The month opens on the bright note of a brilliantly blue sky, and the Pyrenees arranged along our horizon in an orderly fashion, full of alpenglow and glistening snow. The air is crisp. It is unbelievably beautiful.
Monsieur L comes to the office for his pay. There is a big smile across his face. The pruning has finished! He is free to go back to his brother’s restaurant in Cannes. We will see him again next winter – he is our marker of the coming and going of the years.
J and Ch are also all smiles. The pruning has finished! they sing joyfully in unison. It’s quite incredible, never in 21 years have we finished so early. The vineyard is as neat and polished as a Dutch huisvrouw‘s front room. All the vines are pruned, their pruned wood has been swept to the middle of the rows and then cut and crunched and worked back into the soil. The cables supporting the vines have all been tightened. The whole place is even more shipshape than the QE2. And the sun shines on.
Friday 4 February
The Revue du Vin de France is organising the Blind-Tasting Championship of France, with 83 top tasters coming from France, Belgium and Luxembourg for a qualifying round in Limoux before the finals in Paris, and phoned to say they had selected one of our wines for the event. Can’t say which one – we’re keeping it under wraps because telling would be giving it away, wouldn’t it? Though we’re quietly wrestling with the question if they wanted this particular wine because it is so typical of Limoux … or is it being used as a red herring because it isn’t?
(One of the 83 participants, a French wine shop owner, came to visit us to taste our wines at the end of the day.
Did you spot our Blanquette?” Jan asked hopefully, the first wine they were given to taste. No he hadn’t.)
Then the organiser dropped us a line. Most had thought it was a Crémant. Many had thought it was Champagne. And a few plumped for Blanquette de Limoux.
But at the end of the day, we still don’t know if it had been chosen as a trap, or because it is such a good example of a Limoux wine …
Thursday 10 February
New figures released today say there are 59,000 vineyards in France, 11,000 less than in 2010. They say this represents a loss of 16%, which is quite a lot of a loss. But the number of vines has decreased only by 1.4%, while the average size of surviving vineyards has grown. So what does this say? Something, though I’m not too sure what – apart from the fact that it might be better to be in wine than in sheep and goats, which have gone down 47% …
Monday 14 February
I do get a kick out of this, even after 21 years. On the left, Tahnée Fournier, Canada’s first Méstis Wine Scholar, hauls a bottle of Odyssée out of the fridge. The trained eye immediately spots a bottle of Occitania there as well, chilling out with a Veuve Clicquot, and a second Occitania close up and confidential with a Chandon. The important thing is, this is in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Yes, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. 
Right after Tahnee’s email comes one from Curaçao. The Boase Luxury Resort, actually voted best luxury resort of the Caribbean last year, has taken our Chenin blanc, Dédicace.
Two distant spots in the world, part of the huge odyssey of a small vineyard in the South of France.
Friday 18 February
The neighbour’s 4×4 slowed down to a snail’s pace as he looked incredulously at our little chenin vineyard at the main entrance, earlier this week.
You could see the question marks rising from his vehicle.
And then he drove on.
We enjoyed the sight from the window of the tasting room. “Sébastien’s wondering what the hell’s going on”, Jan said.
Ch. and J. were meticulously taking the trellising off the vines, one by one, pole by pole, supporting wire by wire. They had started on the street side and were now halfway down the field.
The next day, Sébastien drove past, and couldn’t resist. “Are you grubbing this field?” he shouted across the vines, incredulously.
J. shook his head, and laughed his slow laugh.
Now all is clear to all. Wooden poles have been delivered, and all the vines are be
ing re-staked, one by one, vine by vine. It’s a massive job.
(Just such a shame that J’s thumb was hammered by the enthusiastic and unyielding pole-planting machine driven by Ch.)
We’re doing this for purely practical, prosaic reasons. Some of the vines were not standing quite soldierly straight, and that makes it difficult to de-weed them, either by man or by machine. (Of course, chemicals don’t come into play here) . An expensive exercise, but at least it’s provided huge entertainment for the village.
Thursday 24 February
“We now have a war in Europe of a scale and of a type we thought belonged to history” says the head of NATO. The “special operations” undertaken by Russia’s President Putin is “a brutal act of war”.
“Peace on our continent has been shattered” concludes Jens Stoltenberg.
And Vladimir Putin replies chillingly that “whoever wants to interfere with us should know that Russia’s response will be immediate, and lead to such consequences that have never been experienced in history”, as he launches his so-called ‘denazification’ of the Ukraine.
The UN’s General Secretary, Antonio Guterres put in the helpless, possibly hopeless, plea that “innocent people will pay the highest price”.
Everything else now takes the back seat. No more Diary this month, maybe not even next month … Suddenly ‘business as usual’ seems irrelevant, impertinent even.
…/to be continued