Summer 2010. We found our barn when we were no longer looking for a home. Over the course of the past year we had seen the insides of forty seven properties between the Black Mountains and the Pyrenees, from the Corbieres to as far west as Saint-Girons. Finally we decided to give it a rest and go to Barcelona for a long weekend to think about what to do next. We called on some friends to tell them we were going away and in passing they asked if we'd looked at a particular website. We hadn't, so we did and there it was, fresh on the site that day. The kind of property we knew we wanted was a maison vigneron or something similar. We'd been inside one in Fabrezan and were stunned by the amount of space. This one was even bigger. It had been a stables for the horses used in the vineyards and had a one up, one down at the very back. Unlike the previous Maison Vigneron, which had a solid, level concrete floor, this had an uneven, well trodden earth floor. The first floor was supported on beams as thick as tree trunks, the floorboards were worm-eaten and decaying. The accommodation at the back was basic but solid. Best of all the roof was sound. So we bought it.