The corners of Neil’s mouth tugged upwards. ‘We never did get on, Armand and I. It’s not your fault.’

I flashed a quick look up at him. ‘I don’t see that I have anything to do with it.’

‘Don’t you?’ He slanted a kind smile down at me. I struggled for a response, but before I could collect my thoughts, the others ahead of us stopped walking, and I had to step smartly to avoid running over Paul. The vineyard tour was about to begin.

CHAPTER TWELVE

… past a hundred doors

To one deep chamber shut from sound,

Armand had led us to a spot halfway along the imposing wall, where the rows of stunted vines began their orderly climb to the crest of the hill. The noise of the passing traffic was muted here, a muffled humming on the far side of the wall, and nothing more. There was only the deep green hill, and the great sundrenched sky with its speckling of cotton wool clouds, and at our backs, the ever-watchful presence of Château Chinon. The modern world seemed but a distant dream.

‘Of course,’ Armand was saying to Simon, ‘you know that it was an American, like yourself, who nearly ruined the wine-making in France?’

‘We’re Canadians.’

‘But that is the same thing, surely?’

Paul stepped in once again to keep the peace, his calm voice riding smoothly over Simon’s ruffled feathers. ‘What did the American do?’

‘He ate our vines,’ Armand replied, then to our puzzled faces he explained how the tiny phylloxera beetle, nearly a century and a half ago, had crossed the wide Atlantic aboard the newly-invented steamship, and landed like a conqueror upon the shores of France. In the 1860s, Armand told us, that one microscopic pest, undetected, had ravaged vineyard after vineyard, bringing the noblest of estates near to ruin. The French wine industry had very nearly collapsed, until it was discovered that by grafting French vine stalks onto American roots – immune by nature to phylloxera – the devastator could be held at bay.

‘It is a truce only,’ Armand admitted, fingering a broad leaf. ‘We must still graft, and spray, and be on guard. The danger, it has not entirely disappeared.’

Paul peered closely at the base of one of the gnarled vines. ‘These have American roots, then?’ he asked. ‘All of them?’

Armand nodded. ‘Yes. In my father’s time, such grafting was done by hand, but now we have a machine to do the work.’

‘Wouldn’t it be simpler,’ I put in, ‘just to grow American vines?’

Armand grinned at that. ‘The native vines of North America, Mademoiselle, produce the wine like vinegar. Even the roots, they change somewhat the character of our grafted vines, but,’ he added, philosophically, ‘we must make sacrifices sometimes, to preserve a way of life. And what lies beneath the surface, no one sees.’

Still conscious of Neil standing close behind me, I took the opportunity to move away a few steps, venturing into the row of vines. ‘What kind of grapes are these?’

‘They are the Cabernet Franc,’ Armand said. ‘That is the grape of Chinon’s wines, the red wines.’

‘But there aren’t any grapes,’ Simon complained, as though he’d been somehow cheated.

‘No, we have already harvested, last week. I had a … how do you say it … a hunch that there would be rain, and at this time the rain can be most harmful to the grapes. The water rises through the roots, you understand, and swells the grapes, and so the wine it has no colour, no substance – it is spoiled.’

Simon, who had only come to see the cellar anyway, lost interest quickly after that. When Armand led us in between the vines, Simon wandered after us, hands in his pockets, his mind on other things.

The vines stood chest-high on the men and reached very nearly to my shoulders, their spreading branches trained around strong wires strung between short posts. Trained, I thought, was the operative word, for despite the twisting tangle there was pristine order here. The rows climbed the sloping hill like soldiers, each vine pruned with such precision that when I looked out across the field of fluttering green I might have been looking out across a level, square-clipped hedge.

Neil walked behind me, silently, and seemed content to listen while Armand explained the workings of the vineyard. Paul was the only one of us who truly paid attention. His intelligent questions pleased Armand, who took his time in answering them, his technical language punctuated by beautifully expressive gestures.

I had thought Armand Valcourt in his element when I’d seen him in his home last night, but here in the fragrant hush of the vineyard another aspect of his being came quietly to the surface, surprising me with its intensity. He spoke proudly of the superior qualities of the Clos des Cloches – the south-facing slopes that captured each ray of the summer sun, the limestone soil that kept those slopes well-drained, the age of the vines themselves … ‘The appellation contrôlée requires that a vine be four years old before wine can be made from it, but we wait until our vines have eight years.’

‘What is the appellation contrôlée?’ Paul wanted to know, and Neil’s voice drifted lazily over my head.

‘A kind of committee that sets the standards for the making of French wine.’

Armand accepted the definition, adding only that the rules were very strict. ‘We must not harvest before a certain date, nor after a certain date. We must grow a certain variety of grape, and then we may call our wines Chinon. If not, if we choose to break these rules, the penalties are hard. There are heavy fines, and they will come and uproot our vines.’ He shrugged. ‘It is truly the end of the world, I think.’