Homesick - Grape Expectations - page 22

leum. Once we had cleared the room I tackled the wallpaper while Sean took on the win-
dow. I steamed and scraped until my arms ached. Drops of boiling water, molten nicotine
and soggy paper fell incessantly onto my arms and hair. I geared up in waterproofs with
goggles and hood regardless of the heat. The wallpaper was beyond tenacious. An Inter-
net search affirmed that what we had was not normal. Clearly something more serious than
standard wallpaper glue had been used to attach it.
Weeks later, my arms were toned but the room was still in an awful state. I was more at
home with a keyboard than a screwdriver and found myself a reluctant renovator.
'We're getting nowhere, SF,' I said, bursting into tears. Completing this room alone before
Seanstarted pruningthevineyard waslookingunlikely.Ienvisioned tryingtodotherenov-
ations on my own and dissolved into further floods of tears.
'Feck it, Carolinus, we have moved country,' said Sean, trying to cheer me up, but only
making me cry harder. The stress of our move was taking its toll. We'd moved country be-
fore but not like this: then it was in the same language and with the security of the large
multinational for which I worked. It wasn't just getting familiar with physically hard work.
We hadn't made love in months - living in a room with our daughters didn't help. Romance
was forgotten in change overload. We were spending more time together than ever, but I
had never felt so estranged from Sean.
That afternoon, a neighbour we met in passing at the village fête dropped in. Jamie was an
impressive character who had worked his way up to being vineyard manager of one of the
largest wine estates in our region. He had spent half his life in England and half in France
and the speed of his French when he talked on his mobile left me breathless and envious.
We had a chat then he looked uncomfortable.
'I've got a favour to ask of you,' he said. 'I need a chai . We've got problems with some of
our vats. This year will be a catastrophe if we don't find somewhere else to make our wine
and since you're not using yours this year I thought of you.'
A winery is called a chai , pronounced 'shay'. We hadn't worked up the courage to venture
into ours.
WeleaptatJamie'sproposalwhichprovidedtheopportunitytowatchaharvestinourown
winery and to get to know the equipment. A week later we rose early to see him bringing in
the first of his grapes with François, his colleague. The weather was changing, autumn had
arrived and with it that morning a chilly five degrees. With Ellie wrapped in blankets in her
pram and Sophia bundled up in her winter coat we watched, enthralled, as the dawn poked
long gold fingers through the vines. The harvest machine was already motoring up and
down the rows and soon the trailer loads were arriving every half-hour. Jamie explained the
idiosyncrasies ofourwinery as he and François worked frenetically to move their machine-
harvested grapes from the trailer into a vat. He had to yell above the noise of the tractor
that drove a pump in the trailer to push the grapes into a massive pipe oriented into the vat.
I hung onto Sophia, anxious to keep her out of the way of the large machinery.