I wasn’t quite sure why I’d been
asked to collect either the walnuts or the fleurs
de châtaigner. I had followed Anne-Marie’s instructions in blind faith. It
transpired that they were both to serve a similar purpose. In the afternoons,
when it was too hot to work outside, Anne-Marie and Pierre both worked in the
cellar where it was beautifully cool. Pierre worked at making his cheese. It
was what he had always dreamed of doing, and now he was living his dream. Anne-Marie
had needed something to occupy herself with, something which didn’t take too
long to learn and which there was a gap in the market for. A friend introduced
her to the idea of making flavoured fortified wines, and she was hooked.
There were plenty of flavours that
she made over the year: quince, grapefruit, raspberry, blackcurrant, spiced
orange, and chestnut all featured, and, as it happened, so did fleurs de châtaigner and walnut. So that’s what I had been collecting for.
The wine cellar was small and the walls were lined with wooden shelves that
seemed to be creaking under the weight of hundreds of bottles, some empty, but
most filled with varying shades of liquid translucence. At the flick of a
switch they were backlit, transforming them into bottles of brightly shining jewels.
It was what was on the
floor though that intrigued me. There
were four or five big plastic barrels, bright blue with black lids, most of
which had lumps of wood balanced on top, each with a black plastic tap at the
base. More of these barrels were lying empty on their sides, awaiting attention.
There were lengths of plastic tubing that would have been at home in a fish
pond, and nearby stood what appeared to be a four-legged toilet cistern with
three metal pipes attached to it by a lever. Wine aside, it all looked a little
bit like a torture chamber.
The worst instrument of torture was
hidden underneath the sideboard. It was a three-legged contraption in the
heaviest of bright green cast irons. Protruding from the legs was a
poker-straight body which reached about a metre high, at the top of which was a
block, rather like a head. The head had a circular hole all the way through it,
which seemed to be lined with smaller cubes of unpainted iron. Attached at the
nape of the neck was a black lever pointing upwards like a unicorn’s horn, and
parallel to the body was a vertical spring, at the top of which – directly underneath
the hole in the head – was a round platform. Suffice to say that I couldn’t
work it out. On top of the sideboard were a very boring white kettle and a bag
of wine bottle corks.
My first job in the cellar involved
using that most dangerous looking of torture implements. A batch of wine was
ready to be corked. This wine was a special spiced wine – hipocrasse – based on a medieval recipe, not for sale but for use
at a medieval fair that was to take place the following month. It had been
stewing in one of the blue barrels for weeks. Together we lifted it onto the
work surface, as smoothly as we could to avoid disturbing the contents. Anne-Marie
attached the tap of the barrel to the toilet cistern by way of the fish pond
tubing with an expert swiftness, and, sitting on a milkmaid’s stool, turned the
tap. The cistern filled up with blood. No, not blood. Wine. I forgot it wasn’t
actually a torture chamber. An empty bottle was put onto each of the three
metal pipes, and she began to milk the pipes, pushing down on them. The ensanguined
elixir drained from the cistern into the bottles. Not taking her eyes from her
work, Anne-Marie would take the full bottles from the pipe and replace them
with empty ones, simultaneously placing them on the sideboard next to her.
I was on standby, waiting for this
moment, armed with a bowl of recently boiled water in which a stock of corks
was soaking. I was to take the full bottle, push down the spring of the torture
contraption and trap the bottle between the hole at the top and the round
platform at the base. Taking a cork and shaking it dry, I introduced it to the
hole. Pushing down firmly on the lever, the cubes of unpainted iron were pushed
together, compressing the cork whilst from above the lever pushed it down into
the neck of the bottle. I was clumsy at first, not being firm enough with the
lever, or else not trapping the bottle firmly enough on its platform, and I had
frequent moments of fear when the bottles seemed to slide from my grasp. But
miraculously not a drop was spilt, and eventually we found a rhythm, and soon a
hundred bottles of hipocrasse were
sitting on the sideboard.
Then came the sealing. That was
fun! The seals were paper-thin plastic cylinders of either gold or black,
closed at one end with a slightly thicker circle and open at the other, so that
they sat on top of the bottles’ necks like oversized candle-snuffers. I had to
boil the kettle, open the lid, and keep one finger on the topside of the seal,
holding it onto the bottleneck until the very last moment whilst dipping it
into the heat of the water. The plastic reacted to the temperature and shrank,
moulding itself to the neck. We worked in silence, both alone in our thoughts.
Mine were back in England, wondering how many places I had passed in my life,
unknowing, where behind the doors all kinds of unimaginable creativity were
taking place, talent and skill exercised for the sheer pleasure of it, and not
for admiration. Soon I had not just a
hundred bottles of hipocrasse, but I
had them all with impressively neat gold seals. I knew that the seals would be
broken and discarded as soon as the wine was drunk, but which were beautiful
nonetheless.
I had seen the end of the
production process. But I was still in the dark as to how the wine was actually
made. I didn’t have to wait long. The instruction came to rinse out two of the
empty barrels, and so I did. We were to be starting off the process of infusing
the fleurs de châtaigner wine for sale later in the season, as well as the
walnut wine. We used white wine for the chestnut flowers, and a more robust red
to complement the nuts. The wine wasn’t made on the farm, which I found a
little disappointing if not wholly surprising given the lack of cultivated
grapes; instead it was sourced and bought in bulk from a local organic wine
producer. This was then mixed with a much stronger organic clear spirit; I
never did work out what it was. The flavourings – whether flowers, nuts,
fruits, spices or anything else – were added next, and the lids were put on the
barrels. The additions were left to steep for weeks, and it was important that
they weren’t disturbed, otherwise the resulting aperitif wines would be cloudy
with sediment. That was why the random pieces of wood were on top of the
barrels: to serve as a reminder not to move them. And so all became clear.
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