Mary Dowey meets a dynamic young couple living their dream on a vineyard in southern France.
The nights are long in Azerbaijan. With no television to watch, no cinema to go to, Charles and Ruth Simpson - he the regional manager of a major pharmaceuticals company, she a humanitarian aid worker - used to dream about their future as darkness settled over Baku on the Caspian Sea.
"We'd been married just six months," Charles says. "We decided we would like to set up a business together. We wanted to have children and the idea of living in the country appealed. First we thought about commercial forestry, then estate management, then wine." He shoots a one-wine-buff-to-another smile. "We were both enthusiastic wine drinkers."
That was just five years ago. Look at them now outside their fairytale Languedoc château, Domaine Sainte Rose, with two small daughters in their arms, two vintages behind them and the third well under way. The harvest began the evening after these photographs were taken, with Charles staying up until dawn to oversee the picking and crushing of his Chardonnay grapes in the cool night air. "No sooner was the last tank filled at 5 a.m. than the heavens opened," he tells me the next day with a mixture of exultation and relief. "The luck of the Irish. We got all the Chardonnay in safely without picking up a speck of rain."
Luck of the Irish, maybe: Simpson's mother is from Belfast, his father from Moneymore in Co Antrim, and although he has led a peripatetic life - going to school in England, spending four years of his childhood in New Zealand and a further 14 years in the US - he feels distinctly Irish.
Charles and Ruth were undoubtedly lucky to stumble upon the Domaine Sainte Rose, north-east of Béziers, one grey Sunday afternoon, after they had viewed more than 30 properties in a month-long search. "It took our hearts immediately," he says. A coup de foudre - much as you imagine their own love affair, which began at Henley Regatta.
But, hearing their story, you rapidly conclude that luck was vastly outweighed by resolve as a shaper of events. Even before their wine plans took root, these two were focused achievers. A graduate of international marketing at Michigan State University, Charles managed sales in Iowa, Missouri and Illinois for the pharmaceuticals giant Merck at the age of 25, before moving to Europe and Glaxo Wellcome. Ruth, a Scot with a degree in International Relations from St Andrews, had gone back to college to study paediatric nursing - a practical skill which she felt would make her more effective in humanitarian relief work - by the time she met her future husband.
So theirs was emphatically not the sort of wine dream that millions of people languidly foster in a small compartment of their mind marked "some day, maybe", like an unwritten novel. It was not so much a dream as an action plan. Soon, evenings in the apartment they occupied in a former KGB building in Azerbaijan were spent downloading global wine statistics - the raw material for a business plan. Wine regions were rated for their quality of life, security and reputation, with the New World heading the list.
"We felt that all the excitement was in the New World," Charles explains, "and we wanted to be part of something dynamic. The Old World seemed stodgy and we felt we might not be so welcome there."
In a 100-page document - circulated to friends and family but dismissed by many as the by-product of boredom in a remote Asian republic - they pinpointed Australia as the best country in which to start a wine business, with Margaret River in Western Australia the most promising location. New Zealand came next.
Ruth promptly signed up with the University of South Australia for an online course in wine marketing. Charles, meanwhile, was appointed international commercial director with his company in London. "It was a huge step away from what we wanted to do, but I decided to give it a go for six months."
Six months later, he handed in his notice. Ruth completed a six-month contract with the charities board of the National Lottery. "It was time to get on a plane," Charles recalls, "and try to validate all our airy-fairy assumptions about wine." They would take a year off, travel the world and find the right place to make wine. Sounds great, doesn't it? "Maybe, but my whole reward system was rooted in corporate culture," Simpson says. "I was a junkie addicted to a system of constant appraisal. Who was going to tell me I did a good job today? I felt naked when all that was stripped away. Eventually, I decided: what's the worst that can happen? You take a year off and discover that you don't want to do what you thought you wanted to do. Better that than be sitting in our rocking chairs, full of regrets."
So off they set on a global tour. Australia was ... well, interesting. "But Margaret River didn't live up to our expectations. It was so parochial. And Mount Barker, a more affordable possibility, was little more than a crossroads. Neither of us felt we could live there."
On to New Zealand, where both had lived happily before. "We fell in love with Marlborough, and even more with Central Otago, but it was around the time of September 11th, and we felt terribly far away." Back they came to London. "We read everything we could find about wine, every minute of the day - and the more we read, the more we were drawn to the Languedoc." They went there for a month. The rest is history, in a strikingly elegant form - a 16th-century wine estate with a 100-year-old château, complete with turret and garlands of grapes carved in stone.
Crunching across the gravel to the massive front door, I feel acutely envious. The whole place is an idyll, every bit of it, from the frilly iron balconies and the fountain, built for pilgrims on the route to Santiago de Compostela, down to baby Mhairi Rose, six weeks old and sleeping in a corner of the grand front office while her energetic mum sorts administration. Behind the château, there is parkland and a fine old orangery, not to mention healthy vineyards and a spotless winery.
All this, and wines singled out for medals in the recently announced Decanter World Wine Awards. Suddenly, the dream looks easy. Charles, who must have observed a procession of visitors gape jealously, is quick to re-introduce reality. He points out that this estate - 55 hectares, rather than the 30 they had based their careful plans on - was much more expensive than they could afford. Eventually, they hammered out a deal in which the owner retained a one-third stake for two years, with the Simpsons and a bank each financing another third.
But the winery, unused for years, was a sorry sight. With a three-week-old baby on their hands - their first daughter, Eilidh - and just two months to go until the 2002 vintage, this instant-action pair decided to steam ahead and build a new winery. The cost, €350,000, was spread over seven years. "Thank God for Crédit Agricole!" The new tanks and press were installed only days before the harvest began. "We were afraid it might all blow up when we plugged everything in."
They duly rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in - neither having worked in a winery before. Were they nervous? "I think we were nervous non-stop. I think we still are. But by that time we had built up so much momentum that there was no going back."
Still, there were times when the financial burden they had undertaken seemed terrifying. "A hailstorm could have wiped us out." One day that first summer, Charles admitted as much to a friend of his father who had come to the Languedoc for a wedding and dropped by for lunch. He was Ronnie Kells, former chief executive of Ulster Bank in Northern Ireland - a man with continuing involvement in various business interests North and South.
As it happened, Kells had already suggested to Dermot Egan, former deputy chief executive of AIB in Dublin and a fellow board member of United Drug, that it might be fascinating to invest in a vineyard, as they both enjoyed wine. "Various other people overheard this conversation and said they would also be interested," Kells told me. "But there was a large element of fantasy about it. We joked about it for a long time. It wasn't going anywhere until I happened to visit Charles and Ruth."
When Kells told the Simpsons he had a few friends who might like to be associated with a wine estate, they were cautious at first. "Would they expect to come for monthly board meetings, we wondered? Would we be used as a summer house for half of Ireland?" The proposal spelt out was much less daunting. Ronnie Kells and Dermot Egan would assemble a group of 12 wine and golf enthusiasts - six from the North and six from the South. They would invest "a modest amount" in Domaine Sainte Rose - providing a loan with interest payable in wine. And they would turn up once a year for a dinner at the château, followed by a day or two of golf nearby.
"We feel the project has gone exceptionally well," says Kells. "The wine is of much better quality than we ever expected. Charles and Ruth are a very well organised, energetic young couple. And it's great to have a North-South venture."
The Simpsons, needless to say, are delighted to have the support of "Les Amis de Domaine Sainte Rose", as they are known. "Or sometimes we just call them 'the 12 Apostles'."
Two years on, with the former owner paid off and the vineyard area cut back to 30 hectares, their new life seems less scary - although they recognise they are still on a wine-learning curve. Grape varieties such as Vermentino, Viognier and Muscat may soon be added to the mix with which they started: Chardonnay, Roussanne, Syrah, Grenache, Merlot and Carignan.
Although Charles was initially frustrated, he says, by his poor French, he is progressing. "Being an employer and having children has made the whole process of integration easier. I can't think of a single negative experience we've had since we arrived."
"Culturally, it has been really enriching," Ruth adds. "We're three hours from Barcelona, four hours from Paris and five hours from Italy." These days, they wake up happy to have found their niche "90 per cent of the time", fretting about risk, not least the fickle weather god, for the remaining 10 per cent.
What advice would they give those with wine-producing aspirations? "Passion and enthusiasm are enormously important," Charles points out, "but without good financial planning and marketing they won't necessarily lead to success. At the front end of the machine, wine is all about farming - nothing more glamorous than that. In the sales office, it's a highly competitive industry."
Sober, pragmatic words. But don't tell me that hedonism doesn't creep into the corner of the picture. Think of it this way: 120,000 bottles of your own wine, already selling in eight countries. Room for a massive swimming pool in the back garden. And, oh yes, sunshine 300 days a year.
Six wines from Domaine Sainte Rose are available from Co Down-based wine merchant James Nicholson. Orders may be placed with payment in sterling or euro and delivery is free throughout Ireland. www.jnwine.com. Re-tasting all the wines, I still give my first vote to La Garrigue Vin de Pays d'Oc 2002 - the rich, juicy blend of Syrah, Grenache and Carignan which was a Bottle of the Week in June (€11.95). This was recently served to Prince Charles at a dinner at Hillsborough Castle. www.sainte-rose.com