The French Garden Blog

ANOTHER DAY…..ANOTHER VINEYARD

My hobby is garden writing and photography, but my day job is in a French estate agency where I am responsible for business development. In plain English that means I try to sell property and to develop our business into new areas. My big focus at the moment is vineyards and I have just spent a fascinating day visiting three. Two of them were ‘take-ons’ – i.e. I was visiting them in order to encourage the owners to allow us to market them for us (mission accomplished here) and the third was a lovely vineyard we already are marketing – I was visiting this with a potential buyer.

They were three very different animals. The first was organic, as was the last. It had a lovely old house which had been beautifully renovated; a five star gite; vineyard management in place and a super wine. The second was a stunning building which is a state of tragic dis-repair with much loved vines and plum trees. The wine is mostly sold ‘en vrac’ i.e. to customers who come along with their own containers - and goodness knows what happens to the plums. The trees in the orchards looked old, but there was some very good equipment for harvesting and drying the fruit. If someone with some money gets hold of the chateau before it falls down and shook up the vineyard marketing a bit it could be fantastic. At the moment it is not. The third vineyard was absolutely spanking modern. Contemporary house, in excellent condition, newly built chai (winery), very smart marketing and hugely interesting owner who conducted the visit in English (and she does most of the work there herself). I hope my client buys it – but if not I have asked if I can go along and work there occasionally, so that I can develop a fuller understanding of the wine making business.

Last week and the week before that I visited four Premier Cru chateaux in St Emilion. I love St Emilion. These were all entirely social visits and involved eating and drinking and mixing with friends. The lack of presumption on the part of the owners of significant St Emilion chateaux never ceases to amaze me. At one, the owner’s great grandfather (who lived and worked at the same chateau she still lives and works at) is the man who was in his day the leading specialist in grafting French vines onto American rootstocks. His work was an invaluable step in overcoming  a problem caused by the Phylloxera aphid . This immigrant from North America attacks the roots of European vines and almost devastated the French wine trade in the 1800s. American vine rootstocks had developed a resistance to the aphid’s  effects and so by grafting French vines onto American rootstocks the French wine industry was able to survive. Without his work we may not have the vineyards in France which we have today.

The chateau owner is constructing a new building at the vineyard which will be used in part for marketing. I suggested devoting a corner of it to her great grandfather’s contribution to French wines; the thought had never occurred to her. But now maybe she will. I hope so.