Oysters, spiders, sulphur and regrets
It was 1981. I was working on a vineyard in France.
When the weather improved with the arrival of spring, we started to eat our lunches on the terrace of the old farmhouse. There was a lawn separating the house from the vineyards and in the centre of the lawn stood an ancient and very large oak tree.
On Sunday we did no work at all on the vines and it was a day in which we had a longer lie than usual. Through the week we rose at 5am to weed and hoe around the roots of the vines while the earth was still moist from the night’s dew.
This Sunday, a friend of Peter’s arrived from Bordeaux. He arrived with boxes of oysters fresh from the port. The journey was not long and the ice in which the oysters say had not yet melted.
I had never had oysters. Peter — who owned the vineyard along with his wife Fox — brought up several bottles of white wine made from the farm’s grapes. Most of the vineyard was used for red wine making but a small patch to the south of the farm was given over to white grapes. It was from here that the white wine had come the previous year.
The farm tried to be organic as far as possible but because the majority of vineyards surrounding us in this area near St. Émilion used chemicals quite freely at the time, the spiders that are such a blight to the nascent grapes flocked — or scuttled — to our fields.
The only — cheap — response was to spray the vines as they grew with sulphur. This was a weekly job that was hot — because of the protective suits we wore — and generally unpleasant. It also added a distinctive flavour to the white wine and made it even drier as a result.
It was a perfect accompaniment to the oysters, it turned out.
The guest from Bordeaux taught me and the handful of young farm workers to open the oysters with a sharp knife and how to eat them. Normally fussy and unwilling to try new things, a few of glasses of the white wine removed all inhibitions. And then I went into greedy mode and probably ate more than my fair share, although the wooden boxes seemed to hold hundreds of the ugly ridged shells.
I have liked oysters ever since. And for a long time, I loved dry white wine from anywhere around Bordeaux.
I was fit and healthy and living a wonderful life then. But I wanted more and I left too soon and regretted it for many years but was too proud to return.
Sometimes, it’s not just about the things we fail to do but also about the things we stop doing because we don’t appreciate it enough at the time.
