History

14 posts

Le Temps des Cerises

We are now in Le Temps des Cerises.   “Cherry Time” conjures up everything about these rare, perfect days in May and June that stop your heart with their kaleidoscope of colours and perfumes.    It’s the time of the longest days of the year, when the evening church bells echo above the river and we’re bathed in the irridescent light of “golden hour.”     This particular June, it’s as if we’ve been cast back fifteen years.   Before the evidence of climate change, before incessant heat-breaking records.  And due to abundant winter rains, it’s once again a year of […]

Times of Uncertainty

My grandfather’s grandfather was a serf in Poland in the early 1800’s.   I suppose he wasn’t an ordinary serf, if that isn’t an oxymoron, because he was a manager.   But an economic slave nonetheless, owned in most ways, owning nothing. I was reminded of this ancestor when I found Julien pruning in the vineyard last week. Pruning and ruminating:  “I look up and see an ocean of vine plants pleading for care, costs rising, climate change, Bordeaux wines in crisis and the world at war.” There was no easy repartee to this dark version of reality.   So […]

Julien’s Wish (A Vigneron’s Year in Pictures)

Julien’s wish for this, his first year as Vineyard Manager:   “A Harvest.” People thought he was joking.   Nothing grander than that? … or was he clairvoyant? It was a year of frost and hailstorms that ruined the work of many.   It was a summer of unprecedented heat and drought.  Tomatoes got sunburned and cooked on the vine.  Fruit shrivelled on the trees.   Far-off fires filled our air with smoke.   The usually rambunctious dog panted in the shade.   Even the forest seemed to have trouble breathing.  Conditions which sent us scrambling in mid August, with local workers still away on […]

Ten Years On – An Epilogue

I love epilogues.    The story ends  but the fates of the characters haven’t been revealed.  Then a bit like cheating, you flick the page and know the future. “Grapes and Old Stones.”       Ten Years On. It’s Autumn again.    Hot summer mornings replaced by cold, misty dawns.   Harvest pressing upon us.    The incessant thrum of machines echoing across the valley. This harvest marks ten years under our belt.   In November Julien will officially join us as vineyard manager.   A new story will begin.  As befits endings, I went back to the beginning:  15 August 2011  “Be careful what […]

Neighbours

Question for today: What do mushroom filaments (mycelium) have in common with prosperity? Examining our grapes at harvest time, yes we think about mycelium and soil health.  But end of September also brings the end of al fresco, safely-distanced gatherings with friends.  So I am thinking about mycelium and neighbours.  When we moved to this hilltop vineyard we left behind extended family and close friends in far off cities.    By some happy twist of fate our children came to join us.  But actually, we hardly knew anyone.  On our first Christmas Eve I remembered the words of a local wood […]

The Next Generation

Each September, the same struggles:  make Time stop, bottle the end of summer light.   This year I’m holding back the flow just long enough to chronicle a new undercurrent. Baby in the house.      It has been a summer of babies.   And youth who were once babies – we knew them fondly – passing under this roof, through the Taverne, in the vines…  adding their stories of life journeys to my memory bank.   They return to this place altered by their trajectories, and I try to map their seedling selves to the adults before me.    […]

La Tourbeille in London – 2017

In the envelope:  plane tickets to London, passes for the Gatwick Express, Oyster cards for the Underground and keys to a beautiful apartment in Pimlico.   When one of our dear nephews said, “Come to London and tell your story,” we never expected such a very red carpet.   I remember this particular nephew at age seven, dividing his time between reclusive hours reading “The Philosopher’s Stone” long before Harry became a household word, and running with the raucous herd of franco-british-american cousins stampeding through an indulgent Grandmére’s house.    He is now an apparition in suit and tie, carrying […]

Parallel Lives

Crisscrossing the land on this hilltop are several roads to nowhere.  They are the vestiges of old rural lanes that once connected farms and hamlets to villages.  A few of these paths still lead from one place to another, but most of them were chopped up a century ago and have fallen into abandon. My favorite path has an intersection at our front gate.  Like the scarecrow’s choice, from this point you can meander south along the ridge, east down to the stream, or north to the river.  Or rather, one could a hundred years ago.  You wouldn’t know you’re […]

Summer Solstice

Millions of years ago the Dordogne carved a series of caves into the rock cliff under our house.  The village historian told me they were the site of Druidic rituals, later appropriated by the Romans for their own gods. Since it’s the Summer Solstice, I took myself down to the caves this morning looking for the wisp of a Druid or two. The spot is somewhat difficult to access, and hidden most of the year by the shadows of thickets and tress.   But in late June at sunrise, the caves present several niches of warm and inviting nooks.   […]

The 17th of May in 1763

It’s one of those perfect Tourbeille days.  Sunlight and sky so crisp you want to sing.  Air fragrant with Acacia blossoms.  Fields rising high with clover and prairie flowers. On the most sublime day of the year, John waltzes off to an overgrown pasture with his scythe and I chain myself to my desk. The United States government has requested a translation of the “wallpaper” on our wine label. By scythe and by pen, we jump back in time. I open my copy of a page from the Old Parchment Journal to find the scribbles in antique French that make […]

June – Linden Blossom Tea

Every June we’re brought to our senses by the ubiquitous perfume of the Linden Trees.  A hot Sunday afternoon, time out from chores, we sit under their massive boughs and synch into the hum of hundreds of bees. Someone is dozing in the hammock there, dreaming of Linden Flower honey. Under the soporific spell Henri toys with a flower and asks his Tata Claire if she knows how to make Linden Tea.  Nap time ends abruptly. First, John saws off several low branches that beg for pruning.  We perch inside a fragrant heap of leaves and flowers teeming with insects […]

The Parchment Journal

“Vers la fin de l année 1761, le Regiment de mont marin dans lequel je servais en qualité de Capitaine, était en garrison a Bordeaux…; il recut ordre de se tenir prêt pour s embarquer sur les vaisseaux du Roy a Rochefort pour etre transporté a l Amerique.” Of all the people who used to come to tea at La Tourbeille, Madame V. was my favorite.  Sparkling and direct, she prefers cheer to gloom and had the best stories about life in this region during the Time Before the War.  I shunned all other conversation to glue myself to her […]

Paris Refugees

We were in the Bibliothèque, my mother in law and I, cleaning the chandelier.  A  delicate task L. trusted to no one since it involved taking apart scores of pieces of crystal, cleaning each jewel with cotton batting and alcohol, then putting the puzzle back together again while balancing at the top of a ladder. From the ceiling I had an eagle’s view of the mahogany cabinets, laden with meticulous stacks of antique green file boxes.  L. was very proud of her library; it had become the central repository for family archives as her peers left the earth and left […]

A Place for Dreaming

Over the years we’ve lived so many stories on this land my journal entries could fill an 18th century armoire.  In truth, La Tourbeille is such an out of world/out of time place, she should really be the subject of sonnets.  Even the postman goes poet when he steps on the land.  He brings extra junk mail as an excuse when he can’t fill the box with bills; he lingers and chats and reminds me every day that we live in a “magical” place.  For sure, this is a place that makes people dream.  Maybe that’s why I’m trying to write […]