We (the Swansea Dunstones) first met the Andrés in the late 1970s when we chanced on their restaurant 'Au Bon Pasteur' in a back street of Carcassonne. Rémy was poised and charming front of house, making it all look calm, while Giselle toiled in the oppressive heat of the tiny kitchen. My little sister and his little son started playing together, we got chatting and kept in touch. I spent a few weeks with them in the 1980s, then more or less lost contact until after they had retired from the restaurant business.
With their new found freedom they started to think about travelling, and came to see us in Wales in 2005. We all had a wonderful, if exhausting, time. It left me thinking how stupid I'd been to stay out of touch for so long, as much through embarrassment at my rusty French as anything else. A few months later, Giselle had a horrible accident (you are happier for not knowing the details) and died.
Rémy won't mind me saying that in many ways he's a caricature Frenchman of the old sort. He's spent his working life cooking and serving food, has very strong opinions about how it should be done, and normally considers the traditional French way to be best. Usually, faced with the resulting meal, it's hard to disagree with him. After retiring from the restaurant he slipped further into the stereotype, cultivating a luxuriant moustache and taking over a few parcels of vines to keep himself busy.
His English is good, honed during two years of working for Cunard, but rusty with lack of use. We both had good French 'O' levels but the decades have eaten away at our skills leaving us with one and a half tenses each and a strange patchy vocabulary all mixed up with Welsh and Spanish. Given that, conversation is surprisingly easy. Rémy remembers enough English to help out, knows how to simplify his French for us, and anyway likes to talk in gestures and comic-strip sound bubbles as much as in ordinary words, so we get along 'pas mal'.
He has a bottomless fund of tales from a busy life; childhood in cool green Brittany, national service on a fisheries protection vessel in the North Atlantic, two years being the perfect French waiter for Cunard, time in restaurants in Paris, before Giselle and he took the plunge and opened their own place in Carcassonne. During his decades in the south the sun and the wine and the olives have marinaded him until he's become a native, embedded in the culture and traditions of the Midi*.
We stayed with him for two days in early December, did a circuit of the Hérault region and returned for another quick visit (partly to pick up some parcels he was keeping for us). We had intended to spend just a Friday night with him, but he had a special treat arranged for the Sunday morning (12 December) so we were persuaded to hang on.
On Sunday morning in the big blue van we followed Rémy out of Cazouls into the sunny vineyards. We arrived next to a little farm building (a 'Grangette') a little after 10am, to find some of the others had already started. .
The event was an annual working party that's developed into a tradition. We were faced with a vineyard of old, gnarled vines, with no steel wires, growing unsupported like small trees, but with this year's growth of vines sprawling across the stems and across the ground like brambles. The job today was to cut the trailing shoots short and pile them into bundles for burning. Someone would have to work their way through later doing the detail of the pruning, but at least they would not have to do it in a tangled thicket of vines.
The team of people worked their way down half a dozen rows, then collected the bundles for the fire and returned to start another set of rows. The atmosphere was more like a party than real work (although it was tough on the hands and elbows after a few hours). There was lots of chat and laughing, tiny children on pink plastic tractors getting in the way, and dogs romping and digging amongst the vines.
Everyone here seemed to have a clean-shoed day job, but country roots. In this area, it seems the wine industry is kept alive by the weekend labour of office workers yearning for some fresh air, wood smoke and to take care of grand-dad's vines.
The work was all done by one o'clock. We returned to the fire where a couple of metres of sausage had been cooked on a grill, potatoes had been baked in the embers of the vine trimmings and mountains of bread, pate, wine, home cured olives, saussison were laid out on a picnic blanket. More chat and laughs, sitting around a heap of good food in the sunshine. We visitors probably understood around half of the chat, but got most of the joie de vivre.
But we had miles to go and Spain to see, so at about 3pm we said our farewells and headed off south.
* However, an odd fact – Rémy was the only person present to refer to the potatoes as 'pommes de terre' rather than 'patatas'. Everyone there was proudly French, but the influence of Spain, Catalonia and Languedoc is strong in this area.
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