complaining. Nor did I say no when Bernard and Stephan came by one night and asked, “Are you in the mood to eat sanglier?,” and we cooked up the meat Stephan had brought from the sanglier he caught the day before on the converted half water heater Bernard made into a grill, after gathering wood by the river. (The succulent flavor was no doubt helped by the sarmant or dead wine branches from Mr. Marty’s vines.) So what if the morsel that lodged in the ruins that are my teeth is still there two weeks and a couple of dozen ibuprofen tablets later? I will still cook up Mr. Marty’s sanglier with relish. I will cook it up for ten hours and pulverize it, but I will still cook and eat it with relish.

If Luc is still reading after that little eloge to viande, I want to tell him that I have never eaten as much fruit in my life as I have eaten the last two months — peaches (from Mr. Marty’s grove), apples (mostly from the tree in the backyard, near the river). And above all plums. It started with Mr. Marty inviting me to bring a basket over and pick some of the tiny red plums from the tree behind the chicken coop — “Otherwise they’ll be wasted and that would be dommage!” — then progressed down the route to Le Bugue, the village where I do my marketing, and along which I scored green, red, and a whole lotta yellow or mirabelle plums. (The rule here is that if the branch is hanging over the road you have the right to pick the fruit. And for fruit on the ground, it’s safe if it’s not punctured.) There’s even a bush of mirabelles right before you turn into the train station. In Le Buisson, where I go to get the medicine for Sonia, my 20-something part-wolf Alaskan Siamese, I took a different route to get to the river after picking up the meds and trampled upon a field of prune plums — probably the best I’ve found. And in the cute medieval vllage of Belves a couple of weeks ago, finding myself stranded at the train station for two hours (the wine festival I was there for was over by the time I arrived), I was reduced to picking very hot, almost prunified plums below a little red-leafed tree next to the abandoned gare.

But The Big Prune Show — that’s what it’s called — took place last weekend in Agen, after California the largest producer of prunes in the world.

If there’s one great food divide between Americans and the French, it may be our different perspectives on the noble prune.

In the States — even in California, the world’s largest producer of prunes — prunes and above all prune juice are something for very old people. And they are diaretics, which is exactly the reason I avoided them for 40 years. I actually like the taste, so it was more a protective measure. (Even in the popular culture, prunes get a bad rap, e.g. the villain character of Pruneface in the Dick Tracy comic.)

France has totally changed my perspective on prunes.

First, they don’t give me diarrhea here.

That out of the way, I’ve been able to indulge.

Besides being succulent tout seule as a fruit (generally speaking they’re not so dried up here), they’re fantastic in yogurt. I’ve also had them wrapped with bacon and have made my own aperitif recipe involving spreading creme de canard (or foie gras if you’re rich enough) and a single (pitted) prune on a grainy bread, preferably toasted. Soaked and stewed with lamb, tajine-style, they’re sublime and make the lamb sublime. Then there are prune tarts. This region is also known for ‘prune,’ which doesn’t actually mean ‘prune’ but eau de vie a la prune. (The eau de vie Mr. Marty supplies me with is actually made from his grapes. Not that he makes it; he no longer has the right. The problem when he, and other paysans, made it on their own is the government couldn’t tax it. Now, if he wants to have eau de vie from his own grapes he has to pay a man who comes around once per year to collect the harvest and turn it into ‘fin.’ It costs him as much as if he were to buy a bottle in a liquor store. The best way to consume eau de vie, btw, is a la ‘canard.’ which does not mean getting a duck drunk with the liquor and then killing it for the barbecue, but rather dipping a sugar cube into the eau de vie and then sucking on it. The best eau de vie I ever tasted was fig, which is illegal, perhaps because the alcohol content is too high.)

So last weekend I decided to take the Perigeux-Agen regional train to the end of the line in Agen, a 90-minute to two-hour ride depending on how many stops you make. Later I learned, watching a television documentary on French concentration camps, that if I were taking that same train in about 1944 I probably would have had to get off in Penn, where I’d have been interned before being shipped off to Auschwitz.

Fortunately, this being 2009, my French hosts permitted me to stay on the train until the terminus (of the train), where San Francisco pals Renee and Alvin were waiting for me. I know Alvin peripherally, because he used to run a jazz cafe across the street from me in San Francisco’s Mission District, Cafe Babar. They were installed having a glass of blanc and tea at the buffet I was a bit impatient. “Where’s the prune giveaway?” I pressed them. We started with a walk through an alley where local producers were selling regional wine and liquor specialties. Here I had a great reunion with an aperitif called the floc of Gascon. The red variety kind of tastes like bitter strawberries, and goes well with chocolate. I also discovered that I was not quite as finished with rosé as I thought I was after a summer of going through three three-litre cartons (of a very red and dry Lot variety) and one 5-litre box (from St. Emillion). The one I tried in Agen was fruity and actually had a nose, rare for a rosé. (With a nose like that, it probably also would have found itself type-cast and sent to Penn by France, er, Vichy, during the Occupaton. ‘Free Zone’ mon oeil.)

After the tastings, Renee and Alvin lead me to a tour of the old city, starting with the Street of Jews. (Talk about making it easy for the French, er, Vichy police. “Eh les flics! Nous-sommes la!”) (If I keep digressing to this subject, it’s because this week, finally, after years of films in which everyone in France seemed to be resisting the Nazis and/or hiding the Jews, the public television is finally focusing on the collabos. On Tuesday, France 2 broadcast a fictional film in which Marthe Keller discovers that the granddaughter she thought was shipped to the camps and her death was actually kidnapped by one of the French militians who arrested her family, and is now a pupil in her class. This was followed by a documentary on Drancy and the other French camps that focused on the role of the French police and gendarmes in rounding up the Jews, and reminded us that it was the French, er, Vichy government that volunteered to do so before the Germans, er, Nazis could ask them to — the only country where this happened. Then the last two nights, a documentary on Jacques Chirac replayed — twice — the landmark speech he made, shortly after being elected in 1995, in which 50 years after the fact, a French chief of state finally acknowledged the culpability of the state of France in the deportations and deaths of the Jews.)

But where were we? Oh yes: In the old city of Agen. Which is pretty breathtaking, with the buildings a sort of melange of the sandstone found around these parts and Spanish-Toulousian red brick. (Agen is an hour away from Toulouse by train and, in the other direction, the same from Bordeaux. It has a real Mediterranean, luminous feel, not surprising, I guess, as it also hosts the canal deux mers, which runs from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, more or less.) Later, when Alvin and Renee decided to take a pause for lunch, I left them at the resto and took my picnic kit and lunch to the white-stony banks of the broad and vast Garonne. This is fast becoming one of my favorite French rivers, after the Seine. (In the moving van that brought me here two years ago, trying to make conversation, I asked the French girl who was doing the driving what her favorite dream was. I guess I must have said ‘rive’ instead of ‘riviere’ and she must have heard it as ‘reve’ because she answered, “A fragment of Roland Barthes.” Even when I do manage to connect with a French woman on a serious topic it’s by accident.) It may be just my imagination, because I’m aware that the Garonne feeds into the Atlantic, but I could swear it was almost blue and that my lunch was accompanied by a briny aroma.

On the way back to find Renee and Alvin, I crossed a long, green esplanade, with the requisite skate park and petanque players. I stopped to watch the petanque players, just so I could write that. Then finally, at about 3 p.m., we reached the prune give- away, where there was already a long line. Renee and Alvin left me there, with their sac, which gave me two. First I scored a big sac of wet, just prunified fruit — what looked like a prunifying machine was just behind the tables where the young men and women were handing out the sacs of prunes — and then, cleverly stuffing it into my bag, I moved to the next table and was handed a bag of the dried variety. Before leaving I found a Shopi in the covered market, where I scored a jar of brandade (great in crepes — thank you, Joe Liebling) and a bottle of Tariquet at an affordable price (4.20); then a second at an even more affordable price 3.70) at a food and wine boutique. (Tariquet is a white made from the same grape as armagnac. It’s kind of like Colombard, which one can find in the States, but better — fruity and with a bite. Goes great with fondue, tartiflette, and raclette, and can even be served as an aperitif.)

While my train was still in the station, a friendly-looking older man with a hearing aide sat down across from me. Noticing his umbrella, I said amiably, “Fortunately it didn’t rain today!” He explained that he’d just been getting the umbrella repaired for his grandchildren. I asked if he’d checked out the prune festival; he’d been busy visiting the church. “They were giving out free prunes!” I said, and invited him to try the wet ones. “Delicious!” he remarked, his whole face lighting up. As soon as I found out he was from Toulouse, I asked him if he found it polluted. Toulouse had been one of my candidate villes until I visited it last summer and discovered that on some streets you can actually see the pollution in front of you.. But for social reasons, I keep coming back to it. “No no,” he said, he didn’t find it polluted. As, doing the math, I figured he must have been close to 80, I thought this was a good sign. He added that public transport is FREE for those over 60. This is another thing I like about Toulouse, on paper anyway; it isn’t just that it offers a lot of cultural events, but that they’re free or close to. (For 80 Euros, you can see everything at the Cinematheque — a good one, with a strong Russian collection — for one year, which beats Paris (120) and Lyon (183, and you still have to pay for the special seances). He also said, brightening up even more, that in the park across from his home there’s lots of pissenlit (dandelion leaves) to pick, so we swapped recipes, mine for salad and his for a casserole with potatoes (the key is to cut the pissenlit up into tiny morsels). I guess I was friendly enough that the man, whose name was Marcel, asked me if I wanted a gold or a silver Virgin medal. I asked for the silver but he ended up giving me both. All I need to do to get benedicted is show it to a priest. (According to the documentary on the deportation camps, it was the albeit belated protests by the priests — notably the archbishop of Toulouse — that finally slowed the French, er, Vichy government down in its zeal to collect the Jews and deliver them to the Germans, er, Nazis.) On the trip, Marcel, a retired telecommunications specialist for the train company, explained to me how fragile the telecommunications lines for the train company used to be, made of glass.

Just before we passed the stone house where I live, from the train window I caught Bernard and Stephan harvesting Bernard’s potatoes. During the Occupation, according to Bernard, whose father lived those years here, the maquis used to sabotage the train tracks just above the stone house. They hid in the pre-historic caves I look up at when I take my apero on the terrace. The Germans once shot at Bernard’s father — for nothing. There were also collabos who told the Germans where to find the resistants and, not far from here, a whole village that was killed in reprisal by the Germans.

After dropping the prunes and Tariquet at the house, I walked down up to the potato fields. Bernard handed me a heart-shaped pair of Siamese potato twins and said, “You know what these are? Balls!” I unearthed a potato tinier than a prune. Holding up the one Bernard had given me I said, “These are American balls.” Then showing him the tiny one I added, “And these are French balls.”

For the prunes: The more aged ones are so hard — almost like hard candy — I decided to stew a few in a glass filled with Mr. Marty’s eau de vie. Perhaps I will have them for desert today if there’s any room left in my teeth after the sanglier gets through with them.