I'll Drink to That (2 page)

The wine that these and other growers produced has been central to French civilization ever since the Romans backed off and the Gauls took their own history in hand. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that France came to be defined by wine, considering its deep religious symbolism, the stubborn belief in its strength-giving medicinal qualities and, of course, the unique conditions of soil and climate for turning out the enormous palette of wine varieties that made France the world reference in this ancient and still somewhat mysterious art.

Tasting wine, analyzing it and buying it for investment are now fashionable in most of the world’s wealthier nations, but as a rule the movement is like a pastime or hobby and limited to the cultured bourgeoisie of the great urban centers. In France, wine is a daily routine that cuts across classes like potato chips and beer in the States. Certainly consumption levels have dropped from the dizzying levels of previous years—the French are becoming reasonable—but wine is no less an everyday part of life, as much a banality as watching the news on television. France would not be France without its wine, and the old traditions are passed on as a matter of course. When a baby is born, Papa still dips his finger into his celebratory glass of Champagne and gives the little newcomer a taste. Does that initiate a lifetime habit? I don’t know, but after enough years of living in the midst of this civilization I felt constrained to do it myself, even though both my kids are American, born of American parents in the American Hospital in Paris.

At the embassy, the staff calls this sort of behavior “going native,” and I suppose they’re right. There’s an ever so slight sniff of disdain behind that expression, but for me it was impossible not to fall under the charm of the multitudinous aspects of the wine culture here, beginning with the inevitable epiphany of the first truly Big Bottle (for the record, a well-named Meursault-Charmes of the 1964 vintage). Finding a Meursault seductive is no triumph, of course (approximately equivalent to finding Catherine Deneuve or Juliette Binoche seductive), but it is an excellent way to instill a lifelong respect for the skill of the French vigneron community. Although Beaujolais is a “lesser” wine than the great Burgundies, the devotion that its best artisans bring to their craft is no less impressive. A nation that approaches its wines as knowledgeably as this one can be counted on to respect it and honor it at all levels and in all circumstances, and the mention of my first bottle of Meursault inescapably brings to mind the finest example I have ever heard of this vinous respect and honor. It was delivered by Père Baroillot, who might be termed the unofficial and unbeatified patron saint of French gourmets.

Father Raymond Baroillot is long gone now, but in a single moment of inspired candor a few decades ago, he proved himself worthy of an immortal place in the hearts of wine lovers everywhere. It seems clear that a heavenly power had traced a mission for this wispy, soft-spoken Catholic priest to evangelize the world of wine and food. As a young curé before the war, he had been assigned to take over the parish of Meursault, and he applied himself with such diligence that over the following years he acquired a quasi-professional nose and palate for appreciating the finest Burgundies. Transferred from this dream assignment to the much larger and much less distinguished city of Roanne, he might have assumed his gourmet tour was finished, but as luck had it his sphere of responsibility in Roanne included the area around the railroad station—exactly opposite which sat Troisgros, one of the world’s greatest restaurants, directed by Jean-Baptiste Troisgros, an uprooted Burgundian like himself. Father Baroillot watched in admiration as Jean-Baptiste’s sons Jean and Pierre Troisgros cooked their way to three Michelin stars. He also ate in admiration because, as confessor, confidant and spiritual advisor to the famous cooking clan, he enjoyed a regular seat at the family dinner table. Before long, his knowledge of gastronomy equaled that of oenology. After Jean-Baptiste died, Jean and Pierre naturally called upon the priest to celebrate a private mass for the departed patriarch. The entire family was present when, at the moment of Consecration, cradling the holy chalice of wine in his hands, he caught himself, turned 180 degrees and ad-libbed a brief bit of professional information for the brothers: “It’s a little aligoté from Colin,” he said, before giving it a swirl, a sniff and a taste, and then getting on with the rest of the proceedings.

The story would have been just right for my purposes if Father Baroillot had been using Beaujolais instead of aligoté, but you can’t always have everything exactly the way you want it. Even so, there’s a real connection here to the subject of this book, an almost eerily fitting one, because half a century earlier a French author named Gabriel Chevallier had anticipated Father Baroillot’s life story with uncanny accuracy when he penned the satirical novel
Clochemerle.
By inventing the Abbé Augustin Ponosse, saintly of demeanor and scarlet of nose, parish priest of a little village in the Beaujolais-Villages area, he proved conclusively that, in France, anyway, life is often called upon to imitate art. Read on.

I

WHAT A GLASS OF WINE REPRESENTS

B
eaming, voluble, robust as a workhorse, fairly erupting with energy and good cheer as he performed surgery on his supper with his pocket knife, Marcel sat at the head of a long rectangular plank table supported on sawhorses, presiding over an improbably diverse collection of youth, most of them girls barely out of their teens, med students from Brittany. A second table, same size and parallel to his but over against the other wall, was occupied entirely by men—older, bulkier and considerably noisier than the girls. Nearly forty strong, the harvesting crew filled the little room next to the kitchen with such an ear-shattering din that everyone had to shout to be heard, which of course made the clamor only worse. Never mind: there was some serious chowing down to be attended to, because there was nothing like a twelve-hour day in the vineyards to put an edge on the appetite. After
velouté de légumes
, peasant soup with vegetables from her own garden, Nathalie had delivered four enormous platters of her own
poule au riz
, chicken and rice in cream sauce, cooked up that afternoon on her industrial-sized stove. Cheeses would come after that, and then a selection of Nathalie’s tarts and fruit preserves. Pretty soon, once they’d sated their hunger and drunk enough of Marcel’s wine, the men would be singing their bawdy songs again, led as usual by Choucroute the Alsatian and Zorro from Toulouse. That was how it always went in the evening.

Glancing down the table, Marcel spotted something amiss: L’Écrivain, the scholarly, ginger-haired young German from Leipzig who also spoke Russian and English and who was always lecturing the girls about Rostand, Proust and Balzac, hadn’t finished his chicken leg. Marcel surged to his feet, made a lunge with his fork and spirited the spurned morsel back to his plate at the head of the table. Eyelids squinched down to a crack with epicurean pleasure behind his steel-rimmed glasses, he grasped it in viselike fists and finished it off as neatly as a cat.

Things were going very nicely, even better than he had expected. The harvest was nearly all in, the grapes were healthy and the rain that had been falling all over the country had miraculously spared the regions between Mâcon and Lyon. The new vintage was going to be fine. It was a good time for the Beaujolais.

It was for Marcel Pariaud, at any rate. Sixty-two years of age at the time of this harvest, looking a dozen less than that and charged with the vigor and optimism of a twenty-year-old, he was already in his fortieth consecutive year as an independent wine grower, or vigneron. He had reason for his good spirits, because he had prospered over those four decades—as, indeed, the whole of the Beaujolais had prospered. (And before we go any further, please note the “the” here. It underlines a point that many people do not realize: Beaujolais is a wine, to be sure, but more than that, it is this
place
, an irregular little rectangle of land measuring roughly sixty by fifteen kilometers, framed to the south by Lyon, to the north by Mâcon, and named after the old regional capital of Beaujeu. In terms of geography, “Beaujolais” simply signifies the land lying around Beaujeu, a little ribbon of a town folded into a cleft between hills of chalky clay where grapes can thrive in the sunlight. During several prime daylight hours the abrupt slopes above Beaujeu block the sun from reaching all the way to the bottom of the cleft where the river Ardières flows. The soil down there is no good for grapes anyway, so that’s where they stuck the town. Logical: care for the wine always comes first in the Beaujolais.)

I like to think of Marcel as the ideal model of the yeoman citizenry of this stunningly beautiful and still little known corner of France, because wine defines the Beaujolais country the way information technology defines Silicon Valley, and Marcel Pariaud makes it as responsibly and passionately (and deliciously) as any man I know. I admire him because his ebullient good humor never fails him, because no matter how busy he is he will always take the time to educate the ignorant and explain the subtleties of the ever-shifting art of vinification by which the boring old caterpillar called grape juice is transmuted into the gorgeous butterfly called wine, and because in a modern world increasingly dominated by abstractions and virtuality—industries of service rather than creation, economic sleight of hand and “outsourcings,” dehumanized manipulations that pluck vast amounts of money apparently from thin air via distant computer keystrokes—it is wonderfully refreshing to discover an embodiment of traditional old ways and virtues. Here is one honest man who built a modest but respectable prosperity for himself and his wife by the sweat of his brow and the calluses of his hands, a man who had truly earned every franc and euro that came to his pockets and who richly deserved the retirement he was beginning to contemplate on that September evening of 2006 as he chomped on his secondhand chicken leg. Reaching his present point of relative financial comfort had been anything but easy, but ease has never been Marcel’s strong suit. We’ll be seeing more about that, and about Marcel himself, in later pages.

I was about to write that it is difficult to imagine anyone who had worked as hard all his life as Marcel Pariaud, but that wouldn’t have been quite right, because there was another one quite nearby, living just down the road hardly more than a mile away, in the neighboring village of Romanèche-Thorins. He was a longtime acquaintance of mine, a man who was quite unlike Marcel but essentially similar, the other side of the same coin. By the time Zorro and Choucroute had begun bellowing their postprandial ditties that evening, this other one had already downed a quick bite and returned to his office to face the mountain of papers on his desk. There were e-mails to answer, phone calls to make, texts to write, reports to read, documents to sign: too much to do. It was past eleven when he finally went home, but next morning he would be up at four-thirty, just like the day before.
Ah là là
he would be muttering, this is no way to live. But he had been living exactly that way for more than fifty years.

His name was Georges Duboeuf, and if on the surface everything about him and Marcel seemed different—antithetical, even—the two men had lot more in common than appearances suggested. Certainly the contrast of physical appearances was striking. Lean, reserved and ascetic where Marcel was hearty, muscular, loquacious and outgoing, Duboeuf chose his words with painstaking care, was given to periods of introspective silence and, poker-faced, spoke in a voice so softly modulated that it could barely nudge a decibel gauge beyond whisper level. Joyous and happy to share his joy, Marcel never stopped smiling and never shut up. The environment at Marcel’s place in the little village of Lancié bespoke the true, hands-on, do-it-yourself rural artisan, a little one-man hodgepodge of old equipment and old ways that functioned smoothly only because he had the secret of how to keep it all going. By contrast, the workplace that Georges Duboeuf had built up over the years was enormous: a computerized, high-tech, multifaceted plant of glistening stainless steel and virginal white buildings, one that required 130 or so employees to keep it functioning properly. Marcel was the quintessential small-time winemaker. The vineyards he tended had never measured more than twelve hectares, or about thirty acres, the greater part of it on rented land, and by 2006 he had wound his operation down to his own land, a mere 4.5 hectares. Duboeuf was big-time, a major wine dealer, or
négociant
—
the négociant
of the Beaujolais, far and away the biggest and most important of them all—a businessman of worldwide scope who year in and year out sold 30 million bottles or more under his label. In fact he was, by the count of bottles sold (more than 7 million a year), the number one exporter of French wines to the United States.

The rich international star of commerce and the obscure peasant did not exactly frequent each other—their life contexts were different—but each knew and respected the other’s work. If the yard behind Marcel’s vinifying and storage sheds was littered with old equipment rusting in the grass, it only meant that the consumer society had not yet arrived at his doorstep. He was inhabited by the peasant’s ancient horror of throwing away anything for which he might conceivably find a future use: he was thrifty. But his rows of vines were as clean and perfectly tended as human sweat could make them, and the wine he made in the old wooden vats inside the big vinifying shed that he had built with his own two hands was the perfect, honest expression of the genius of the gamay grape. If Duboeuf drove a fancy Audi, wore expensive shoes and slung a cashmere sweater over his bony shoulders, Marcel knew that he, too, had been born to the peasantry and had not forgotten it. Each man, within the orbit of his making, was equally estimable. It would be hard to find better incarnations than these two—the winemaker and the wine seller—of the soul and the spirit of the Beaujolais. They represent the forces that brought Beaujolais, against all odds and against the established wisdom of centuries of wine snobbery, to the enviable position it enjoys today as the world’s best-known and most popular red wine. There can hardly be a language anywhere in which those three euphonious, easily pronounced syllables “bo-jo-lay” do not trip lightly off the tongue, or a large city (at least in those parts of the world that do not criminalize a touch of the grape) where the wines of that same name do not enjoy the same kind of popularity as back home in France. Worldwide, there is nothing to rival Beaujolais for name recognition save Champagne.