Starting his own French vineyard on the documentary series Chateau Monty may have made Monty Waldin a household name, but it’s not the first time France has taught him life’s lessons
“I count myself lucky that from my early teens whenever I crossed the English Channel it was invariably to live abroad for extended periods, rather merely for quick holidays. The reason for this was a sometimes complicated, claustrophobic home life and years spent cooped up at boarding school.
For greedy, anaemic, sex-starved boys such as I, "abroad" meant sun and girls and sexy Mediterranean food. But it also meant a more profound freedom, the freedom to express myself. In my case, that freedom came through wine; it was the first thing I appeared to be remotely good at.
Not making wine of course, or not then, anyway - my early teenage efforts at home winemaking using sugar and supermarket oranges were vomit-inducingly bad. It was tasting wine I seemed to be good at. I have a wine taster's nose, in other words a big one, and with it a pretty acute sense of smell.
So when my French teacher ordered me to France to improve my broken, and she thought unfixable, French, my sixth sense told me to try to find a summer job working on a vineyard. I ended up in Bordeaux, the world's biggest, and many would say best, red wine region.
Friends told me before I left that I'd catch all sorts of illnesses merely from drinking French tap water. I soon realised, however, whilst travelling to Bordeaux by train, that sticking to national stereotypes was a dead-end for those in search of cross-cultural success. The French, in fact, were far more advanced than we gave them credit for.
French trains ran on time and smoothly enough for book reading to be possible without going cross-eyed. On British trains pork pies were so fatty you could bounce them on the floor, but French buffet cars had an astounding collection of exotically-filled sandwiches. Plus cold beers in bottles rather than warm beer in dented tin cans.
Read the full article in our November 2008 edition.
The book "Chateau Monty" is published by Portico and is available from all good bookstores priced £16.99. Alternatively go to www.anovabooks.com
