The French House by Helen Fripp (ebook reader with highlight function TXT) 📕

for sixty bottles. As she made the holes with a bradawl, the wood released its scent of sap and sawdust.

Josette knocked on the door and Nicole tutted. She had given strict instructions – no one was allowed in the kitchen cellar.

‘What is it?’

‘Monsieur Bohne is here, Madame. I thought perhaps you might make an exception.’

Of course, for Louis.

‘Send him in.’

Louis bowed. ‘I am honoured to be admitted to your top-secret activities.’

‘You should be.’

‘What are you doing? Josette says you’ve been down here for days.’

Nicole held up the lamp to illuminate the old kitchen table with four neat rows of champagne bottles upturned, a total of sixty bottles. In her frenzy to make her invention real, she had scattered wood shavings everywhere and the tabletop was pocked with failed attempts, but the diagonal holes were exactly as she wanted them. The old table had taken a battering, but it worked. All the years of trying to make it work for François, trying to solve the problem that had eluded vintners down the ages. Just a few adjustments and efficiencies and voilà! All she’d really had to do was believe that she could do it.

‘You’re moving from viticulture to woodwork?’ Louis asked, perplexed.

‘It solves everything!’

‘I know that look. You have a big scheme that will embarrass your father, give the village endless gossip and me more reason to worry about you than ever. What are you planning with that battered old thing?’

‘It doesn’t matter how it looks, Louis! It’s the answer to all our problems!’

‘We both have a lot more problems than a butchered kitchen table can solve,’ said Louis softly.

‘I mean the sediment problem! Times are hard, and it takes months for a skilled cellarman to reach your standards of clarity when it comes to champagne. How many times have you told me not to send you cloudy bottles?’

Louis counted on his fingers, and ran out of them very quickly. ‘A lot more than I can show you this way,’ he laughed.

‘I’ve solved it, Louis! No more laying out in sand and hoping for the best with inexact positions and waiting for the sediment to travel to the cork instead of sticking to the bottom and sides. No more transferring from one bottle to another and losing all the fizz, and some of the precious wine, never mind taking up the time of my best cellarmen. And no more “clarifiers” from spurious sources.’

She took a bottle out, very gingerly so as not to disturb her work and held it up to the lantern.

‘Look. The sediment is near the cork, ready to slip out without disturbing my bubbles.’

Nicole removed the staple, placed her thumb over the cork and felt the pressure, searched for the air bubble separating the sediment and wine. Just right, ready to go. A deft flick of the cap and the sediment shot out, leaving the champagne intact. She quickly replaced the cork and showed the champagne to Louis.

‘Look! Clear as a diamond, and nothing lost. It takes less time for the sediment to travel to the cork, and reduces the labour time, too. The processing time for everything is halved!’

‘Bloody genius!’ Louis took the bottle and held it up to the light again. ‘Clear as a sunbeam. My God, the weeks of labour for each bottle it’ll save…’ He inspected it upside down, then upright again.

‘It’s really simple. A few efficiencies and improvements to an age-old technique and I’ll save thousands of labour hours. Look.’

Nicole dragged over the sandbox she’d hidden over six years ago, the day François had died, and demonstrated. She bent over, picked up two bottles, stood up to shake them a little, then knelt back down to place them in the sand. Then, at her riddling table, she showed Louis the same process with her new invention. Standing at her table with all the bottles in front of her at waist height, she shook and turned a whole row of fifteen in the time it had just taken her to do the same with the two in the sandbox. Then, her pièce de resistance. She held up the neck of the bottle to Louis, ready to burst with excitement.

‘Four chalk marks?’ He was unimpressed.

‘Yes! It’s obvious! When I put the bottles back in the sand, it’s never accurate and the sediment has to move again if I get the angle even half a centimetre wrong, which delays the process even further. With my riddling table, all the cellar workers need to do is to line the chalk mark back up and voilà. With this, I can turn thirty-five thousand bottles in a day, with practice. Each turn and the sediment travels a little further towards the cork. It’s ridiculously simple, like all the best ideas, but it works. It’s really just an exercise in time and motion, like I’ve seen in Papa’s woollen mills.’

‘Fifteen thousand bottles a day for mere mortals, and thirty-five thousand for you no doubt! Nevertheless, the advantage over all our competitors, thousands of flawless bottles turned in a fraction of the time, with half the labour. You’ve done it, Babouchette… all the sacrifices and gambles!’

She bowed and he applauded.

‘Even with this, how will you manage to keep going? It will still be a long time before you can get the money in. The markets are still dead, even with thousands of bottles of flawless champagne laid down.’

‘I don’t know, but I’m doing this for us, Louis. For your family, for mine, for all the workers who belong here. I’m also doing it for me. I want to be first, the best.’

‘You always have been.’

‘I want to be the best in the world’s eyes. Not just Reims, not even just France. This is our secret, Louis. Antoine knows about it too. We will pay the workers to keep quiet and only a select few will be allowed to work the champagne cellars. No one else must know about it. I’ll lay down my comet champagne on my new racks and wait.