The Critic

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There is a smell among the vines. Of grape juice and leaves and trodden earth. And something else. A black smell edged by the yellow of the harvest moon, which spills its light across the neat, manicured rows that march side by side across this gentle slope.

A smell which has none of the sweetness of fruit at maturity. It is rotten, and carries the unmistakable stench of death.

The air is warm, soft on the skin, and full of the sound of grapes dropping into plastic buckets. A gentle plop, plop. A rustle of leaves, the snipping of secateurs. Beams of light from flashlights on helmets criss-cross in the dark, then pierce the sky as if searching for stars as heads lift for air.

Annie is young. Just sixteen. It is her first vendange. A night pick by hand to harvest the cool, white mauzac grape for the vin mousseux. She knows nothing of how it is made-a secret stolen centuries before by a monk called Dom Perignon, and made famous in another place on the far side of France. She is young, and ripe like the grapes. Ready for picking. And she knows that Christian is watching her, biding his time with growing impatience. He is in the next row. She can hear him breathing as he examines each bunch in the light, before paring away any mould and then dropping it in his bucket. They have made a tryst, to meet at the source of the stream that tumbles down the hillside to water the vines, clear and sparkling in the moonlight. A place in the woods where lovers have met for hundreds of years, in the shadow of a chateau that is no more, beneath the abandoned church that dominates the hilltop. Far below, the river Tarn forms a seam of gold traversing the night.

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