‘Probably best to do the interview before lunch,’ says a spokesman for Gérard Depardieu, France’s best-known export and highest-paid actor. This made sense. The last time I was due to meet Depardieu, at the UK launch of his cookbook two years ago, he failed to make it to the lavish party thrown in his honour, after drinking too much of his own fine wine and falling asleep upstairs.
I’m expecting a partial recluse with Cyrano de Bergerac’s anti-social nature, a Jean de Florette-style curmudgeon with Obelix’s endearing clumsiness. But Depardieu is none of those things. Grumpy and deliberately obtuse, with a disappointing tendency to default to whimsical thespianisms on any subject but wine, he nevertheless betrays glimpses of the infectious bon vivant I hoped he would turn out to be.
Wine, he warns me with a barely perceptible widening of his pupils as we begin to discuss his passion, is not a joking matter. And there is something in the way this egg-shaped 59-year-old talks about it that makes you trust his opinion. ‘I know nothing about wine,’ he begins, batting away my questions with a large, gnarled hand before I ask them. Of course he does: Depardieu has been tending his own vineyards since the 1980s, first in the Loire, Bordeaux and the Languedoc, and now all over the world, in Spain, Algeria and even the US. Celebrity winemakers are springing up everywhere in his wake: Francis Ford Coppola owns vineyards in the Napa Valley, while Cliff Richard has his own in Portugal.
‘As a child the first few times I tasted wine was at country fêtes,’ he growls. ‘Really nasty, warm rosés which got me very drunk very quickly. Before understanding the elixir that it was, I used it to get drunk.
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