Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 3
Homesick
I wanted the glamorous part of owning a vineyard, not the hard work. Sean was to do the
vineyard work and I would look after the kids, do light renovation and eventually the mar-
keting. At the time there was little that could be called glamorous in what we had purchased
save perhaps the view.
What we had bought was a large old house that had originally been two houses, numerous
ragged outbuildings including the fermentation winery or
pressoir
, the storage winery and a
very large barn, and a chunk of about 30 acres of surrounding land of which 25 acres were
vineyards in different stages of disrepair. One small part of the house was liveable: a large
bedroom where we had installed our entire family, a kitchen where we had a makeshift set-
up that included our new equipment and a very old hob, and a large bathroom that once thor-
oughly cleaned was passable but miles from glamorous. Looking after a very young family
in a kitchen that rated just above camping was a full-time job. The gas hob had two working
plates and we had no oven. We were scared stiff of spending any more money.
The winery andits renovation were onthe longfinger -we might have toputthem offfora
while. It would be a year before we turned our attention to our first harvest and it seemed far,
far away. Just coping with daily life in this new environment was enough; my mind could
not take in the idea of making our own wine.
Decades of garbage had to be removed from Château Haut Garrigue: fridges and ovens that
didn't work, beds that hadn't been used in generations and mounds of unidentifiable detritus.
Soon the dreadlocked young man at the dump was greeting me like a friend.
We lived in one large room together while we worked on our first project - a bedroom
for the girls. It was lightweight renovation, decorative rather than structural, and meant we
would at last get a bit of parental privacy. It had a dirty neon light and walls covered with
brown, flowery wallpaper that was peeling badly and stained dark yellow with nicotine. The
window in the corner was black with mould. Below it were several fist-size holes that had
been the main entrance for our late friends, the mice. The concrete floor was covered with
filthy linoleum curling up at the edges like old tobacco. The door had several large vertic-
al cracks running down the upper half and didn't close. We started by removing the lino-
