A cruel awakening
Montagu Curzon
A CHATEAU IN THE DORDOGNE: THE RYMAN FAMILY'S DREAM by Jeremy Josephs Smith Gryphon, £15.99, pp. 181 The château in question is the Château de la Jaubertie, a very pretty late-16th- century sandstone house a few miles south of Bergerac, notable for splendid carved panels on the front. All around is a 27- hectare vineyard producing good Bergerac wines, red, white, and rosé, and with lovely countryside beyond. An enticing prospect, one might reasonably think.
Mr Nick Ryman certainly did when, flush from a lucrative takeover of his family stationery business in 1973, he set out to realise his long-held ambition to own a French vineyard. Smitten by La Jaubertie at first sight and careless of the extortion- ate tactics adopted by the vendors, he upped and upped his offer until the prize was his. Whereupon he learned what a costly one it was and paid and paid until the vineyard was in good order and its equipment modernised and the house beautiful and the wine much better and by then he was practically broke, his wife had left, he had quarrelled with his children and he was casting gloomy looks on the Dordogne river from Bergerac bridge.
All this evokes a sigh of increasing depth the closer one is to the vineyard business. The best one can say is that it is a salutary corrective to sentimental English notions about life in rural France and a reminder of the hazardous lot of the neo- Plantagenet. It also gives a useful insight into the problem of earthly paradises: their notorious way of stimulating offended human nature into counter-balancing dis- plays of hell.
Otherwise the point of the book is not clear. The story of English people owning vineyards in France is scarcely new and has been well covered, for example in the his- tory of Château Latour. The story of the genial Englishman stitched up by the wily French has also been cruelly flogged. Mr Jeremy Josephs' approach owes a bit to Peter Mayle, his style a bit to Hello! maga- zine. Outsiders may be embarrassed to be exposed to no obvious purpose to an unknown family's dramas. Private printing and circulation to friends might have been better.
Having thus carped, one has to admire Mr Ryman, who is no longer the owner of La Jaubertie. He transformed the place and vastly improved its wines, to the great enjoyment of many. If Mr Josephs' claim is right, that he raised the viticultural stan- dards of the whole area, that is the final accolade of the imperialist and, as the net result of a windfall, a worthwhile achievement. Unsold copies should be given to lottery winners.
Previous page
