A Verdelais Pilgrimage — And Pappy’s Great Wine Heresy

Sure, wasn’t it like our own French movie establishing shot each morning as we opened our cooling bedroom shutters on to the already warm and luminous sprawl of trees, shrubs, picnic tables, sheds and bric a brac below — including Joel’s old cement mixer — and the dip down to the little stream 100 yards from the house, while one or other of their three cats (mother and two daughters) lolled around below or explored in their estate of grace.

One morning, after the pungent coffee and toasted baguette, we ambled, Joel, Anne and I, past the flat-roofed, red-slated artist neighbour’s house with its unusual porcelain gate pillars and outdoor seating area, and down, down into the leafy dell and to the open-air picnic and concert area (the gravelled concrete floor in the covered area in the centre laid down by Pappy Roger over 50 years ago and only beginning to crack now, and the nearby bridge over the little stream widened by him too) and up, up the steep tree-lined path that led to a back road into the village. 

We stopped to take photographs outside Joel’s first school, and carried on up the gravelled square of this ancient pilgrimage town, shaded by lime trees, and watched over by the golden Virgin Mary atop the imposing bell tower on the village’s beautiful Notre-Dame basilica.

Our short Verdelais pilgrimage ended with a cold Wendelinus (“La bier de l’Abbaye d’Alsace”) in Suzette’s.

This path we took was the one walked every morning by Joel’s mother, Marie Jeanne, until well into her nineties, on her own grocery shopping pilgrimage. She is only dead a few years, and herself and Cathou got on famously.

‘She would only come into the house when we invited her,” Cathou explained, ‘she was really a wonderful woman.”

Little wonder Cathou got on well with her, not just because of the older woman’s charm and disposition, but, observing Cathou interacting with family (one of her smiling sons dropped by one day) and friends, restaurant staff and everyone else during our stay, she just seems to see the best in people and bring it out further in them. Like Joel. Well able, also, to kill or deflate with a laconic quip, which a pretend aghast Joel obviously enjoys.

The same Cathou, Joel tells me proudly, staged a walk-out that time a one-time friend made what she considered a racist observation at dinner in his house. Up she stood, and after calling out, “Are you coming, Joel?” they made no excuses and left. 

Cathou’s go with the flow geniality seems innate, but also hard won as she has also come out the other side of two bouts of cancer, and a painful separation and divorce in the middle of the second visitation.

She told us of how angry she was for the first year, and how one day, at a large family gathering, to which her husband was, as usual, not invited, she thought of him, and what he was missing out on, and asked one of her grandchildren to fetch him down.

‘My granddaughter told me she was so happy that I had thought of Dou Dou, because she loved him too, and he is a good man … so since then, I let go my anger and (she gestures a sweep of her hand accompanied by an oh so gallic loud raspberry snort and double dip of the head), and it is much better for everyone …”

Indeed, Dou Dou — a retired fire chief — and the father of her three adult sons, is often around and had of course organised that vineyard tour for us.

Joel too is on very good terms with Martine, his former wife, and she had been invited to our gathering of the old gang but had to cry off at the last minute.

I think of Joel’s mother now, all those years ago, and her ready smile and gorgeously fussy old-world hospitality, while the taciturn but benign Pappy went about his routines and rituals.

And I recall that Christmas Day I spent with the whole gathered clan, as well as that of Martine in Marie Jeanne and Pappy’s home. Martine’s father was a wine merchant, specialising in the Spanish wines of his own family’s region of origin, and to a great hush and the reverence of heightened expectation, he had ceremoniously uncorked the two splendidly opaque and dusty vintage bottles he had brought to the festive gathering.

How the assembled young, middle-aged and older cooed and complimented the aromas and flavours of this precious liquid they nosed and swirled before imbibing — and then the communal suspension of breath when the oblivious Pappy, as he always did with his table-only wine, horsed a fine dollop of water into this nectar of the wine gods.

And Joel laughing, again, now when I remind him, again, and regale Anne, about my heaving, not quite suppressed contortions at the assembled connisseurs’ reaction to Pappy’s heresy. And the wine itself? Superb, no doubt, but forgotten, unlike the reaction to Pappy’s faux pas.

TO BE CONTINUED …