Encore Provence

We stopped at the end of a long avenue of trees where the pickers were at work—men and women from the surrounding villages, doing what their great-great-grandparents had done before them. In those days, when travel was by mule or foot, the olive harvest used to be one of the few times in the year when inhabitants of isolated villages had a practical excuse to get together. This was a rare chance for young men to meet young women, and romantic attachments were often formed under the trees. A sackful of olives must have had the same allure as a bouquet of red roses. Love blossomed, and marriages were arranged. The first male child was often named Olivier.

In Provence, the olive has gone through some hard times, suffering from both man and nature: from freak frosts like the memorably brutal year of 1956, or from a long-lasting tendency among farmers to replace olive groves with more profitable vineyards. (Since 1929, the number of olive trees in Provence has declined from eight million to two million.) And then there’s general neglect. You see the victims on deserted, overgrown hillsides, their trunks strangled by ropes of wild ivy, entire trees almost hidden by brambles, apparently smothered to death. Amazingly, they survive. Cut away the ivy and the brambles, clean up the area around the base of the trunk, prune the tangle of branches, and in a year or so there will be olives. The intelligent camel, so it seems, is practically indestructible, capable of springing back to life again after going through an arboreal nightmare.

We followed her as she went slowly through the trees, head down, nose cocked, tail wagging. From time to time she would stop and scratch, surprisingly gently, at the earth, and she never failed. There was always a truffle just below the surface, to be eased out with a U-shaped pick while she nosed at her master’s pocket for her reward, a tiny piece of Gruyère.

, I found myself an ignoramus among experts.

n I asked him to explain a phrase that had puzzled me ever since I first saw it displayed on a bottle of oil from Lucca, in Italy. Extra vérgine.
I could never understand how anything could be extra virgin.

with a cellar containing wines of unimaginable elegance and expense: golden-white Burgundies, first-growth Bordeaux, late-nineteenth-century Yquem, vintage champagnes from the oldest vines.

have a friend who, like myself, is a refugee from the advertising business. Some years ago, he moved to the Luberon, where he now makes wine for a living. Instead of the big glossy car and matching chauffeur, he drives to work on a tractor. His problems are no longer with fractious clients but with the weather

The human body, so we are told by men of science (who spend most of their time sitting down), is a machine that thrives on use. When left idle, muscles atrophy, and other working parts of the system deteriorate more rapidly than they would if subjected to regular exercise. The urban solution is the jog and the gym. A more primitive alternative is the kind of manual labor that comes with country life, the rural aerobics necessary for existence.

Working with (or fighting against)

I am not by nature a shopper, and the idea of trailing around on the lookout for something I don’t need has no appeal for me—except when I’ve had a good lunch.