One Friday night 24 years ago, Peter Khan sat in the back of a taxi heading to Heathrow, sleepless after another 48-hour work binge.
“My computer is on my lap,” recalls the American-born organic winegrower from France, the spring sun illuminating the deep pink walls of his office in an old Loire Valley mansion and his beloved grapevines outside, “and I’m making a spreadsheet.
“My boss is berating me because I didn’t stay at work – I promised my French girlfriend after I don’t know how many promises that we would go away this weekend – and then she calls and starts screaming at me because she knows I’ll miss my flight to Paris.”
After a few moments, “there was something inside me and it was happening like this” – he makes a vice with his right hand – “crunch-crunch-crunch”. Paralyzed and unable to breathe, a 36-year-old corporate strategy consultant suffered a panic attack. This was the turning point when the body told the mind: “Enough.”
Khan continued to work as a financial advisor, his strong sense of impostor syndrome was “nullifying” me, and he had no idea why. After all, he was the son of an executive at a major pharmaceutical company. “I had the idea that I was a businessman, that this was my path.”
His family left their home in New Jersey when he was four years old. “We went all over the world – Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sydney,” where he was sent to “one of those boarding schools for boys – they didn’t spare the cane.” At 22, he got a job as a trader on the Sydney Stock Exchange, when there was still a trading pit, a lot of shouting and a lot of money.
By the age of 20, he had fully formed himself, in which he did not feel at home. “I was one of those international business guys,” he says. Ten years later, “a bit of a nihilist, I was thrown into this world of big cars, big boats, private jets. I didn’t feel any sense of purpose. And I got scared because at some point it’s quite difficult to pack up and do something else.”
He was also frightened by the feeling of melancholy, he writes in his new magical book: Angels in the Cellar: Notes from a French Vineyard. An admirer of Proust who openly loved the 19th century, he admitted to feeling nostalgic, but it didn’t seem poetic. It was dangerous, he felt “decapitated”, cut off from his roots and did not even know what he craved.
“What do you really love?” – he asked himself, trying to find out. “That’s a great question, isn’t it?” – he tells me, smiling now that he knows the answer. “I thought, ‘What would life be like where you worked, where you lived, where your work was your life, where you enjoyed it to the point where it didn’t feel like work, even though it might be hard, and where you spent almost every day of your life on the street?’
It all came about because of his passion for wine, and Peter began taking winemaking lessons in Paris, which is now his main base of work, exploring wine cellars, working and walking through vineyard after vineyard. He realized that what he liked most was being on the ground, feeling the earth and soil, caring for the vines. So, after two years, he returned to college part-time to study viticulture and enology (growing grapes and making wine). Here he met two young organic farmers, Damian and Vincent, who taught him about the physiology of the grapevine. Through their mentorship and friendship, he decided to find a small homestead for organic farming. The time has finally come for a new way of life.
In 2002, he found a devastated four-hectare farm with a small Vouvray vineyard that no one wanted, only because it came with a 400-year-old house and required “tons of work.”
Since then, Peter, 60, has been producing organic wine in small batches at Le Clos de la Meslerie, where he lives with his second wife Juliette and their 14-year-old daughter. His two eldest children from his first marriage are frequent guests. Avoiding machine farming wherever possible, he and his colleagues prune the vines and harvest the Chenin grapes by hand. They are crushed in a 100-year-old hand press and fermented naturally, and his friend Philip brings in work horses instead of tractors to process the fragile 60 to 80 year old vines.
One day Peter and Philip were relaxing under a Judas tree blooming with pink flowers. Peter ignored the beeping sound of his phone before checking his messages. A friend from his “old life” sent over some photos from a business lunch at the Ritz: Peter’s wine on the wine list (worth over £100 a bottle), the sommelier in livery, the ornate chandeliers.
Peter admits that he felt a momentary sense of pride, perhaps even self-satisfaction—all fleeting. “What struck me was that at some point I would have been very excited about all of this, but right now I wasn’t particularly excited about it.
“I’ve lived my life differently than I have in finance and a lot of the corporate world, where you’re moving to the next level and trying to get accolades from your bosses and clients. It slipped away. It was a nice moment, but I realized, God, I really don’t care. It was kind of a revelation.”
However, he is concerned about the socio-economic aspect of the wine industry. “Farmers get the short end of the stick,” he says. “The price this bottle sold for at the Ritz or any Michelin three-star restaurant anywhere in the world was probably 10 times what I sold it for. There’s a certain bitterness to that too,” he laughs.
When Peter handed Phillip his phone, he simply shook his head, smiled and said, “Let’s just get the job done.”
The physical nature of this work dispelled Peter’s anxiety and brought him closer to the land he was reviving. “I no longer feel that nature is separate from me, which is the development of humanity in the 19th and 20th centuries.” With its predominantly non-mechanized agriculture and viticulture, it has deliberately returned to the past.
“I definitely don’t want to sound like some weird New Age guru, but Homo sapiens have been roaming this world for 300,000 years, right? So for about 298,000 of those years we lived on and off the land. We were hunter-gatherers and farmers. When you fly on a private jet, make deals, or work at Burger King, he continues, we lose sight of all of this.
In his view, knowing the landscape of his land, its topography, and the ecosystem within it allowed him to be on time—learning from the past, living meaningfully in the present, and shaping the future for others.
“The deer I saw grazing in the vineyard this morning. The praying mantises I found on a post. The insects around me as I kneel among the vines, pruning them, the birds – it all sounds like a Disney movie. But I’m part of it; I’m not outside of it.”
The weather can be harsh, but Peter leans into every season. “I don’t mind if it rains, hails, or freezes. You know that when nature throws lightning at you—say, hail or frost—it’s not the same as when your client or your boss comes at you, making you feel like there’s something wrong with you; it’s nature doing it to you. It’s not on purpose, it’s not personal.”
But his relationship with each harvest he produces is deeply personal. He loves them just as much – no more, no less – as he loves his own children. “A lot of people don’t believe me when I say this, but it’s true! I don’t have favorites – kids or vintages – and I would do anything for all of them.”
It’s unusual to be in the company of someone who is completely calm, someone joyful, someone who could die happy – and a few years ago he almost did.
He worked on a tractor and sprayed the vines against fungal diseases, using minimal amounts of copper and sulfur (less than one-third the amount allowed for organic viticulture). It was a steep section, the 400 kg sprayer shifted the center of gravity.
“I turned too fast and felt the wheels losing traction,” recalls Peter. “I felt the tractor turn over. I was falling. How long did that last? A second, half a second? The tractor turned over on its side and rolled over once.”
He writes down his many thoughts in a book: “I will die. I want to be with my wife and children. Who will finish the spraying?… At least I will die on my vines.”
“I was surprisingly calm,” he reflects now. “It really surprised me. The only explanation I can come up with is that I felt like my life was somehow complete. I felt like I was doing what I wanted, I didn’t want to change anything, it was my life. If I die now, it doesn’t mean I’m missing out on anything else I want to do.”
Angels in the Cellar: Notes from a French Vineyard by Peter Khan is published by Little Toller Books, £20. Buy a copy from Guardianbookshop.com for £18.