Vin de Pépoulie, appellation non-controlée

As a gesture for the environment, if not for my liver, I planted seventy vines this week. If all goes to plan - and lots can go wrong between planting a one year-old vine and opening the first wine three years later - Ulla and I will be able to share a bottle of Pépoulie appellation very definitely non-controlée every day of the year. The variety is Syrah, grafted on to an American rootstock because resistant to phylloxera. You can see the grafting as a red blob of wax three quarters of the way up each plant.
While I was digging the holes, the postman arrived. He asked if I was planting grapes for the table.
- No, to make wine, I said. Then, because I knew it was illegal to make wine to sell outside an appellation controlée area, quickly added:
- For consumption by me and by the family.
- And by the postman, he replied.
The neighbours have also approved of the initiative - phew - saying that we'll be able to drink ecological wine free of sulphites and other additives you get in shop-bought stuff, and so keep healthy in old age.
Let's hope it's drinkable.

Two Canadians at Pépoulie in autumn

Céline and Jim spent the last week of October and three weeks of November here, and wrote the following six postings Meandering thoughts and pictures. Read some of the things they did, mostly on foot or using the bikes we have for guests, and how much they enjoyed their stay.

Meandering thoughts and pictures (6)

Wind tower hopping: France, apparently, has one of the fastest growing wind tower economies - just look north from Pépoulie and ten kilometres away on the horizon you will see the newest addition to the wind tower farming community. We cycled to see this particular wind harvest just outside Seviès. But the best wind tower viewing is to the south of Puylaurens, outside the historic and picturesque town of Saint Félix Lauragais. Here you can see fourteen of them. Eye candy or eyesore???



Apple pie: 'tis the season for apples to continue their longstanding temptation of the world. We bought bags of them for one euro a kilo at the local market, tasted about ten varieties, and became experts at making tarte Tatin. It's on page 41 of Pépoulie's resident cook book The Impressionists' Table.

Meandering thoughts and pictures (5)

Pastis and pétanque: on any sunny afternoon on the driveway leading up to the gîte, a game of boules with a pastis in hand ensures that you get to go native at least once in France.

Fire and tea or wine: although the autumn weather doesn't require too many fires, on the few nights when there was wind and rain we relished our time in front of the woodburning stove, with wine or tea in hand, and chestnuts roasting, marvelling at how the gîte warmed up.

Wind...stars...sunsets: from the northwest corner of the pool or from just out the back door, we spent many late afternoons and early evenings admiring the sun bled sky, being lulled by the wind blowing through the tall poplar trees, and practising our very limited astronomy skills. You should be able to easily see the Big Dipper, the Milky Way, and with a little concentration, the North Star.

Meandering thoughts and pictures (4)

Monsieur Rastoul: the wee garden farm that Pépoulie looks down on to the northwest holds our fondest memories, and had our favourite tourist attraction: Monsieur Rastoul. He is a diehard farmer and longstanding citizen of Puylaurens, who will greet you as if you have been friends for ever. We thoroughly enjoyed our visits with him at his well tended plot of land, and everywhere else that we bumped into him!

Markets: our favourites were Saturday morning in Revel and Wednesday morning in Réalmont. Both of these are an easy drive (about 20 minutes) and have a tremendous selection of food and various other things. No touristy elements, just authentic French market shopping. Having said that, our most rewarding market experience was right in Puylaurens - mainly because after one week we were chez nous. We recognised the vendors and they recognised us!

Meandering thoughts and pictures (3)

Walking: again, the tourist office offers maps for various routes. Although we did the 6 kilometre Boucle de Saint Etienne de Florac right from the gîte most often, our preferred route was La Boucle d'Ardialle - a bit of a hike at 14 kilometres, but worth the effort for the variety of landscapes and farmscapes it provided. Alternatively, do this one counterclockwise, and turn round in Montgagnes.

You'll know the turnaround point because you will be met by Tina, the hamlet's friendly watchdog. She will even escort you part of the way back to Puylaurens. 
Her turnaround point is the end of the forest tunnel, where she stops, sits and watches as you carry on home past the pigeonnier of La Métairie Haute.

Meandering thoughts and pictures (2)

Cycling: the tourist office in Puylaurens has a variety of maps that allow you to pedal the hills near and far. Our favourite was Un circuit vélo des pigeonniers (C16) - well marked with very distinct signage, not too hilly, about 39 kilometres, and departing right from Puylaurens centre and heading south.

Meandering thoughts and pictures (1)

Foraging: we picked chestnuts, walnuts, figs, mint, bayleaves and dill on the side of the road, in abandoned farmyards, and on the many walking and biking paths that we wandered down. 

We also profited from others' foraging by spending ridiculous amounts of money on the crazy mushrooms, dug up from who knows where, that appeared at all the local markets. Curious looking but absolutely delicious!

Hunting hares

At around six this evening, taking a breather after a day of clearing unwanted saplings in front of the house, I was startled by two huge bangs that reverberated around the surrounding hills. Then I had two seconds sight of a hare twenty metres away, literally running for its life, followed by two yelping dogs. The hunting season has started.
I ran out into the fields to see the two dogs frantically running this way and that in the distance, finally to lose the scent. The hare had escaped.

Coming back in the garden I met two jolly hunters, one of them our immediate neighbour (on the left in the picture). He told me they were each allowed to shoot three hares per season. Each time they killed a hare, they showed it to the townhall, and got a plastic bracelet to put on the hare, with a detachable sticker to go on their hunting permit. Quite proudly they said that with the French administration "c'est géré" - it's managed.

And when I told him we did rabbit with red wine and local Agen prunes, he immediately said he'd give me one next Sunday (Wednesdays and and Sundays are permitted shooting days).

Visca la lenga occitana!

When you enter villages and towns now in southern France, you are very likely to see bilingual roadsigns like the one above, in French and Occitan.
And there's the rub.
Very often, if you ask the locals here about Occitan, they'll laugh and say "Oh, you mean patois". But the word patois in French has very negative connotations: "a substandard form of the pure language, ie French"; "a dialect spoken by peasants and the ill-educated". The reason is that, as part of their drive to unify and centralise France over the centuries, it suited the French speakers from the north to denigrate the other languages that existed, including Occitan, and to get the speakers feel ashamed of their mother tongue.
In fact, of course, Occitan is a fully fledged member of the Romance language family, along with Castilian Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian and Portuguese, spread throughout a third of France, with a rich cultural heritage of over a thousand years. It is the language of the troubadours.
And yet it's an endangered language, in the sense that there are fewer people speaking it, and they are mostly older.
But what does it take to revive a language? The Welsh experience shows that both a top-down approach of legislation and institutional measures, combined with a bottom-up surge of opinion among those affected is necessary. For long regarded as the language of the rural poor and ill-educated, Welsh seemed doomed to extinction. But when the middle classes saw it as a way of asserting their Welshness, and took pride, for example, in sending their children to Welsh-medium schools, this had the effect, combined with legislation to promote the language, of assuring the language a living future.
Perhaps the decision makers in the French Ministry of Education should resist parents' pressure to introduce English at an ever earlier age, and start with Occitan instead. Children are smart. They can figure out later what subjects they will need, including English. In any case, solid linguistic research from elsewhere shows that precocious exposure to a foreign, as opposed to a vernacular, language is no guarantor of proficiency later.
And it might make le professeur Claude Hagège less grumpy about what he calls, with a breathtaking lack of academic rigour, "l'anglo-américain".
There is a heartening range of initiatives by committed occitanists to revive Occitan:
- the setting up of an Institute of Occitan Studies (IEO), funded by the central and regional governments;
- getting towns and villages to put up bilingual road signs;
- an IEO publishing and distribution company, based in Puylaurens, with an impressive range of titles (around a thousand) mostly in Occitan - novels, poetry, plays, children's and young people's books, dictionaries, text books, histories, audio and video;
- radio stations;
- language classes;
- resource centres;
- theatre groups;
Next week in the nearby town of Carcassonne there's to be a demonstration to demand the top-down measures (the setting up of an Occitan TV channel, and more investment in language classes, for example), as well as to instill a greater sense of pride among the locals about Occitan. The first demonstration in 2005 in Carcassonne attracted 10 000 people. The second, in Béziers in 2007, 20 000 people. This time, they're aiming for 30 000 people. Let's hope it succeeds. Occitan is a mellifluous, vibrant and important language.

Ratatouille

For years I've been boring Ulla and the rest of the family, friends, and former colleagues that I wanted to live in a climate where I could grow all the ingredients for ratatouille. Well, done it. Actually, not the shallots and garlic yet, as I arrived here too late in the season this year. But aubergines, peppers, courgettes and tomatoes, yes.
The recipe:
Use about the same volume of aubergines , courgettes, tomatoes, and red peppers, depending on what quantity you want to make. So one large aubergine would need two or three courgettes, three or four tomatoes, and two largish peppers. As for the shallots, about half the volume of the aubergine, and one clove of garlic per person. These quantities would produce enough ratatouille for four people.
Chop the shallots roughly and fry gently in olive oil so that they become translucent but do not brown. Put them in a heavy bottomed saucepan that has a lid. Drop the tomatoes in boiling water for five seconds to loosen their skin, peel, and put straight in the saucepan. Slice the aubergines and fry in the same frying pan as the shallots until lightly browned - they'll soak up masses of olive oil. Then add them to the saucepan. Do the same with the courgettes, and then peppers. The point about frying each separately is that the end result is not a brown stodge.
Add to the saucepan crushed garlic, some thyme, salt and pepper, stir around gently to mix, put on the lid, and simmer gently for about twenty minutes.
Can be eaten warm in an omelette or pipérade, or cold the next day as a salad.
I'd like to be able to say that using homegrown vegetables puts the dish in a class above shop bought ingredients. To be honest it doesn't. It just tastes very good. Especially eaten cold the next day.

What do Brigitte Bardot and a girl from Puylaurens at the time of the French Revolution have in common?

On all the main routes leading into the village there are those brown road signs proclaiming Puylaurens the "Berceau occitan de la Marianne républicaine" - the Occitan cradle of republican Marianne. In October 1792 Guillaume Lavabre, a cobbler-troubadour born and bred in Puylaurens, wrote a song about a local girl by the name of Marianne. Called in Occitan La Garison de Marianna - The Healing of Marianne - it was also in praise of the newly created Republic, which he baptised Marianne. The lyrics are, it has to be admitted, a rather contrived extended metaphor of Marianne suffering under the Ancien Régime but regaining her health as a result of the Revolution and the exploits of its heroes. Our neighbour, Madame Garric, is secretary of the Association Marianna in Puylaurens, and she asked me to make a translation in English, as closely as possible word for word, and keeping the references to Revolutionary events and personalities as in the original. It will be used as part of the forthcoming annual celebrations of Marianne here:
Marianne, suffering from a serious sickness, was not being well treated and was dying of misery. The Doctor, rather than curing her, made her suffer day and night. The new Executive Power gave her an emetic to clear her chest. Marianne feels better.
A grain of liste civile is a fatal remedy which retains the bile in the body, and always increases the pain. And the remedies of Louis are not good: one never gets better. But an ounce of Egalité and two drachmas of Liberté have certainly cleared her chest. Marianne etc.
Marianne the kind got her sense of taste back after the correct bleeding that took place on 10 August. The accursed pain quickly goes when one gets back one's appetite. A little oil of Servan, a little syrup of Roland, have certainly cleared her chest. Marianne etc.
Dillon, Kellermann, Custine have started to drive out the foul vermin that almost killed her; and the insides of the intestines will soon be rid of such malignant worms; the elixir of Dumouriez, rubbed on the soles of the feet, has certainly cleared her chest. Marianne etc.
A capture of Nice and two pinches of Emigrants are needed to dissipate the harm of this pain which was so great, carefully passing the submission of Brunswick through the still. In the morning, on rising from bed, the evaporation of Clairfayt has certainly cleared her chest. Marianne etc.
Montesquiou, the good patriot and Marianne's doctor, wants to cure her completely with marmot fat. Finally Anselme expels the poison, taking some more blood from her. So, her body purged, cleansed of the harmful yeast, Marianne, recovering fully, will be a picture of health.
What is striking is how well informed Lavabre was about the often chaotic events happening all over France in 1792. Googling the names in the song and events like the capture of Nice gives a vivid picture of the febrile atmosphere of the time.
Today Marianne is everywhere - on French postage stamps and euro centimes, and all of the thousands of mairies in France have a bust of her. The Statue of Liberty, presented to the United States by France, is inspired by the republican virtues symbolised by Marianne and what the new republic on the other side of the Atlantic aspired to. And Delacroix's famous painting la Liberté guidant le peuple has Liberty represented by Marianne.
There is a certain irony in all this. The song was written and sung in Occitan, the language of this region that stretches from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. It was almost extinguished by the imposition of French, and this still causes a grudge. Madame Garric, for example, talks unselfconsciously of "the invasion by the people from the North" and she doesn't mean Brits buying houses here or the Nazi occupation, but the speakers of French (the "langue d'oui") imposing their language and culture over the centuries on the speakers of the "langue d'oc", ie Occitans like her.  
And Brigitte Bardot? Every few years a new bust of Marianne is produced using a contemporary model or actress for inspiration. Brigitte Bardot in 1968, Mireille Mathieu (1978), Catherine Deneuve (1985), and Laetitia Casta in 2000. I'm not sure who the bust of Marianne in a niche on the front wall of Pépoulie takes after.

Figs, and other fruits

 

There is something immensely satisfying about going out early into the garden to pick a basket of figs, already warmed by the morning sun, to put on the breakfast table. The flesh sweet, soft, a beautiful pinky mauve. The new fig season started a few days ago, and will last till nearly the end of September. The cherries, an early reddish yellow variety, and a later, darker one, last from around the third week of May to the third week of June. The pears start in late July and go on to the end of August. And the grapes, on the front wall of the house, will be ready from mid-September. So with four cherry trees, three figs, two pear trees, and three grape vines, there is plenty of fresh fruit for our guests to pick. The only disappointment this year was the plums - hardly any on either of the two trees. And the only gap is late June to late July. But this is made up for by the apricots and peaches in the market. By preference, French apricots and peaches, not from any chauvinism, but because they come from the next door region to our Midi-Pyrénées, Languedoc-Roussillon, so can be picked and dispatched whilst perfectly ripe. (Spanish ones, because of the greater distances, have to be picked that bit earlier.)

Manure

Jérome Pagès is a neighbour who has a 60 hectare farm here. A couple of weeks ago he dumped two trailer loads of sheep manure on the meadow at the front of Pépoulie.

To be clear, I did ask him to do this, although I am acutely embarrassed that he refuses to take any payment. In fact he does the same for several other neighbours here, seeing it, I think, as being part of a local community. I’m racking my brains about how to offer something to him and the local community in the same spirit. 
60 hectares is apparently tiny compared to the huge agribusinesses in the Ile de France. He has sheep, cows for producing veal, onions, garlic, and a different kind of grain crop each year.

Whilst the muckspreader was doing its business, he told me about his 86 year old grandfather, who is still alive and lives at the farm. In the old days he would spend every day in August digging out by hand the manure that had collected in the sheep pens over the previous winter and spreading on the fields. With a mechanical digger and his muckspreader (“the same age as me, thirty two”), Jérome now does the job in two.

He also took the opportunity to bemoan the over-regulation by Brussels. For example, he is not allowed to spread the muck on his own fields until 1 September, in case storms before that date cause nitrates to soak into the water table. Why it should be OK after 1 September, I’m not sure. I asked how Brussels could find out if he did do the spreading in August, and what the penalty would be. He pointed to the sky and said “satellites”, and the stopping of his annual EU subsidy.

Before the manure arrived, I was worried it might stink the place out, and destroy all my efforts at building a reputation for good customer care of our guests. I needn’t have worried – it is beautifully crumbly, light and odourless. There’s enough for 80m² of vegetable patch and the rows of vines I plan to plant over the winter. 

A report from the vegetable patch next spring.

Why a Pépoulie blog?

This blog is for those who have booked to come to Pépoulie, and those who may be interested in coming. It will try to give a flavour of being here, beyond the Useful to Know sheets about the gîte, the pool, Puylaurens, and the surrounding area that I send out to guests. Let me know if it's interesting or not, and if there are other things you'd like to read about Pépoulie and this part of France.

Apologies straightaway for it being only in English. If I did it in all the languages of those who have stayed here, it would have to be in Dutch, Finnish, French, Swedish and Korean as well...which is beyond my linguistic capability.

So, to the first postings...