Low life
Wine and dine
Jeffrey Bernard
Montpelier I9 m just back in my excellent hotel room — a lovely view, a wonderful bathroom and a refrigerator bursting with goodies — from having toured Languedoc and have had lunch in a sea-food restaurant by the quayside in Sete. The langoustes were superb. The sun shone hot enough to eat outside and the shade made by exotic vegetation prolonged the effective life of the ice bucket by an age. The hors d'oeuvres, the cheese and the ice cream were excellent as well and at 2.30 p.m. the hitherto shy and retiring yin blanc sec crept up behind me and hit me over the head with a hammer.
Yes, I'm here helping to script and pre- sent a film for Canadian television about the wine war. A poor man's Alan Whicker you might say, and you may imagine my surprise when the producer telephoned me in the Coach and Horses last week to offer me the job. 'Why me?' I asked. 'Your col- umn makes me think you might be in- terested in wine,' he said. Well, there are worse ways to make a living than standing in front of a camera in the South of France making a fool of yourself for five days, so here I am.
Firstly, I dropped off in Marseilles for 24 hours believing as I do that sea ports are the most exciting cities in the world and contain the cream of Low Life. I give you Barcelona, New York, Hamburg, Istanbul etc. But I was disappointed this time and minded fractionally less about being ripped off for a bouillabaisse than I did about being surrounded by some nasty-looking Algerians. They seemed filthy and dangerous to me. Unfortunately too late I discovered an amazing bar populated by the best packaged, presented and most sensational-looking prostitutes. Time, money and pastis however were not on my side. And, incidentally, if a feminist from the Gray's Inn Road told any of those ladies that they were being degraded then the high-heeled beauties would spit in their faces. Never have I seen such heart- warming lipsticked smiles of job satisfac- tion. Had I fluent French I could settle down in a bar like that passing the time of day with them and the fat, rather jaded old lady who always presides behind the cash till and who's seen it all.
Then to Montpelier via SNCF who make BR look a little sick. It's a very pleasant, quietish old town this, and my interpreter tells me you can actually rent a one-room studio avec kitchen and bathroom for £60 per month. All very lovely isn't it? But stop and think about just how you spend five days inspecting, tasting, rubbing shoulders with and interviewing one million gallons of wine and then actually remember enough of it to write about it. And another thing. I've discovered that the nasty, uneasy feeling I get that mars these occasional buckshee trips abroad is because I'm there with me if you see what I mean. Nevertheless I shall try to put up with myself for a little longer. Meanwhile I shall now descend to the sweet-smelling garden beneath my room and sit by the fountain and sip until dinner. It's been a very hard day.
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