How an American businessman misplaced his job and located himself in an outdated French winery

One Friday night time 24 years in the past, Peter Hahn was sitting at the back of a cab to Heathrow, sleepless after one more 48-hour work bender.

“My pc’s on my lap,” the American-born natural winegrower from France recollects, the spring solar lighting up the deep pink partitions of his examine in his historical manor home within the Loire Valley, his beloved vines outdoors, “and I’m doing a spreadsheet.

“My boss is giving me shit as a result of I hadn’t stayed at work – I’d promised my French girlfriend after I don’t know what number of guarantees that we’d go away that weekend – then she calls and begins yelling at me as a result of she is aware of I’m going to overlook the flight to Paris.”

Moments later, “one thing was within me and simply going like this” – he does a vice grip together with his proper hand – “crunch crunch crunch.” Paralysed, unable to breathe, the 36-year-old company technique marketing consultant was having a panic assault. It was a second of breaking, of the physique saying to the thoughts, sufficient.

Hahn carried on working as a finance marketing consultant, his extreme sense of impostor syndrome “whittling away at me” and no concept why. In spite of everything, he was the son of a big-pharma enterprise govt. “I had this concept I used to be a enterprise man, that this was what my path was.”

His household had left their house in New Jersey when he was 4. “We popped round everywhere in the world – Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sydney”, the place he was despatched to “a kind of all-boys boarding faculties – the cane was not spared.” At 22, he received a job as a dealer on the Sydney Inventory Change, again when there was nonetheless a buying and selling pit, a whole lot of yelling and a great deal of cash.

By his mid-20s, he was totally fashioned in a self he didn’t really feel at house in. “I used to be one in every of these worldwide enterprise brats,” he says. Ten years later, “a little bit of a nihilist, I received swept up on this world of larger automobiles, larger boats, personal jets. I wasn’t feeling any which means. And I used to be getting scared as a result of, in some unspecified time in the future, it’s fairly laborious to pack up and do one thing else.”

He was additionally spooked by a way of longing, he writes in his magical new guide, Angels within the Cellar: Notes from a French Winery. A fan of Proust, with an avowed fondness for the Nineteenth century, he recognised he was nostalgic, however this didn’t really feel poetic. It felt harmful, he felt “deracinated”, uprooted, and didn’t even know what he was eager for.

“What do you actually love?” he requested himself in an try to search out out. “It’s an important query, isn’t it?” he says to me, smiling now that he is aware of the reply. “I believed, ‘What would a life appear to be the place you labored the place you lived, the place your work was your life, the place you loved it to the extent that it didn’t appear to be work, although it could be troublesome, and the place you spent nearly day by day of your life outdoors?’”

This all stemmed from his ardour for wine, and began taking wine courses in Paris, now his principal work base, exploring wine cellars and dealing and strolling in winery after winery. He realised that above all he beloved being on the land, feeling the earth and the soil, tending the vines. And so, over two years, he went again to varsity part-time to review viticulture and enology (rising grapes and making wine). Right here he met two youthful natural farmers, Damian and Vincent, who taught him concerning the physiology of vines. Because of their mentoring and friendship, he determined to search for a smallholding to farm organically. The time had lastly come for a brand new way of life.

In 2002 he discovered a depleted four-hectare farm with a small Vouvray winery that nobody needed – solely as a result of the 400-year-old home got here with it and wanted “tons of labor”.

Since then, Peter, 60, has been making small-batch natural wine at Le Clos de la Meslerie, the place he lives together with his second spouse, Juliette, and their 14-year-old daughter. His two older kids by his first marriage are frequent guests. Eschewing machine farming wherever attainable, he and his fellow employees prune the vines and decide the Chenin grapes by hand. They’re crushed on a 100-year-old hand press and naturally fermented, and his pal Philippe brings in work horses as a substitute of tractors to until between the delicate 60 to 80-year-old vines.

Sooner or later, Peter and Philippe had been taking a break beneath a Judas tree in full, pink blossom. Peter ignored his beeping cellphone, earlier than checking his messages. A pal from his “earlier life” had despatched some images from a enterprise lunch on the Ritz: Peter’s wine on the wine record (at over £100 a bottle), a liveried sommelier, ornate chandeliers.

Peter admits to feeling momentary satisfaction, even perhaps self-satisfaction – all fleeting. “What struck me was that, at one level, I’d have been extraordinarily enthusiastic about all that however now, it actually didn’t make me significantly excited.

“I wasn’t dwelling my life as I did in finance and in lots of company worlds the place you’re attending to the following degree and also you’re making an attempt to get accolades out of your bosses and shoppers. That had slipped away. It was a pleasant second however I realised, God, I actually don’t care. That was a kind of revelation.”

He does care concerning the socio-economic side of the wine business although. “Farmers get the brief finish of the stick,” he says. “The value that bottle was promoting for on the Ritz or at any three-star Michelin restaurant wherever on this planet might be 10 occasions the worth I bought it for. There’s additionally a sure bitterness to seeing that,” he laughs.

When Peter handed Philippe his cellphone, he merely shook his head, smiled and mentioned: “Let’s simply do the work.”

The physicality of that work has seen off Peter’s anxiousness and aligned him with the land he’s regenerating. “I now not really feel like nature is separate from me, which is such a Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century growth of humanity.” Via his largely non-mechanised farming and viticulture, he has gone again in time, intentionally so.

“I positively don’t need to sound like some type of bizarre New Age guru, however Homo sapiens have been traipsing round this world for 300,000 years, proper? So for about 298,000 of these years we had been dwelling on the land and from the land. We had been hunter-gatherers and farmers. When you’re in your personal jet or doing offers or working at Burger King,” he continues, “we lose sight of all that.”

For him, coming to know the lay of his land, its topography, and the ecosystem inside it, has enabled him to be in time – to study from the previous, stay meaningfully within the current and form the long run for others.

“The deer that I noticed grazing within the winery this morning. The praying mantids that I discovered on the submit. The bugs round me when I’m kneeling within the vines, pruning, the birds – all of it appears like a Disney film. However I’m a part of this; I’m not outdoors it.”

The climate might be brutal however Peter leans into every season. “I don’t thoughts if it’s raining or hailing or freezing. that when nature throws a thunderbolt at you – hail injury, say, or frost injury – it’s not the identical as when your consumer or your boss is bearing down on you, making you’re feeling there’s something incorrect with you; it’s nature doing that to you. It’s not on function, it’s not private.”

However his relationship with every classic he produces is private, deeply so. He loves them as a lot – neither extra nor much less – than he loves his personal kids. “Lots of people don’t imagine me after I say that, however it’s true! I don’t have favourites – kids or vintages – and I’d do something for all of them.”

It’s uncommon to be within the firm of somebody who’s totally comfy, somebody joyful, somebody who may die glad – and some years in the past he very practically did.

He was out on the tractor, spraying the vines in opposition to fungal illness utilizing minimal ranges of copper and sulphur (lower than one-third of the quantity permitted for natural viticulture). It was a steep plot, the 400kg-sprayer shifting the centre of gravity.

“I turned too shortly, felt the wheels dropping traction,” Peter recollects. “I may really feel the tractor going over. I used to be taking place. How lengthy do these items final? A second, half a second? The tractor flipped on its facet and went over as soon as.”

He information his a number of ideas within the guide: “I’m going to die. I need to be with my spouse and youngsters. Who will end spraying?… Not less than I’ll die in my vines.

“I used to be remarkably calm,” he displays now. “That actually stunned me. The one rationalization I can consider is, it was as a result of I felt like my life was full in some way. I felt, I’m doing what I need to do, I don’t need to change something, that is my life. If I die now, it’s not as if I’m lacking out on one thing else I need to do.”

Angels within the Cellar: Notes from a French Winery by Peter Hahn is revealed by Little Toller Books at £20. Purchase a duplicate from guardianbookshop.com at £18