GINS & TONIC
Sap rising and bud break. spring wakes up the vines and the towns they surround. The expats slowly return. The rains come, and many of the streets in Collioure turn briefly into rivers. The change in the vines is the best. They slowly shed their skeletal look as the buds break; the leaves begin to open and spread out to face the sun. The hills and mountains transform slowly from greyscale to technicolour. It’s not quite like in the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy opens the door of her Kansas farmhouse to a sudden flood of colour, but it’s not far off.
All thoughts of the cold and the dank quickly evaporate. Winter doesn’t linger in the memory long in warm places. Late in the winter and early in the spring, the vines get ploughed. We have a horse for this, a big old shire horse named Titan who used to plough the vines at some of Burgundy’s finest domaines. Some of the vines in Banyuls are too steep for Titan; these will be done by hand.
People return to Collioure and Banyuls and Argelès bit by bit. Holiday-goers from far afield and expats; this is very much an expat time of year, as it precedes the hordes that arrive in July and August when the French schools are out and, apparently, nobody in France has to work. And as these people arrive, we’re bottling new wines for them to drink. This is when the first of our wines from the previous harvest, only about eight months ago, are bottled and ready for sale. Wine just bottled can be a little different from what you’re used to, especially when you leave it as much to its own devices as you possibly can. With our whites, this is the freshest they will be, some of them, like the Mas Cristine Blanc, will even feel as though there’s a hint of effervescence – there isn’t, but it will feel like it. The rosés will be sharp and clean and hint at strawberries and cranberries. The reds will be crunchy and, if I’m lucky, the Mas Cristine Rouge will smell just like the back of Julien’s pickup when it’s loaded with grapes to be thrown into the de-stemmer, wild red fruits, honeysuckle and a bit of dust kicked up on a dry sunny day. We don’t make enough white. It’s in demand, but there just aren’t enough vineyards planted with white varieties to meet that demand. New plantings take time, and when there are people wanting something that you can’t give them, that time seems eternal. Juggling allocations for customers gets more difficult for Andy and Philippe every year. By the time the new vintage is bottled and ready to go, all of our best customers have been waiting for at least a month or two for stock. Anyone who waits too long to confirm an order will have their wines allocated to someone more decisive.
Recently, Andy managed to get our basic rosé, the Tramontane Rosé, on the list at the Templiers in Collioure as their house pink by the bottle, so the second rosé up the ladder. Their house pouring rosé is a rather tasty bag-in-box that they sell for about six Euros a half-litre pichet. Anyway, this was quite a coup. Most of the bars in town make do with the co-op offerings. Andy reserved 600 bottles for them and they went through it in a month. I don’t think even they knew how popular it was going to be. It’s a good wine, but being a rosé, and the second cheapest rosé probably helped it more so (studies show that the second cheapest wine on a wine list can often prove to be the most popular, as folks want a bargain, but don’t want to seem too miserly). In any case, they went through their allocation for the year in about a month. So we had to put a bit more aside for them this year.
Along with the Café Sola, the Templiers forms the binary system around which most of the debauchery and drunkenness in Collioure revolves. It’s a hotel, restaurant and bar owned by a local family that have been collecting art for a century or so. Behind the bar is a photo of Picasso, signed with a doodle, stood next to the grand or great-grandfather of the current generation of owners. Every inch of wall space is covered in paintings, all of them framed in heavy, gilded, ornate frames, the likes of which are probably more expensive than some of the art they hold now. They don’t show off their good stuff anymore. Too many priceless canvases disappeared with the odd unscrupulous punter. Picassos probably sit at the top of the tier, but there are others, such as Matisse, now all locked safe elsewhere. Rumour has it that when the Templiers has a bad year, when the wolves are closing in and bills need to be paid, the family will release a painting for auction to get them through. The work that hangs now, not just in the bar but throughout the hotel, is fine. It’s dingy and thickly oiled, interesting in and of itself as it charts the local art that didn’t achieve fame. A chronicle of also-rans and wannabes. You wouldn’t find a collection like this anywhere else, because no one would collect it. Some of them are lovely, in fact. It’s like a Battersea Dog’s Home for art. I’ve not known a museum to specialise in the obscure, but the idea has merit. The potential curator could go to the Templiers to see how it’s done. Of course, if they got stuck into the G&Ts expertly crafted by the Brazilian barman, they might find themselves in a bit of trouble.
No one around here uses measures when they make drinks. They just free pour. Now, in some places, this means that you still get about the same as you would in a bar in the UK. Not so at the Templiers (nor in the Petit Café, but that’s another place and another tale).
Sometimes after a day in the winery the pain’s a bit too much for beer alone, and you need a proper muscle relaxant. The sort of thing that harkens back to the martinis made in the days of Mad Men – an immediate de-stresser, so laden with booze that it bypasses the brain and loosens everything else before you even realise it. That’s what the Brazilian’s gin and tonics do. They come in narrow, tall glasses, loaded with ice. He holds the gin upside down for almost a five-count, until there’s barely more than an inch left between the top of the liquid and the rim of the glass. If you’d not seen him prepare it thus far, you might think the drink was finished. It looks finished. You might think the tonic was just a bit flat. But no. There’s a whole 3/4s of an inch of tonic to add, and then it’s done. The tonic may still be a bit flat. It’s this gin and tonic that proves the essentialness of a swizzle stick. Without it, you’d sip away the tonic in one gulp and be left nearly choking on a tall gin on the rocks. Swizzle away, blend that splash into the ocean of gin and marvel how incredibly drinkable it all becomes. Oh, sure, there’s a bitter edge here and there, but before you know it, you’ll be feeling much better than you were. During harvest, we usually stick to just the one gin. It does the job. After that; beer.
In the spring, however, among friends and with the table covered in beers of various sizes, the odd carafe and pichet of wine, perhaps a glass or two of pastis with the requisite pitcher of tap water alongside and maybe a couple of glasses of Banyuls for apéro, sometimes another gin and tonic hits the spot. After two, you’ve got to watch yourself, because it’s quite likely that the reflexive ability to assess your own fitness for function disappeared in those last few sips. If the conversation and company is good, as it usually is around these parts, then you could find yourself lost to the night, working your way through each of the drinks listed above. Possibly falling in the sea or, in a reckless state of abandon, phoning pretty much the only taxi in town and demanding he drive you to the casino or, worse, La Jonquera, the Spanish border town riddled with hookers who’ve been known to thieve card details and run up a several thousand pound tab in the course of only a few hours.
I’m not speaking from direct experience of the latter. Honest.
Good company on these evenings involves a mixture of local and expat colour. Earlier in the evening, Petit Louis may be about. Petit Louis is probably not quite five feet tall and as far as I can remember has had about three 90th birthday parties in the last five or so years. So I’ll just assume he’s over 90. He used to be a fisherman, and now he makes small model fishing boats that he charges a ridiculous amount for. His workshop and gallery sit just up the winding road from Andy and Kirsten’s flat. Kirsten’s portait of Petit Louis, next to a gutted fish that I think is a mackerel but may well be something else has become her calling card for the town, as she captured him perfectly. Age has carved deep folds into his face, which appears fixed in various forms of smile and laughter. He looks sort of like a happy bloodhound. I’ve never seen him in anything other than blue denim, both in terms of shirt and trousers, no matter how much the sun is beating down. Petit Louis knows everyone. His walk from the workshop to the Sola or the Templiers tends to be a walk of smiles, greetings, handshakes and the traditional kisses on both cheeks for the ladies. He still loves the ladies, and is quite the flirt.
The only one who doesn’t say hi to Petit Louis is Max. I’m not sure what Max did in his professional life. He’s younger than Petit Louis, and unsurprisingly taller. He too knows pretty much everyone in town and flirts relentlessly with the ladies. Perfectly white hair framed by dark but slightly salty arched eyebrows, Max must be somewhere in his sixties, but again, I’m not quite sure. If they’re both out, quite often one will be at the Sola and the other at the Templiers. The division runs deep, and apparently there’s a woman and a trip to Paris and the root of it all, but that’s just hearsay.
One particular April evening, I sipped from a glass of rosé at the Templiers and kept up with the conversation. It was quite a few expats that evening, most of them just down and still a bit pale from the winter and sunless spring. I got chatting to a retired Cornishman. He and his wife have a place down here. He didn’t seem to like it very much. He had the grumpy demeanour of someone who’d become a bit bored of retired life and was slowly beginning to think the world around him was pretty stupid, and that he must be pretty stupid to be still putting up with it after all these years. But still, quite fun to chat with. He drank red wine, but didn’t like to spend too much on it. He did like the wine down here. He liked the wine that we made, as it happens. ‘I like the big stuff’ he said, sounding every bit the west countryman, even though his work had taken him all over the world. He could have offered to sell me a litre of farmer’s scrumpy and I wouldn’t have flinched. I supped my beer and he drank his wine and he asked what I did and I told him I made and sold wine and he told me he was retired but used to be a businessman.
‘And what business was that?’ I asked
‘Oh, I was an arms dealer,’ was the reply. I didn’t comically choke on my pint, but in my head I did. The idea of this softly spoken West Country accent offering fleets of fighter jets and lorry-loads of M-16s rather than a litre of dodgy cider knocked me down a peg or two, I must admit. I got the impression he was quite high up in his former employment and was later told that he brokered meetings between defence ministers and various heads of government and state. At the time, however, he was just a bloke in the Templiers on a warm April evening sipping on a glass of red and talking about how he loathed the French.
‘Well, I don’t really loathe them, you see, I just can’t be bothered to speak the language.’
I nodded with understanding and lamented that I didn’t speak better French, and if I could, I may well have moved here by now.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t bother if I were you. What’s the point in learning French? It’s a dead language. As dead as a dodo. French, German, Italian, all of ’em. Pointless. All dead soon enough.’
This was another comedy spitting-my-pint out moment, but instead I swallowed and chuckled. It was pretty funny.
‘As far as I’m concerned, it’s just English, Spanish and Chinese that folks should bother learning these days. No bloody point in learning any others. They’ll be nothing but historical footnotes. Fifty; hundred years from now, it’ll just be English, Spanish and Chinese. And Spanish’ll be lucky. So I refuse to speak French. And I’m too old and not bothered to learn a new language now, anyway.’
I nodded and told him I could see what he meant. And I could, I suppose. It was one of those sweeping statements said by someone with such conviction and simple logic that getting into an argument would have been pointless. I didn’t bring up that French was important for me now, and that in trying to understand a winemaker’s nuanced instructions, pointing out the potential extinction of their mother tongue as a justification for my ignorance would go down about as well as pissing in a fermentation vat.
He comes down here because his wife likes it. He gets along ok, he supposes, but doesn’t really get into it as much as some of the others do. It’s fun to think of him as merely a character. Broken veins stretch across his cheeks and nose, his eyes are watery. The glass of red he’s drinking is not his first, nor will it be his last. He doesn’t give a shit what I think, and I can’t be bothered to challenge his dismal view of things, hence my nodding accompanied by just the odd protestation that I like it here. He doesn’t really care. I’m getting that way, on occasion, where everyone is of course entitled to their opinion, but I reserve the right to not give a shit what it is.
I’ve been an expat for more than half my life. I moved away from the city and country I was born in in 1989 and, aside from two years at boarding school in the mid-90s, have lived elsewhere ever since. It’s something I’ve always been aware of. I like it, because it means that I can feel very quickly at home pretty much anywhere. I feel at home in Collioure as much as I do in Boston, London or St Andrews. But I never really used to hang out in packs of like-folks. My parents had fellow expat friends and whatnot, but for the most part, I’d say we were fairly integrated. My friends were mostly Londoners, and when I went to university, they were from all over the place: Scotland, England, the States, Norway, Switzerland, Nepal, wherever. I even knew a guy from the Faro Islands. He loved Australian Shiraz.
But the point is, I never really experienced the idea of an expat community until I saw it in Collioure. I saw mention of it, obviously, but most of my thoughts and images were formed by people like Hemingway, Orwell and Fitzgerald. The idea of the young and aspiring seeking out their place in the world, adventuring, making art, living for the moment so much as to seem nihilistic. Tangoing, eating and drinking and fucking; moveable-feasting; being both of the places they went and yet utterly separate. Valuing that dichotomy above all; the idea that they could enjoy the riches of a place while still having a home to go back to. Behaving, for the most part, appallingly, because they could get away with it. Anything they did wouldn’t matter at all, because any consequences would be so far away from home, away from those you cared about or would be embarrassed by your behaviour. I read The Sun Also Rises my senior year in high school. None of the class were really ready for that sort of selfish decadence in the form of fiction. We balked at the racism, political incorrectness and general odiousness of everyone involved. I revisited it a couple of years ago and understood it far better. I even liked it as a novel, in spite of the remaining irredeemability of the characters.
The expats in Collioure are like those Hemingway characters except a little more likeable and a little older. They eat out and drink at lunchtime, which often leads to eating out and drinking at dinner time as well. Often the conversation at lunch will be where to go for dinner. They fit no simple category; some are retired arms dealers, some are married, some are divorced, some are lovers, most drink too much (but who am I to talk), they party and drink and fuck and do drugs and some speak better French than others. There’s nothing really predictable about them. I say ‘them’ as though they were a single entity; they aren’t, not really. There are overlapping groups and some who quite purposely choose to keep to themselves. But the appearance is that of unity. Everyone tends to say hello in the Café Sola or the Templiers. Often tables will be pulled together and another carafe of wine bought. At this time of year, the air is fresh and the wine is fresh. All along the coast and throughout France, as green returns to the vines; bars, cafes and restaurants begin to serve the newly bottled fruits of the previous autumn. Sat in front of the Café Sola, you’ll hear a few more English voices as they sup their small goblets of fresh rosé poured from a pichet. Donald might be there, the formidable Scottish hotelier whose knowledge of those here from elsewhere is peerless. His cane-bearing hand rises constantly in greeting, as he knows or at least recognises most of the people who pass by. He’s quick to offer a drink and, if he’s just arrived from Scotland, there will no doubt be plentiful smoked salmon, and Stornoway Black Pudding (which he prefers to the local boudin noir) in tow. He owns The George in Inveraray, a coaching inn that’s been in the family for five or six generations. His sons have the running of it now. Stay there if you can, or if you’re just passing through, stop for the mussels. They’re the best I’ve eaten, and would turn many a Belgian green with envy.
Around Donald revolves much of the expat world in Collioure. Those overlapping groups all tend to overlap in his vicinity. He’ll often suggest popping over to Spain for long Sunday lunches that stretch into dinner and sometimes even lunch the following day. He knows seemingly everyone, local and visitor. He introduces himself if he doesn’t. My first introduction to him was at Andy and Kirsten’s wedding, where he instructed me to rent a kilt on Max’s behalf. I don’t think Max really believed Donald was going to go through with it, and to be honest, I was a little hesitant to arrange for a kilt on someone’s behalf sight unseen. There are a lot of very particular measurements that go into getting a kilt right. I didn’t want to bring an outfit 1,000 miles for it not to fit. When I spoke to Donald on the phone he said not to worry. And I shouldn’t have. Max looked great in a kilt, and even managed not to upend himself after the several gallons of Banyuls consumed at the wedding.
Donald tends to be the observer and sometimes instigator of the outrageous, but very rarely the perpetrator. Instead he’ll regale those at the table of the various incidences of the night before, often with a bit of a twinkle in his eye and the odd sigh of a hangover, and very little damage done to or by his good self.
An afternoon that Donald holds court is one that can last far longer than intended. He often starts by offering you a glass of the splendid red he’s drinking, but oh dear, there’s only a drop or two left in the bottle. And so another is ordered and depending on how many folks are there, quickly put to rest by just the filling of the surrounding glasses. And so a scant few sips after they’ve been raised, they must be filled again. And so another bottle will arrive and this lasts a little longer, as pleasantries have been exchanged and the chat becomes relaxed and constant with problems of both the world and closer to home given the once over before moving back towards the gossip of the town and the chat amongst the locals. This conversation will often include recently dined at restaurants and/or the drunken antics of the evening before. As soon as food is brought up and the glasses are empty another bottle is ordered and discussion moves towards what people’s dinner plans are. Some folks may be intending to go home for a meal and some may have a table booked locally. By the time the third bottle sits in its dregs and a round of beers is ordered (that fantastic new wine might not have been that fantastic after all) a restaurant’s been mentioned that no one’s been to recently, or that is under new management or ownership. Questions about how solid everyone’s former plans are. Who wants to cook at this hour? Could we get another wee dish of olives and peanuts please? Oh, and a few more beers – oh? You want wine? Three beers and a bottle of wine then, please. Well do you think they’ll have a table for nine on a night like this? There’s only one way to find out.
And I think that’s what’s called a moveable feast.
Collioure is split in two by a rather large fortification set into a natural hilly outcrop. To travel from one half of the city to the other, you can walk along the stony walkway that surrounds the fort, along the water, passing the odd artist, street musician and ticket tout for day-sailing on the Med. The art ranges from middling to terrible. There are spots where you can see the masonry of the fort sat square on the bedrock. Doubtless there will be a few fisherman too, their rods leant against a rock or gripped lazily. I think the fishing is more important than the idea of catching anything. The water’s always crystal clear – dark reefs cross the white pebble and stone sea floor like tiger stripes. In the spring there’s a brightness to the light and a coolness in the air that makes the clearness of the water that much sharper. The coolness sits behind the ever-present breeze, a reminder of the snows from the mountains, and the winter not long past.
Or you can walk up the hill, behind the fort, to the mini roundabout. You pass at least one tasting room and Olivier Bajard’s remarkable confectioners. At the top of the hill is an improbable Renault garage and petrol station. Further up past the roundabout is the big Anchois Roque shop, cannery and tasting area, where you can learn pretty much everything you want to about Collioure’s famous anchovies. Whether they tell you that they’re no longer from the Med, that they’re only canned here, depends on how honest they’re feeling that day. I believe they all come from South American waters now, what with the sea here about quite empty.
It’s a nicer walk up the hill in the spring than it is in the summer. In the summer there’s an endless queue of cars seeking their way towards one of the rare parking spots in the town. The odd honk of a horn and the craning necks of drivers looking for a glimmer of a space wherever they may be. Any movement in their periphery could be a car exiting the perfect spot. It isn’t. But it could be.
By the mini roundabout, you turn left and start walking down the hill, towards the other half of town. This is the side that rises up again on the other side of the beach and then just sort of turns into Port-Vendres. There’s a good beach here, and a café that serves pizzas. Children play on the playground and there’s even a carousel. Along this stretch is the scuba school and paddle boat hire. The Les Voiles café sits terraced above the water and is a good, but pricey, spot for lunch. The best place to eat in this part of town, however, is the L’Arbre d’Voyageur. A tiny place in a small square across the street from the beach, there’s barely room for inside seating. There’s a bar and stools, but behind the bar is the kitchen. This is where Michel makes his remarkable food.
Traditional Catalan food is fantastic, and there’s superb produce in the region. Their particular brand of tapas is fresh and influenced very much by both the sea and the mountains. That said, there’s a lot of mediocre dining in Collioure. Why? Because they can get away with it. Thronging with tourists for several months of the year, a lot of restaurants and cafés punt out any old rubbish, charge too much for it and get away with it. I can think of three or four places whose menus are basically interchangeable. It’s a real shame. There should be dozens of great restaurants here, not just a handful.
Michel doesn’t do the traditional Catalan thing. There’s enough of it kicking about. Instead, Michel lets the exotic notes of North Africa, India and Thailand influence his food, and makes a remarkable selection of fresh and exotic curries, steak tartar, but set in a thai salad, Moroccan lamb and his unique take on Rogan Josh. He makes everything from scratch. It’s the sort of food you keep eating long after you’re full, just because it’s so compelling bite after bite.
Michel himself isn’t a chef by training, and his fame in Collioure predates his cooking. Once upon a time he ran the Piano Bar, a remarkable little bar built into some of the oldest parts of Collioure. It didn’t have a piano – it still doesn’t, in fact – which is why it was called the Piano Bar. Michel’s CD collection numbers in the thousands, and the Piano Bar used to jump to jazz, blues, African, all sorts of perfectly chosen tracks that kept the night going. It felt like a cave, seemingly carved out of a mediaeval stone wall. Only room for one behind the bar, Michel’s thing was world beers, and he had a small but perfectly formed selection. After Andy’s wedding, this is where the survivors met for a post revelry livener.
Sadly, Michel was just a little bit too much fun to run a pub in town, and he lost his lease on the Piano Bar. It’s still there, but rather soulless. We don’t drink there anymore. I don’t even know if the people that run it know why it’s called the Piano Bar.
It would be hard to look more French than Michel. Tall and slight, with a weathered face and gestures with his arms while speaking that are at once energetic and lackadaisical. Rarely is there not a cigarette hanging from his mouth (usually just when he’s cooking). He drives a moped and can sometimes nap so late that the restaurant doesn’t open for dinner until a half hour after you were hungry. One vintage Andy had to go to Paris for a sales meeting and I was left to run Mas Cristine for a couple of days. Kirsten was heavily pregnant with Angus, and fairly grumpy. And so when I finished in the winery, I would head back to the flat, shower and change and then slip back out to Michel’s, order a couple of beers or a pichet of wine, and sit out at a table for one. I’d just ask him what was best that night. It was quiet and cool and I could hear the sea from across the street. His daughter would run around playing until her mom would grow weary of the hyperactivity and rein her in. At a break in cooking, Michel would pop out for a cigarette and sit with me, sipping a beer. His English is better than my French, and he would ask how it was all going with harvest. The food was so good, so utterly nourishing at that point of exhaustion.
L’Arbre won’t be open on a spring afternoon, but it’s fun to see if Michel’s moped is there, just to see if he’s prepping in the kitchen early or napping away. If he’s prepping he might get some bookings for the evening, as the smell that comes as he browns and sweats spices over the cooker acts as quite the bait for many a curious diner.
This end of town is also where the Cave Dominicain sits, the co-op in town. Above that is the local art museum, which I’ve never seen open, and the hillside gardens that lead to what is now an ornamental moulin – a windmill that stands above the town. If you follow the road that grabs the side of the hill, it will bring you up to the Neptune, which used to be the only Michelin Star restaurant in town. It was dining there many years ago that Andy first tasted Philippe’s wines. It’s lost its star, but the food’s still good, if a little pricey. It’s up on the hill over the harbour, though, and the views are spectacular.
Further up the hill are hotels built into the cliffside overlooking the water. And so it goes until it’s not Collioure anymore but Port-Vendres. A large Lidl sits on the border between the two towns.
Port-Vendres has a good wine shop but I’ve not really eaten much there. A rash of food poisonings from a pizza place on the harbour one January visit has left me a little lacking in enthusiasm for revisiting the cuisine.
A few years ago, Andy, Philippe and Julien invited a bunch of customers to Mas Cristine for a spring party, to celebrate not only the new vintage, but the fifth anniversary of Philippe and Julien’s partnership in the estate (Andy joined the group a year after they took it over). A bit strange, really, to invite folks to Mas Cristine, as it’s one of the most unappealing wineries in the known universe. But they’d secured a deal with the family that actually owns the house, Mas Cristine. The house is beautiful. A classic French farmhouse guarded from peeking eyes by a perfect row of poplars and set up in the hills between Argelès and Collioure. It looks out towards the sea, and is set in the vines from which we make the wine that bears its name. To the sides and behind it rise the foothills of the mountains, and at this time of year, with the leaves all back and the frequency of the rains, there’s a remarkable sense of life surrounding you. You can almost hear the cork forest growing, the vines stretching to get more of the sun and perhaps even the grunt of the occasional boar from just beyond the tree line. Those hills always feel like the mountains of South/Central America and there is a sense of the tropical. It’s like a rain forest, but without quite so much rain.
The deal that Julien and Philippe struck was permission to use the front garden and the old front garage in order to host this big bash. Sometimes the wine trade is just about drinking loads of lovely wine and having a great party. Old French garages do not stand with other garages of the world. They’re bigger, for one, and their dimensions suggest that their entire purpose was to make wine. In this case, it was very likely that this large space made the very first vintages of wine that bore the name ‘Mas Cristine’ decades, maybe a century and more, ago. It’s a combination of excitement and sadness that comes with that realisation. Excitement that, for the first time, we get to hang out at this place and pretend it’s our own and be in the very room that saw the wine being made all those years ago. But also sadness that it’s different now. The family who own the house use it rarely. From what I understand, they’re also in the wine world, but on a much grander scale than us. I kind of feel this oversized garage should still be used to make wine, rather than as a shed that just makes the small amount stored in it look even smaller because it’s so big in the first place. The house is all properly faced on the outside, it’s only in the garage that you see the large wooden beams that provide the support and structure to the building. I reach out and touch them. I do that sometimes. I like touching old things, be it stone or wood. Just to get some sort of sense of how it feels. I know there’s no supernatural connection or anything like that, but there doesn’t have to be. The sensation of touch in itself can be moving enough as it is.
We set up two marquees on the perfectly manicured front lawn and secured them against the wind. The Tramontane was predicted in force for both days of the party, and so we wanted to make sure that they didn’t go anywhere. It’s the sort of precaution I expected more in Scotland. Having to deal with it under the beating sun in semi-paradise seemed somewhat awry. On further examination though, the sun wasn’t beating that hard, and there appeared to be some very large clouds rolling in off the mountains.
We set out a lot of wine. Most of our best customers were showing up, and as it was in part an anniversary, Philippe brought out some of the small amounts of library stock he’d hidden over the years, including a bottle of the first Coume del Mas wine ever, a blend that would become, eventually, Quadratur. There was also some Mas Cristine Blanc from 2006, his first vintage, and samples from barrel of both Grand Cru and Rancio styles of Banyuls that have still not been bottled, because Philippe doesn’t think they’re quite ready yet.
Library stock is a term used in the wine world for bottles kept back from sale each vintage by the winery for the purposes of storing in ideal conditions. Some wineries have library stock numbering in the millions of bottles and spanning two or three centuries. These will be opened rarely, on special occasions, by winemakers and château owners to chart the progress of a wine and study the effects of time, or to compare how two vintages from similar climatic conditions might age. Sometimes they just open them because they can. Who can blame them? That’s probably what I would do.
Library wines are usually stored unlabelled, with their only identifying mark being that of the un-foiled cork, bearing both the name of the cuvée and the year of the vintage. This allows them to be freshly labelled when released for whatever the occasion may be. It can be somewhat bizarre; an ancient bottle and cork adorned by a fresh-from-the-printer label. Like a granny dressed as Lady Gaga.
Sadly, we don’t make enough wine for such testaments to posterity. It would be lovely to have a cellar built under the winery at Coume del Mas, filled with all the vintages Philippe has ever made both there and at Mas Cristine. Instead we rely on a few odd bottles here and there that Philippe has hidden away somewhere special. I can only assume he keeps them at home, as Coume del Mas is so open plan, there aren’t any nooks or even crannies to slip a few dozen bottles of wine in. And we’re still a young company. We make wine to sell, and need to realise as much from that as we can to keep going for the next year. It’s a bit too much of a luxury to sit on it for a big party.
There were magnums of Folio and Schistes and I was struck by a pang of selfishness. Who needs guests or customers, anyway? Brushing aside my urge to hide the good stuff for myself, I managed to take the tasting quite seriously. I sampled every single wine, swirled and spat, and noted absolutely everything. Customers from all over France came, including a wine merchant from Paris whose cellars go down into what were, originally, catacombs. The wines get older the deeper you descend through the cellars, with the most ancient bottles resting in the lowest levels of the catacombs. Andy described it like something out of Indiana Jones. I still have the gentleman’s business card (somewhere). I very much want to go to that shop, though fear that my meagre bank balance would not survive the trip.
Tray after tray of tapas came out. Loaf after loaf of fresh bread cut into slices and served rubbed with a mixture of ripe tomato and garlic that constitutes one of Catalonia’s signature dishes. People fed and drank. The local wine merchants, wise to the gems on offer at the tasting tables, would grab something particularly rare for their own benefit. This gave rise to one of the afternoon’s more childish but good-humoured pursuits. I’d not tried the Grand Cru Banyuls yet – they got to it before me. And so it became a bit of a race, to see who could get to the rarest bottle and serve themselves the largest ‘sample’. I was fortunate as I was playing with house money, as it were. Some more samples of the older Banyuls, both the Grand Cru and the Rancio, appeared and I helped myself, raising two glasses in their direction with a smile. Then Philippe handed me a bottle of his first ever vintage and an experimental ‘super’ cuvée that he’d put in barrel one year and totally forgotten about – essentially a Quadratur with an extra year blended in oak. Soft and silky. I didn’t actually open those, to be honest. They found their way into my rucksack and are now sleeping quite happily in a cellar in Scotland.
Sipping the two older Banyuls quickly erased the silliness of sneaking about trying to get my hands on this and that before the merchants did. They put a pin in the map of my mind, nailed me to that lawn in front of Mas Cristine as I stood between the two marquees. Intense flavours expressed on the palate with such beauty that the rest of the wine that day, for the most part, has faded into shadow. I took my time with them; wandered down to the end of the lawn by the poplars and tried to take everything in from both the glasses and my surroundings. The patchwork of sunlight and cloud cover, the sound of the strong breeze in the trees, the clanging of the weighted tarpaulin of the marquees against the tentpoles. I quite often seek my own space in such big gatherings, but this time I needed it. The wines were close to perfect expressions of their style. I could have spent the rest of the afternoon just sipping those two wines and staring out towards the sea through the poplar trees. But lunch was ready.
It was here that I first met hippy Kris and we got into our first discussion regarding the pros and cons of ‘natural’ wine-making, biodynamics, organic viticulture and sustainable winemaking. Kris is very pro all of those things. I wouldn’t call him hippy Kris if he wasn’t. I should mention that I’m not necessarily against any of those things myself, but I do like winding up folks carrying a little too much dogma about with them, and Kris certainly qualified. So we debated and argued and went back and forth about adding sulphur and mystical ‘energies’ in certain soils. At this point, I was unaware that it was his strange guano fertiliser cocktail that had spilled in the Mighty Clio, rendering it close to toxic. A wine merchant from London was sat next to us and extraordinarily curious about Kris’ theories. My sparring partner preferred evangelising to debate and so shifted his attention from me to the interested onlooker.
And so I grabbed my glass and headed back towards the tasting marquee in good spirits, though wanting to revisit some of the wines I’d tried earlier. Try as I might, I couldn’t repeat the moment with the two Banyuls. They were every bit as good the second time around, but there was no nailing to the spot or pins in maps. Instead there was the urge to start tidying up and clear everything away for the day. The paper tablecloths were tattered and stained, and many of the samples were empty. I put my glass down and started to help with the clear up.
In the evening after the party, a bunch of us, those that had travelled the furthest, either from Britain or Paris, went to Masashi’s for dinner.
Lijima Masashi, as his name suggests, is Japanese. He’s a chef. He came to France to train at the highest level and now has a restaurant of his own, Le 5ème Péché. He makes French/Japanese fusion cuisine that is the opposite of how wanky that sounds. In fact, it’s deceptively simple how good his food is. Expressive, pure flavours that come from delicate treatment of only the very finest ingredients. The restaurant is tiny (though not as small as Michel’s), located on the Rue de la Fraternité, one of the tiny, narrow lanes in the old town of Collioure that is almost entirely populated by funky little art galleries. In that sense, Masashi is well-situated. His food frequently reaches artistic levels of creativity and Masashi himself kind of wants to be a rock star. He plays guitar, and in the afternoon between lunch service and dinner, you can frequently hear him blasting out hard rock from his kitchen while he gets his mise en place sorted for the evening. His chef hat hides a mane of hair that swooshes perfectly when he’s playing AC/DC covers in the garage of his house on one of the hills behind Port-Vendres. His wine list is good and he shows quite a few of the region’s ‘natural’ wine selection. Some of these are fantastic, like the Bruno Duchêne Collioure Rouge. And some of them leave a bit to be desired. We once opened a bottle, quite an expensive one at that, that was re-fermenting and tasted far more of cider than it did wine.
Philippe once again produced, seemingly from thin air, some old magnums of both Quadratur and Abysses, his two top reds, from an exceptional year, the 2005 vintage. The wine showed brilliantly. After the meal, a fair few of us decamped to the Templiers for a G&T or two.
The following day, back at Mas Cristine, Julien had arranged for three whole lambs to be cooked on rotisserie spits, over a mixture of charcoal and old grape vines. It was a stark contrast to the laser-like precision of the meal before, but every bit as toothsome. The lamb was dripping with flavour, served with large batches of couscous, spiced up with livid, fiery harissa. The wine cooled down the heat, thankfully, and stood up to the spice. It was messy and beautiful.
So it was a toss-up, between the two, which food was better. Masashi’s pristine cuisine the night before or the lamb cooked on spits that second day of the party. It’s good that no one was forced to choose between the two. And it was a brilliant way to kick off the growing season.