Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
to an all-time high, two friends arrived in a vintage Porsche with the top down, armed with
tea, crisps and craic.
John and Sam were keen to get their hands dirty. Sam had worked with Sean in the bank
and John was his eccentric, hilarious and Porsche-fanatic brother. They had been in Le
Mans for the race and were now enjoying a footloose trip around France.
'Come on, Sammy Boy, let's go,' said John as I came downstairs the second morning. It
was 5.30 a.m. and they were already heading out into the vineyard while I hadn't even had
my breakfast.
'Caro, darlin', you need a good cup of tea you can walk on,' said John. 'That was Mum's
advice when I left Limerick for London twenty years ago. Make sure you have a good cup
of tea to start the day, she said, you'll be amazed at what you can do.'
I followed John's advice, brewing my Barry's Tea Gold Blend as the dawn crept across the
sky each morning. Soon I was so addicted I ratcheted up to two bags. Tea I could walk on
became my saviour.
With the vines well into their season we also had to think about the next phase after the
growing: the winemaking. We were looking for a young, keen, modern wine scientist, or
oenologist. Lucille Deneuve appeared to fit the bill.
Lucille could speak English but she always spoke to us in French. Our French dictionary
was always within reach. Weliked her.Well, Sean really liked her.She was ablonde bomb-
shell, someone youwould have expected to find in St Tropez rather than in the vineyards of
Bergerac: pretty but bright, with a luscious body that made men look rather too closely at
certain wording - those in a particular area - on the Bergerac wine T-shirt she often wore.
She recommended that we talk to and taste the wines of other local winemakers so we
could tell her what style of wine we wanted to make. Her suggestions included a name I
recognised as the young fellow I'd sat next to at lunch on Cécile's training course several
months before.
A few days later we visited Château Court-les-Mûts, the property of the Sadoux family.
Their vineyard was just over a kilometre from us on the main valley slope going towards
Sainte-Foy-la-Grande. From our house we could follow a rural route that took us past the
mayor's vineyard down to the D14, the Route des Coteaux, offering the most stunning
westerly views down the Dordogne valley all the way. The unassuming Pierre was a third-
generation winegrower and their farm was the largest independent wine operation in the
Saussignac appellation. We tasted his wines and talked about what had happened in the dif-
