How Laithwaites happened. Part one

It was Grandmother who started it all. The one ours sons called 'Big Nana'. When staying with us in Windsor one day this formidable retired Lancastrian shopkeeper 'rescued' a lost French tourist (who wasn't lost at all). That one action set the whole, long chain of events in motion that leads us to Laithwaites Wine today because the lady came from Bordeaux.

Over a reviving tea, Leina – the tourist – heard about this grandson who fancied going to France when he left school. To meet Brigitte Bardot and Inspecteur Maigret.

Result; there I was, 1965, a week out of school, bundled into André and Leina's white Panhard at a sweltering Bordeaux station and taken to their flat in Talence, given a dish of strawberries in chilled claret sprinkled with sugar. They were very kind and also rather inspiring.

André had a business making a new type of scaffolding he'd invented. Leina had just started to make and sell woven wood fence panels like she'd seen in England. We don't think of France as so very entrepreneurial these days. But back then, with 'Le General' on the throne, it was. Maybe something clicked for me; she was having such fun. Could business actually be fun? New idea.

They tried to get me a job in Bordeaux, but finally had to settle for an unpaid job on an archaeological dig in a village called Sainte Colombe.

I can still vividly recall my first view of Ste Colombe ... possibly because we live slap in the middle of that view next to the church and Le Presbytere. Actually we don't live in France. I just visit all the time. I consider I've never really left Sainte Colombe. I can't leave Ste Colombe.

The pretty young archaeologists left after the weekend alas, and I sat in the hot dust alone, scrabbling away at a Roman villa. The dig uncovered two stone, cement faced square basins; 1600 year old wine vats! No-one else knows about these because the following year the site was sold and the new owner bulldozed everything to plant vines! But clearly Ste Colombe was very long ago seen as a good place to make wine.

Not being able to fend for myself, I was directed up the hill the oldest house in the village to lodge with Monsieur and Madame Cassin.

They saw me lumbering and lost, through their vines and said to themselves ‘C’est bien un Anglais, ça’! Recently returned to France, they had suffered thirty years of British colonial rule out in Nigeria. So they put me up in the barn, showed me the cold water tap in the yard, and the earth privy!

But this, for me, was heaven. This was really living. This was all Laurie Lee ‘walking out’ in real Europe. I raved over everything Madame cooked and gawped when Monsieur told me he ran a huge wine cellar in the next village. Gissa job then? He phoned the Cellarmaster and I was taken on as a ‘Stagiaire’… (cheap labour). Goodbye archaeology.

Employment rules were simpler then, and Brits were a rarity in France. Don’t try this now.

I doubt there was anyone in all Bordeaux better than Jean Cassin to teach me wine. Born there but sent abroad to work at 15 he had the fresh take on the wine trade that only foreigners have. (The fame of Bordeaux was all built by foreigners). A very original thinker. As a very successful trader in Africa he taught me as much business sense as I was capable of understanding. (Not a lot, but it came in useful later).

In Ste Colombe, summer of 1965 it seemed the Middle Ages were only just coming to an end. The Cassins had a car but no-one else did. Or anything much that might be called modern.

Apart the Cassins, all wore clogs. Men; berets and 'bleue's'. Women; floral aprons or black. All kept pigs, chickens, ducks and geese. Horses or oxen to plough. Cooked on open fires often in rooms with earth floors. Grew virtually everything they ate ... and drank. Each tiny patch of land, every apple tree, every walnut tree every acacia copse, every bit of woodland that might produce game or cêpes or posts for the vineyard, was owned, watched over, guarded and cared for. Every bit of precious earth was tended so as to produce its best ... best of whatever it was suited for and to go on producing it for sons, daughters, grandchildren.

They hadn't heard the term 'eco-friendly', but they really understood what their precious, life-giving land needed.

I fell for that life of vineyards and cellars governed by the seasons and the cycles of the moon. And also the long brown legs of the girl who rattled her milk-pail past my window every evening. Living? I was in a novel, a historical novel, and I never wanted to leave.

I made hay (really!); all pitchforks and rakes, the old ladies telling me some undreamt of facts of life! The boys and girls took me to the summer 'Bals'; every village had at least one. Orchestre, dancing, feasting, boules and bike races.

'Stagiere' - work involved cleaning tanks, sweeping floors, filling bottles, stacking bottles, labelling, packing, despatching. Working in vineyards was mostly spraying copper sulphate and turning blue. Nothing skilled but at least I was in the wine trade!