My Life in Languedoc, a Memoir in Chapters #8 - A memoir in Chapters

The Vin en Vacances Team – this is the story of how ‘one became four’ as my vineyard tour business flourished.

The 2014 season had been my sixth and in each of those years I’d seen a big leap in the number of tour bookings. Most bookings were day trips for people enjoying a Mediterranean holiday and a lot of them were staying in the medieval city of Carcassonne or close by. For many it wasn’t until they got here that they realised not only were they in a beautiful vineyard region but one they knew little about.

Most customers were enthusiastic wine drinkers rather than deeply knowledgeable wine geeks. All they wanted was a great day out with an entertaining guide with plenty of local knowledge and interesting anecdotes to tell. They were interested in wine and wanted to know more about it, but they didn’t want a snobby wine buff talking to them in wine-language they didn’t understand. Neither did they want to take themselves off to wineries. Firstly, it’s no fun if you want to taste but have to drive, secondly they wouldn’t know where to find welcoming wineries and thirdly many feared they wouldn’t cope with the French-Language.

My formular was precisely what people were looking for which was great for my business but exhausting for me as to begin with I was just a one-man band. The previous year I’d hit the wall when I ran thirty tours in a row. It was exhausting and although I made sure every one of those tours was excellent, I knew I couldn’t keep up that pace, I needed to find help.

Enter Kate…

Kate had three main things going for her: She was English and spoke French fluently, she held wine qualifications and she’d lived in Languedoc a long time so knew it well. She became my right-hand woman and over the years we worked together she ran hundreds of excellent tours, bringing her unique humour and top notch wine knowledge to each of them.

Next came Marcel…

I met him at a lunch arranged by a mutual winemaker friend who introduced him as someone who planned to start a wine tour business in Languedoc..! It could have been a conversation stopper until she introduced me as the person who runs the best wine tours in the region. We threw our hats into the ring, joined forces and he bought his sommelier professionalism to the team. His tours were top class in both wine knowledge and humour. Later his wife joined the team creating delicious and unique alfresco lunches.

Then along came Carlos…

He’d worked at Château Ollieux-Romanis (You can read about that winery here) for a couple of seasons and as that château was on our Corbières & Lagrasse tour he knew first-hand how our tours operated. At the end of one of the visits he took me to one side and asked if he could join my team, saying he had learnt more about wine from me than he had working at the winery. Due to the wonderful way he took care of my clients, ran his tours with fun and laughter mingled with a deep knowledge of the local history he became a superb asset to the business.

And so ‘one had become four’ but that was no good without enough vehicles so over the next couple of years I also increased the number of tour vans to four and as I now called the team The Fab Four, it seemed fitting to name the vehicles John, George, Paul and Ringo..!

Over the fifteen years I ran my business a few other people joined the team, mainly during the tourist season including Alphonse and Gregg who will always be fondly remembered for their excellent guiding skills as well as their handsome good looks.

Then there was Natalie, an English student studying French. I’d met her a year earlier when she joined one of my wine courses and gained the intermediate level WSET. The following year as part of her university course she needed to find work experience to put into practise the French Language she was studying so of course I snapped her up. She transformed my working day by magnificently tackling all the jobs needing French fluency and joining me on research trips around Languedoc wineries. These days I’m like a proud auntie because since graduating Natalie has gone on to become a regional editor for Decanter writing articles about Languedoc and other French wine regions.

Finally there was Leanne, wife of a Languedoc vigneron who took on the important job of scheduling winery visits and booking restaurants and generally helping me with everything from Instagram to editing the website.

I couldn’t have done it without all these wonderful people to whom I raise my glass (filled with a fine Languedoc wine of course) and thank them from the bottom of my heart.

Footnote. Vin en Vacances is still going strong and is now owned by the redoubtable Carlos, my dear and much loved friend.