Europe Journal 1999
Southern France
Wednesday, October 19
I slept very well last night, but woke up still feeling a little off.
We went next door to the restaurant to a place called the Cognac Café for breakfast – we saw their special, which offered a breakfast of juice, coffee, and bread for 12FF. This was perfect, though I didn’t want coffee on my iffy stomach. Eric drank my coffee for me, and I had most of his juice, and the bread was nice fresh baguette with butter.
Then I went to get my haircut at the Jacques Dessange salon in the center of town. This is the same chain of salons where my friend Lynn worked in Chicago until they closed that location, and so I knew it was a good salon. I had been wondering how I would describe how I wanted my hair cut, but it turned out to be easy. My hairdresser had roughly the cut I wanted, so I told him I wanted my hair like his (but shorter). He turned out to have a slight speech impediment, and so I could hardly understand his French. Anyway, it was a good cut, and he was a perfectionist, always going back to fix things. He put some very thick goop in my hair (actually a mixture of two brands of goop) which has left my hair feeling stiff and uncomfortable.
Meanwhile, Eric went to a store called the Cognathèque, which sold all manner of cognacs. He bought seven little tiny bottles of cognac.
Then we left town to drive through the countryside of Grand Champagne (the finest region of cognac) looking for a small producer of cognac, which we found completely randomly in the Mercier family. There were some small signs put up by the government which led us to the place, which was a big old building built around a courtyard (more of a driveway). On the outside of the place were some signs the family had put up, but otherwise there was nothing there to indicate that it was a place to buy cognac.
We drove in and were about to give up and drive out when a man of about forty appeared in the doorway. We said we were looking for Mercier (also the name of the cognac), and he said it was there, and invited us in. He left us with his father, and a woman I assume was his mother, in what seemed to be their sitting room. We sat at a dining room-type table, and she brought out the cognacs and pineaus for us to try, while he chatted with us. The whole conversation was exclusively in French, and I did quite well once I got going.
There were two cognacs: an XO (ten years old) and a thirty-year. We tried and bought the thirty-year, which was spectacular. There were four pineaus, and we tried them all. Pineau is a mixture of cognac with grape juice (they call it grape juice, but I think it might be partially fermented, almost wine). It’s an aperitif, and it’s somewhat sweet and very complex. It comes in red and white, and for each there was a young and old version. The young is in fact five years old, which is apparently much older than the pineau the big companies put on the market (which are only 18 months old). These pineaus were much better than those we tried yesterday at Camus in town (Camus is one of the big cognac makers we toured yesterday). We bought three pineaus, one of each except the young red.
We sat and discussed how much things cost in the US, and taxes, and that sort of thing. Every time we buy something, the seller seems to have to fill out a special form, detailing how we plan to take the wine back to our country.
Mr. Mercier had mentioned the harvest, which was happening then, and I had said that we would like to see than; but instead he offered to show us his chais (a sort of above-ground cellar), which was a lot more interesting. It was not only the chais that we saw – it was the whole production facility, which was housed in the part of the complex which made up the back, facing the courtyard. The left side of the courtyard was taken by more chais, and the right side was the house itself – as all were connected.
We watched as he and his son loaded the harvested grapes into a huge cement hopper in the floor. They came with something like a dump truck, and warned us to step way back. They didn’t so much open the back of the truck bay as they let it open, and at least a hundred gallons of green grapes and the juice which had already come out of them splashed out of the truck and into the hopper in a giant grape tidal wave. We were standing only just far enough back to avoid getting grape on our shoes. Then Mr. Mercier, junior, turned on the motor which turned the corkscrew-shaped device which pulled the grapes out of the hopper and into the juice extractor.
Then Mr. Mercier showed us the cisterns where the wine ferments before it can be made into cognac. After that we saw the still, a big red copper device just like the ones we’d seen at Camus and Hennessy, but less camera-ready. This was the real thing – the cognac we’d bought had been made in that still (or another just like it) thirty years ago. Then he showed us the chais, which were not so carefully lit and lined up as those at Camus and Hennessy, and even more covered with the black fungus which grows about all the cognac chais, fed by the slowly evaporating alcohol. He showed us the fungus, which he called champignons (mushrooms), and explained that when you see a tiled roof which has turned black, there is cognac aging inside. The alcohol which evaporates and feeds the fungus is poetically called the “angel’s share” (everyone told us that – the French like their poetry).
He disappeared to the house to get a glass, with which we gave us a taste of the new red pineau, made just fifteen days earlier. I thought is wasn’t too bad, but he assured me that it was. “You can still taste the cognac,” he said, which was true – the flavors hadn’t blended yet. It certainly wasn’t the tasty aperitif which we’d just bought three bottles of.
He asked us what we did, and we told him. He asked if we wanted to sell cognac in the US (jokingly), and we said no, but I added that my father had friends who might be interested. We went back into the house to get some information sheets to take back to the US. We were back in the sitting room, where a very old woman was now sitting on the couch. We got the information and continued to chat more (I began to wonder if we would ever leave – though I was having a lot of fun). Mr. Mercier asked if our grandfathers had been in the war, and had come to France – “perhaps you have a brother out here,” he joked. He didn’t seem as interested in my response about how we didn’t know, but “you never know”.
Eventually we extracted ourselves and said goodbye and thank you.
We ate lunch in the car: sandwiches we’d bought in the morning, mine a ham and cheese with egg, mayo, and lettuce, Eric’s a camembert cheese with lettuce. They were nice.
On our way along we stopped again in Angoulême to use the Internet café at the Musée des Bandes Desinées, for which we had to pay admission to the museum again. I sent off a few letters, and began looking into web pages about Asturian Spanish. I found some, but didn’t have time to look a them.
We continued to a town called Rochefoucauld, to see château Rochefoucauld, which is still owned and inhabited by the Rochefoucauld family. It’s a fairly big castle on a hill (on a rock, in fact, hence the “roche” part of the name), which was built and rebuilt at various times. It is medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth century, in various parts. In 1960 there was a sort of sinkhole underneath, and one of the towers partially tumbled, leaving two great stone sections at its foot. They have only just finished shoring up the foundation, and a great many other repairs are needed. This must be why it’s open to tours every day for half the year, and once a week or by appointment the rest.
At first we understood that the tour would be self-guided, but then we were instructed to proceed directly to the library. In the library a group of French people were listening to an aristocratic and learnèd woman explain in great detail the history of the castle (in French). I understood about half, including her stressing the point that in order to understand the castle, one must know why each element was built where is was. A sixteenth century section (which later burned down) was built to accommodate the king and his entourage visiting for three days. The towers were built in medieval times to indicate that the castle owners were friends of the king, who would come to their defense if attacked. And so forth, with many other facts. It seemed that our tour guide was one of the Rochefoucaulds…
The tour continued through a few rooms, and then ended. Since we had not seen everything, we went back to look. We went to the chapel, where the face of the a boy heir who had died at 6 in 1909 had replaced the face of baby Jesus in the stained glass window. We continued through sitting rooms, and then downstairs to the kitchen and guard room. First we went into the guard room, which through which one reached the dining room (medieval in style), through which again one could go down into the depths of the château to see the rock on which the whole place was built.
There, sitting in the dining room and conferring with a woman (a personal secretary? a private saleswoman?) was our guide, whom I will call the Duchess, because it seems that that is exactly what she is. In fact I don’t know if she is the current holder of the title, but I know that her son is the 43rd generation of the Rochefoucauld family. Also, the information sheet we’d been given at the door mentioned, among the famous Rochefoucaulds, the current duchess, an essayist and editor; our guide had the academic demeanor that made me think she could be that duchess.
The Duchess was addressing us in French, curious why we had not already left. I began to explain in sloppy French that we had come into the tour part way, at which point she switched to English and asked if we were English. “American,” we answered. Her English was the sort of perfect British accented English you would expect from a continental Duchess. She did not speak exactly like a British person, but rather with that particular British accent that very well educated Europeans have whether they are French, Italian, what have you.
She explained what she was doing. “We need to buy 150 chairs for the dining room.” There, sitting alone at a large red velvet-covered table, was a single red bent-wood-style café chair. It looked a bit out of place in the room, especially compared to the grand wooden upholstered chairs along the wall, which the Duchess was sitting in. “What do you think of that chair?”
I was surprised that she had asked our opinions, since she didn’t know either of us from Adam. “It’s unassuming,” I said, which I thought was diplomatic. I couldn’t say it was a shame to put such dinky café chairs in such a grand medieval hall as that. She said that that was what they were looking for – unassuming. So mine was the right answer. Eric said he thought they would be nice, because he too couldn’t manage a disparaging remark.
Aristocrats do not talk to common people the way we talk to each other, so I was a little surprised when she commanded, “Sit in that chair and tell me if it’s comfortable.” No polite “would you” or “do you mind” for her – just a direct command, “sit”. Eric went to the little chair in the middle of that big room and sat down. It was pretty comfortable, he reported, though it could use a cushion. She told us they would have cushions, as well as slipcovers. She dismissed us by saying “Go look at the rock.”
But as we were leaving the room to look at the rock, she stopped us again, asking if we had understood the tour. Half, I answered, and she asked which half it was so that she would know what she had to go over with me now. I said that that was quite alright, but did manage to ask some questions about things I hadn’t understood. She answered, and then again said “Well, go look at the rock.”
We went and looked at the rock, which was rather neat, especially knowing that the castle had been built on it. Then we went below that to underground grottoes in the rock, and then back up, through the dining room, and finally to the kitchen, and back out the courtyard. Again we saw the Duchess, who asked if we had seen the rock, and we chatted briefly. And then we left. The Duchess was the most entertainingly eccentric person we’ve met so far. Perhaps she was not eccentric for a duchess, but then I suppose just being a duchess itself in this day and age is eccentric.
We then attempted to visit the “Martyr Village”, Oradour sûr Glane. The townspeople were all killed, every last one, by the SS in World War II in retaliation for resistance. The town ruins have been kept as a memorial and reminder of the horrors of war. It’s a morbid place, but it seemed like the kind of educational experience we are here to see. However, we spent too much time talking with cognac makers and duchesses, and it was close to closing when we arrived. (I had not expected there to be a closing time for a village, but there is. It is walled off and you enter through a tunnel which is exactly like a museum foyer, complete with ticket kiosk.) We did see it from the outside, and it just looks like ruins from the road. We may or may not go back tomorrow.
Tonight we are staying at a hotel we found on the road in a tiny town called Etagnac. The hotel is new and cheap and comfortable, and appears to have been decorated by Ikea. The rooms even have that same primary-color blue and yellow color scheme you are assaulted with when walking into the Ikea store. Anyway, it’s funny, and it does look pretty good.