November 2003
Author: Jack
Well, as life is becoming more mundane there can be little interest in the normal day-to-day events here, which are much the same as anywhere. So from now on the diary will be written on a monthly basis. Also makes it easier for me as I have been constantly falling behind with them
After much bullying from Iain I have decided to try and conquer my fears regarding the operation on my hands and go back to the doctors. I tried to make an appointment but he was not keen, saying that I could just go along and wait. So I did. I decided to time it such that I would be able to collect Beck straight afterwards from school. Arriving at the surgery at 4.30 I found that there was already someone in the surgery and two people waiting. Not too bad I thought, especially when, after ten minutes, the person who was with the doctor came out, and both the people waiting went in together. Me next then. I sat, I waited, I heard without interest much conversation from within the doctor’s office, I sat, I waited… I started to get anxious at around 5.30, having now waited an hour. Not only was I worried about being in time for Beck but I had also just a call asking me to call in at the notaires before 6.30 that evening as there was a very important document I had to sign right now if we were to complete on Les Bardots as arranged. And the notaires was half an hour’s drive. I decided that if I wasn’t in the doctor’s office by 5.45 I’d leave. Which is exactly what happened. After an hour and a quarter waiting I hadn’t managed to see him. I left stressed and panicking that I wouldn’t make it to the notaires. Driving like the proverbial bat out of hell we just made it!
At the third attempt I did manage to get in to see the doctor. Unlike most French people who seem to spend forever chatting to the doctor I was in there less than five minutes. I left with a letter for the surgeon at the clinic in Marmande, with whom I had to make an appointment.
Have tried this month to spend some time in the garden. I am disappointed that I haven’t done as much as I would have hoped. The particularly vicious roses lining the drive and it has taken me ages to clean them up, pruning and removing all the weeds that have grown in and round them. And I still haven’t finished them!
We are still waiting for the planning permission to come through for the cuverie but in the meantime we have decided, for tax reasons, to try and obtain a loan. Following my meetings with the banks in Duras I had arranged an appointment with our accountants to draw up a business plan. This doesn’t sound as if it is going to be too difficult (who am I kidding – everything always ends up being difficult). Anyway the result of the meeting was that once I have all the estimates for the work I was to arrange another meeting to go through everything in detail. So more waiting and more phone calls to try and get the estimates sorted out. When we did get the estimate for the construction of the chai it was not good news. It was much much higher than we had been expecting or even led to believe it would be. This left us feeling pretty fed up. We started to question our situation, our future and most of all our options. One option which seemed possibly attractive was to sell up here and find a vineyard that was already producing its own wine. As we knew of one that was for sale and that we could possibly afford we decided to take a look. Whilst it seemed an attractive option initially when we saw what we would have got for our money we weren’t so sure. The vineyard was not in as a good a state as ours, although it was bigger, the cuverie was in need of a great deal of modernisation, the house also needed lots of work, no swimming pool and no view. On the positive side though there were also a few hectares of plums, which seemed to be the best money earner of the property. But do we really need plums as well. No. This didn’t seem to be a good option. We also contacted an agent we knew that had previously shown us around another vineyard to see what he had to offer. I explained our situation and he decided to come and take a look at our property to see what he could do. His opinion was that we were very well situated, we had an excellent vineyard and that our best option would be to find a way to build the cuverie to our budget. He took the plans away with the aim of getting us another quote. In the meantime we had asked our architect to try and find a way to reduce the price. By chance the two of them came together through a mutual friend, the man from Agrifoy who is supplying all the equipment for the cuverie. Between them they came up with a solution, which was presented to us by the architect. This was basically to construct the buildings out of prefabricated metal rather than brick. This would save us considerable amounts of money. With a few other changes the price had been lowered, but was still pretty expensive. We weren’t at all happy with having a metal cuverie. In the meantime we had had a couple of long discussions with our friend Jonathon who had also come up with some good ideas. These we put to the architect and we left him to go and obtain another estimate, this time for just one building, the cuverie, to be constructed out of brick, with a view to building the second building, the chai, bottle store and office, at a later date.
Beck is doing very well at school. After our holiday it seems that Beck gave her class a little chat about our adventures, which was then followed by a question and answer session. The teacher was extremely impressed with her. Apparently she was able to answer all the children’s questions herself without any help at all from the teacher. Beck continues to have her weekly French lesson with our neighbour, Françoise, which I think has really helped her along. In fact her French has now reached the point where she doesn’t necessarily know what the English word is and where she also mixes French and English in the same sentence. Pronunciation is becoming equally interesting as she often pronounces English words with a French accent. For example she was reading a story out loud to Iain and Cuthbert became ‘Cuthbear’! Must say it sounded better to me.
Am continuing to play Tennis every Wednesday morning and I am really enjoying it. In fact Wednesday is our sports day. I play tennis in the morning and Rebecca now has a riding lesson in the afternoon. The school seemed to be very good to start with, although lately we are beginning to wonder. Grace also goes with her. They are there for three hours, much of the time spent grooming and generally getting used to the ponies, they ride Shetlands, lots of time spent singing (it’s more like a crèche) and not much time it seems actually riding. Also Sarah, Grace’s mum, is an accomplished horserider and she has begun to be concerned about the quality of the teaching. It wouldn’t surprise me if we end up taking the girls to another school soon. It doesn’t seem to be very easy to find a good school unfortunately.
The big news of the month is that Iain will be leaving his job in the city at the end of the year. So finally we will all be able to be together again. We have also accepted an offer on our house in Offham, which we hope will result in its sale and, having found buyers for La Vitaille, we are very much hoping that by the end of January, almost a year after we moved here, we will actually be able to get on with our lives together. It has been a long long wait. Let’s hope it’s all been worthwhile.
I managed to escape on my own for a weekend at the beginning of the month, flying from Bordeaux to Barcelona for a weekend with friends. Iain flew over to look after Rebecca. This resulted in trips to Bordeaux airport on the Thursday evening, to collect Iain, Friday morning to take me, Sunday afternoon to collect me and Monday afternoon to take Iain back. We definitely won’t be missing these trips. And the mileage on the pickup is increasing rapidly!
We completed on the sale of Les Bardots on the 13th. This was the house we bought in April 2002 with the idea of restoring it and renting it out. It has sat there since then untouched. It is such a shame that we cannot afford to keep it as it will make a fantastic house. So one down, two to go! It didn’t quite go away though as towards the end of the month I had a call from the new owners to ask if I could write a letter to transfer ownership of the plans we had had approved for the restoration. So I went over to visit them and went to the Mairie with them to sort this out. They seem to have settled in very quickly despite a few initial teething problems including a flood from a broken pipe!
Ben and Danielle were out for weekend’s visit, which was just lovely. We had a really good weekend together, eating out, visiting St Foy market, visiting our favourite St Emilion chateau, Haut Graves D’Arthus for a tasting and having lunch in St Emilion.
We had a second delivery of some of our possessions from England on the 16th. Most of it was boxes, with just a couple of pieces of furniture. Iain has started packing up the rest of the house with a view to the next delivery being the last, after Christmas probably. I have spent quite a lot of time since then unpacking and sorting it all out.
The rugby world cup final was proving to be a bit of a problem for us as Iain had a flight booked on the Saturday morning of the final, meaning he would miss it. So it was up to me to ensure that we could tape it. I set the video up and checked it worked. Fine, no problem. And then suddenly we lost access to the ITV channels. No problem, I thought, I’ll tape the French channel that shows it. But…that was the one channel that we couldn’t receive. This was not good news and necessitated a change of plan. Iain checked all possible flights and eventually found himself a flight from Gatwick to Toulouse on the Friday evening. A four hour round trip and we were back indoors by 11.30p.m.! And he went off to watch the rugby in the bar in Duras along with Jonathon. Thank goodness we managed to sort this out.
Looking back over the month our social life seems to have been quite active. Life is very different here in the winter months it seems. Many places are shut for the winter and people seem to spend much more time indoors. The feeling of freedom that comes with the long warm summer days disappears. Thank goodness for friends. We have entertained and been entertained several times this month and finally managed to catch up with our old neighbours from La Vitaille, Dawn and Phil, who now live in Marmande. Beck had Grace over to stay one night, Joanne and her daughter Tanya also spent a night with us, trivial pursuit seems to be a popular winter game, and we have spent a lot more time cooking than we had previously.
The weather has been quite varied but generally cool, with a significant amount of rain, which caused flooding in some areas of France, not here though. We have had several frosts and a lot of foggy days. However we have also had some lovely bright sunny days too and I was even able to sit outside and have lunch one day. Our pickup has had its first service. I took the car along expecting to have to sit and wait but they offered to lend me a car whilst mine was being checked. It was only for an hour but I accepted happily and drove off to do some Christmas shopping. When I returned the car was sitting waiting for me, having been thoroughly valeted as well both inside and out. What service, you don’t get that in England – and the service was cheaper than in England. On a sad note one of Duras’ most loved and colourful characters, Monsieur Vincenzi died suddenly. His funeral service was held in the chateau, almost the whole town turned out for it and most of the local shops and businesses were closed as a mark of respect.
The plumber finally turned up at the end of the month. We now have a new toilet, which doesn’t look like it’s going to fall apart. However whilst removing the old toilet we discovered what looked like a leak. It clearly wasn’t coming from the water feed to the toilet. It seemed to have followed a very specific path along the wall behind the toilet. It didn’t seem as if it was going to be easy to trace. He left it with me! Yippee.
You may have noticed that I have so far made no mention of work in
the vineyard. There has not been much to do out there in the last couple
of months. Basically once the harvest is over we have had to wait for
all the leaves to drop before starting work again for the next season.
Work started again towards the end of the month with the removal of
the little plastic clips that hold the leaf wires together, followed
by pretaillage. We are renting tractor time and a driver from a neighbouring
vineyard, Grand Mayne, where Jose has worked. He is organising everything
in the vineyard for us. Prettaillage means trimming off the excess growth
on the vines prior to pruning and is done using a vicious looking
tool attached to a tractor. Our vineyard is now ready for pruning. Jose
and I have spent some time going over the work plan for the vineyard.
He has a team of four including him and we have contracted him to handle
all the manual work in the vineyard (giving me plenty of time to read
magazines!!!). The basic plan is that Jose handles the manual work in
the vineyard whilst Iain and I handle all the tractor work, the chai,
marketing and administration. More than enough there for us to do! And
of course we will work in the vineyard from time to time as well.
We have ordered a soil analysis of the vineyard. Samples are taken from
defined areas of the vineyard and analysed for content. The results
define the program of fertilisation and soil management required over
the next few years. We split the vineyard into six discrete areas for
analysis to try and be more specific about the nature of the soil. Our
harvest return has been deposited with the Mairie. I have had to make
two visits to the Cooperative to complete the annual harvest return,
which then has to be lodged with the local Mairie. We are hoping to
receive our first part payment in December followed by several other
part payments during 2004. At least we will have earnt some money from
the vineyard this year although I am not sure that it will cover all
our costs! I also spent an afternoon at a meeting of the annual meeting
of the AOC in the Chateau de Duras. After the usual AGM type stuff,
accounts, results etc. the pressing issue of vine density was discussed
at great length. The AOC brought in a ruling in 1989 that to qualify
for AOC status vines had to be planted at a minimum density of 3,300
vines per hectare by 2010, this being with the aim of improving quality.
More than 35% of the AOCs vineyards fall short of this, including 8
of our 9.5 hectares. There was much heated debate on the subject and
several vineyard owners delivered speeches mostly against the ruling.
One man estimated he would have to spend 300,000€ to bring his
vineyard up to standard. In the main to achieve compliance vines have
to be ripped out and replanted closer together. This means a loss of
benefit from older vines as well as the cost involved, including the
loss of production for three years. I had to leave at 5.30 to collect
Rebecca. The meeting had already lasted 3 hours and apparently went
on for another hour. Although no conclusions were reached it seems likely
that the AOC may extend the deadline for compliance to 2020. We have
yet to address this issue. At the moment it does not seem as pressing
as getting our cuverie built. Mind you with the way time disappears
these days 2010 is not really that far away. Eventually this will become
a pressing problem for us.
