One day, life as a finance consultant stopped making sense for Peter Hahn, so he took to organic winegrowing in the Loire instead<\/p>\n
One Friday night 24 years ago, Peter Hahn was sitting in the back of a cab to Heathrow, sleepless after yet another 48-hour work bender.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy computer\u2019s on my lap,\u201d the American-born organic winegrower from France recalls, the spring sun lighting up the deep pink walls of his study in his ancient manor house in the Loire Valley, his beloved vines outside, \u201cand I\u2019m doing a spreadsheet.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy boss is giving me shit because I hadn\u2019t stayed at work \u2013 I\u2019d promised my French girlfriend after I don\u2019t know how many promises that we\u2019d go away that weekend \u2013 then she calls and starts yelling at me because she knows I am going to miss the flight to Paris.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moments later, \u201csomething was inside of me and just going like this\u201d \u2013 he does a vice grip with his right hand \u2013 \u201ccrunch crunch crunch.\u201d Paralysed, unable to breathe, the 36-year-old corporate strategy consultant was having a panic attack. It was a moment of breaking, of the body saying to the mind, enough.<\/p>\n
Hahn carried on working as a finance consultant, his severe sense of impostor syndrome \u201cwhittling away at me\u201d and no idea why. After all, he was the son of a big-pharma business executive. \u201cI had this idea I was a business guy, that this was what my path was.\u201d<\/p>\n
His family had left their home in New Jersey when he was four. \u201cWe popped around all over the world \u2013 Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sydney\u201d, where he was sent to \u201cone of those all-boys boarding schools \u2013 the cane was not spared.\u201d At 22, he got a job as a trader on the Sydney Stock Exchange, back when there was still a trading pit, a lot of yelling and loads of money.<\/p>\n
By his mid-20s, he was fully formed in a self he did not feel at home in. \u201cI was one of these international business brats,\u201d he says. Ten years later, \u201ca bit of a nihilist, I got swept up in this world of bigger cars, bigger boats, private jets. I wasn\u2019t feeling any meaning. And I was getting scared because, at some point, it is pretty hard to pack up and do something else.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was also spooked by a sense of longing, he writes in his magical new book, Angels in the Cellar: Notes from a French Vineyard. A fan of Proust, with an avowed fondness for the 19th century, he recognised he was nostalgic, but this didn\u2019t feel poetic. It felt dangerous, he felt \u201cderacinated\u201d, uprooted, and didn\u2019t even know what he was longing for.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do you really love?\u201d he asked himself in an attempt to find out. \u201cIt\u2019s a great question, isn\u2019t it?\u201d he says to me, smiling now that he knows the answer. \u201cI thought, \u2018What would a life look like where you worked where you lived, where your work was your life, where you enjoyed it to the extent that it didn\u2019t seem like work, even though it may be difficult, and where you spent almost every day of your life outside?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
This all stemmed from his passion for wine, and Peter started taking wine classes in Paris, now his main work base, exploring wine cellars and working and walking in vineyard after vineyard. He realised that above all he loved being on the land, feeling the earth and the soil, tending the vines. And so, over two years, he went back to college part-time to study viticulture and enology (growing grapes and making wine). Here he met two younger organic farmers, Damian and Vincent, who taught him about the physiology of vines. Thanks to their mentoring and friendship, he decided to look for a smallholding to farm organically. The time had finally come for a new way of living.<\/p>\n
In 2002 he found a depleted four-hectare farm with a small Vouvray vineyard that no one wanted \u2013 only because the 400-year-old house came with it and needed \u201ctons of work\u201d.<\/p>\n
Since then, Peter, 60, has been making small-batch organic wine at Le Clos de la Meslerie, where he lives with his second wife, Juliette, and their 14-year-old daughter. His two older children by his first marriage are frequent visitors. Eschewing machine farming wherever possible, he and his fellow workers prune the vines and pick the Chenin grapes by hand. They are crushed on a 100-year-old hand press and naturally fermented, and his friend Philippe brings in work horses instead of tractors to till between the fragile 60 to 80-year-old vines.<\/p>\n
One day, Peter and Philippe were taking a break beneath a Judas tree in full, pink blossom. Peter ignored his beeping phone, before checking his messages. A friend from his \u201cprevious life\u201d had sent some photos from a business lunch at the Ritz: Peter\u2019s wine on the wine list (at over \u00a3100 a bottle), a liveried sommelier, ornate chandeliers.<\/p>\n
Peter admits to feeling momentary pride, perhaps even self-satisfaction \u2013 all fleeting. \u201cWhat struck me was that, at one point, I would have been extremely excited about all that but now, it really didn\u2019t make me particularly excited.<\/p>\n