Virgile's Vineyard by Patrick Moon

me,’ he adds. ‘What else are neighbours for?’
    Before I have time to ponder this nicety of etiquette, a furious female voice thunders from the other side of the stream.
    â€˜MANU! Come back here! I want to know how I’m supposed to put my shopping in the deep freeze when you’ve filled it up with fish!’
    *
    â€˜You didn’t tell me you were off to Saint Chinian,’ said Krystina, as soon as I answered the telephone. ‘Escorted by your neighbour, I gather.’
    â€˜Well, you see, it’s more of a wine day,’ I faltered, as I realized that I must have mentioned the excursion to Babette who must have felt it her duty to give the event some wider publicity.
    â€˜I’m not your keeper, of course,’ she bristled. ‘But I can’t send you off in a state of historical ignorance. I’ll pop up at once.’
    â€˜I was just locking up,’ I explained, as Manu’s horn reminded me that we were already late.
    â€˜Then we’d better do the crammer’s course right now,’ she decided, as I performed an elaborate mime in the doorway entitled ‘person reluctantly taking telephone call’, in the hope that Manu would go easy on the horn. ‘You remember our friends Saint Guilhem and Saint Benedict of Aniane?’ (Loud horn blast.) ‘Well, the Languedoc in those days was a very small world. They had this other friend called – confusingly enough – Saint Anian.’ (Louder, more insistent horn blast.) ‘And it was Anian who left Aniane and founded Saint Chinian in 782. Hence the name.’
    â€˜You’re losing me.’
    â€˜Saint was pronounced “Santch” in those days,’ she explained, in the special, exaggerated tones perfected long ago for her slow learners. ‘Santch Anian … Saint Chinian.’ (Even louder, syncopated rhythmic horn blast.)
    â€˜Krystina, I’ve really got to go …’
    I had no time to feel guilty. I was too busy feeling car-sick, as Manu did everything within the little red van’s power to make up for lost time. The village of Saint Chinian lies only about fifty kilometres to the south-west but it is separated by winding river valleys and tortuous mountain passes that double that distance. And for much of the cliff-edge mountainous stretch, the hairpin bends were made hairier still by a programme of roadworks which had recklessly removed every last metre of safety wall before starting to renew even the most vital parts of it. Not that such trifles inhibited Manu from using both hands to point out distant beauty spots at the bottom of precipitous drops; or from accelerating down the middle of the only straight descent to make sure that none of the high-performance vehicles trapped behind us could overtake. Indeed, as we arrived in Saint Chinian, I was half wondering whether Krystina’s driving might have been more soothing.
    Manu has already briefed me on Saint Chinian’s key facts as he sees them: ‘Twenty villages … Separate
appellation
since ’82 … Mostly red, bit of
rosé
… What more did I want to know?’ He is therefore straining at the leash to sniff out a grower or two before lunch, but I somehow feel that I owe it to Krystina to track down the abbey first. There is nothing obvious on the skyline, so we ask at the elegant seventeenth-century Mairie, where every member of staff pulls the blankest of faces until one of their number remembers Mme Guibert.
    â€˜You’re standing in it,’ says this small, serious-looking lady, having sped to our rescue on her bicycle. ‘What’s left of it anyway. It used to be the abbot’s lodgings, before the Revolution. Just as our Salle des Fêtes was part of the church’s gothic nave. There was also a second, smaller abbey on the other side of the river but they flattened all that was left of that to build the rugby stadium in about 1900. No, there’s