I'll Drink to That (3 page)

The story of how Beaujolais reached its present prominence is worth a look because it encapsulates so much not only about the wine itself but also about France and the French themselves: this quick, talented, nervous, occasionally maddening but altogether admirable people.

We have to go back a while to get to the start of the story—say, 50 million years, give or take a few million here or there—to when something called the Great Alpine Folding occurred. Under the colossal pressures of this tectonic shifting, the Alps were born, and then the earth’s crust gave a secondary shrug as a kind of afterthought, splitting the MassifCentral, the high ground in the middle of present-day France, into a series of rocky wrinkles. The easternmost of these wrinkles ended at a plain where the River Saône ambles peaceably along today, leaving a soil heavily granitic in its northern stretches and mostly limestone and clay in the south. Drivers working their way toward Paris from the Mediterranean today can see the result, just a few miles north of Lyon, as clearly as if the process had been laid out on a demonstration board. After the
autoroute
tollgate at Villefranche, the terrain to the right lies flat all the way to the Saône and beyond, interspersed with woods and pastures, and given over to farming and light industry. To the left, though, a dramatically different view appears through the haze: a patchwork of steep, high hills marching off to the horizon in the west—
monts
is the very handy French word for them, for which there’s no proper equivalent in English. It means something more serious than a hill, but not just yet a mountain. Until quite recently, this modest portion of upheaved land was just another obscure corner of France’s richly varied countryside, little known and little valued beyond its immediate vicinity.
Les monts du Beaujolais
the hills are called.

Geographically remote from the main centers of economic activity, the choppy hillsides of the Beaujolais could, until recent postwar times, have been compared to certain parts of Appalachia. Hunched together in their little villages of yellow stone roofed with rounded Roman tiles, the natives had always gazed down upon the plain of the Saône— today as yesterday France’s principal north-south passage—with conflicting emotions. A natural interest in the commerce and novelty that the highway might bring was overlaid with a certain wariness of outsiders, bred no doubt by atavistic memories of the many foreign invasions that their lush, beautiful country had suffered through history. Nor were all of their own fellow citizens to be entirely trusted, either, and least of all the rich or powerful among them, because these hill dwellers were poor themselves—always had been and, it seemed, always would be—and the rich and powerful had a disagreeable historical penchant for exploiting the poor.

I set foot in the region for the very first time in 1965. Strictly speaking, the place where I landed that afternoon was not actually in the Beaujolais, but merely adjacent to it. There is a definite connection, though—I will even say a significant one—between the story of Beaujolais and the town called Thoissey, where I stopped for lunch. This little community of not quite fifteen hundred inhabitants sits on the plain at the base of
les monts du Beaujolais
just east of the Saône and, as nearly as I can tell, has never had anything particular to distinguish it but one: the country inn called Le Chapon Fin. In its time, it was one of the most famous provincial restaurants in France, and its owner, Paul Blanc, enjoyed an esteem among his fellow chefs fully equal to that of media stars like Fernand Point in Vienne, André Pic in Valence and Alexandre Dumaine in Saulieu, the old holy trinity of French provincial gastronomy. Perhaps because of Blanc’s bluff, straight-talking manner and his refusal to dandify his décor, Le Chapon Fin never rose above two stars in the Michelin Guide, but by general agreement its food was easily worth three.

Paul Blanc had inherited patriarchal ascendancy over a remarkable cooking clan that continues to dazzle gourmets today. He was the grandson of Elisa Blanc, who had taken over a village inn that her mother-in-law, Antoinette, had founded in 1872 in the nearby town of Vonnas, between Mâcon and Bourg-en-Bresse. Elisa continued Antoinette’s style of cooking—perfect execution of simple country dishes prepared with all the best local ingredients—and did it so well that the restaurant, now baptized Auberge de la Mère Blanc, became a famous stopping point for hungry diners from Lyon and travelers en route to Switzerland. Elisa won her first Michelin star in 1929 and then a second in 1931, while somehow finding the time to raise two sons. Her first, Jean, became a wholesale wine and soft drinks dealer, while Paul trekked off to Thoissey, opened Le Chapon Fin and soon made it as famous as his mother’s place.

I was totally ignorant of this glorious family tradition when I came to Thoissey in 1965. All I knew was that it was lunchtime, I was hungry, and I was on the N. 6 main road north of Lyon, en route to Paris. The Michelin Guide informed me that a nearby place called Le Chapon Fin had two stars, so I hung a right and headed expeditiously in direction of Thoissey.

My lunch there was a curious experience. Frankly, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the meal. The food was quite good, of course, but I had not expected the mob scene that I encountered when I got there. Every seat in the house was taken, and I managed to find a place only in a distant corner of the terrace. The service was slow, and I was irritated by the long wait. I was younger then, much less experienced in matters French and certainly less patient than I have since learned to be in the presence of serious cuisine. I had not taken into account what should have been obvious: it was August, France’s great month for vacationing en masse; it was Sunday, the consecrated day for a proper lunch with the family; and everyone else on the road had also seen those two Michelin stars for Le Chapon Fin.

In the light of the heroic efforts that Paul Blanc and his brigade were expending in their overheated kitchen to get the mob fed, I can now see that my youthful irritation was both misplaced and self-indulgent, but it changed to something like beatitude when my wine order was delivered to the table. Working on the trusty old precept that it is always a good idea to stick with the nearest local wines, I had ordered a simple pitcher of generic Beaujolais, the least expensive choice on the list. I was expecting nothing much as I poured myself the first glass, but when I tasted it my grumpy palate was suddenly greeted with an explosive burst of fruit and flowers.

What was that: raspberries, strawberries, currants? And violets, maybe? I couldn’t quite tell, but I knew that I liked it a lot. I stuck my nose into the glass, took a long sniff, tasted again just to be sure. Everything from my first mouthful was still present and maybe even more, too, if only I had the skill to seek it all out. It was one of the finest moments of gastronomic surprise I had ever enjoyed, and a cheap one to boot. Getting up to leave after lunch, I made a point of approaching Juliette Blanc, the great chef’s wife, who was naturally in charge of everything that happened at Le Chapon Fin outside of Paul’s kitchen. Wherever, I asked her, did you find such a wonderful Beaujolais to serve in such a plain pitcher for so little money?

“Oh, that’s Duboeuf,” she replied, in the tone of one stating what ought to have been obvious to anyone but a hick. The name meant nothing to me.

Brute luck, it turned out, had brought me to the very place where, a decade and a half earlier, the eighteen-year-old peasant named Georges Duboeuf had made his first sale. I would be hearing a lot more about this extraordinary character in the following years. So would everyone else.

Five more years passed before I ventured into that area again. Beaujolais had become progressively more popular by the early seventies, and the notoriety of Duboeuf was no longer limited to wine professionals and a limited number of insiders. Things were shaping up nicely as the Beaujolais cantered along with the rest of France into
les trente glorieuses
, the thirty years of economic boom that saw the country heave itself up from the shame and penury of defeat and the wartime German occupation to become a rich and powerful leader of Europe, showing the way to whatever bright future the Common Market might promise. In those happy days, France was still the uncontested center of the wine world,
the
reference for anyone who knew anything about or cared about that miraculous procedure by which the hand of man persuades grape juice to forsake its natural route toward vinegar and detour over into an infinitely more desirable, drinkable alternative. More wine was being produced in France than anywhere else in the world; the natives drank more of it per head (about 120 liters a year, down from 150 in the thirsty fifties, with babies, kids, centenarians, cops, nuns and teetotalers all factored into that impressive figure) than any other population, and the export market, where demand still well exceeded supply, was riding a seemingly permanent upward curve. In the Beaujolais country, some five thousand peasant winemakers were tending individual vineyards, pitching in to the national average by producing a yearly average of a million hectoliters
¹
of the twelve different wines gathered under the Beaujolais label: generic Beaujolais; Beaujolais-Villages; and the ten rarer and more expensive
crus
(growths) of Brouilly, Côte de Brouilly, Chénas, Chiroubles, Fleurie, Juliénas, Morgon, Moulin-à-Vent, Régnié and Saint-Amour. Each one had its own character and its own clientele—the muscle of Morgon, the elegance of Fleurie, the depth of Moulin-à-Vent—but at the same time a very interesting new phenomenon was gaining strength from year to year: the wine called Beaujolais Nouveau was on the verge of becoming an international craze.

Things were looking good for the Beaujolais. It was in this atmosphere of heady optimism that I came back for what was my real introduction to the region. Wine and I were good friends by then, and I was still in those fearless, pack-it-away days of youth when you think you can get away with anything, and occasionally do. In the event, I didn’t get away with it, not this time. It was in the village called Juliénas that I made the first of a long succession of overconfident missteps Beaujolais-style, ignorant as I was of the disconcerting fact that the natives enjoy nothing more than testing visitors with as much wine as they can get into them.

I could scarcely have chosen a better place for my initiation, because by itself Juliénas encapsulated the entire sweep of Beaujolais history. The name harks straight back to Julius Caesar himself, conqueror of the Gauls. He wasn’t really what you could call an endearing sort of chap: his brand of pacification was little short of genocidal, and he took pleasure in reporting back to Rome on how he had put entire populations to the sword, regardless of age, gender or sexual orientation. Even so, his memory must still be honored in France today, because it was his legionnaires, retiring after hard years of service to imperialism, who taught the surviving natives how to make wine—infinitely preferable to
cervoise,
the rough beer with which they had been quenching their thirst until then. Intermarriage with these Roman settlers and centuries of assimilation formed the Beaujolais character such as it is today: tough, stubbornly attached to the soil and the vine, a tad suspicious of outsiders at first view, but jolly and overwhelmingly welcoming once the ice has been broken. This little town’s founders named their settlement after their boss Julius, planted their vines and never looked back from winemaking.

Returning northward on a long drive from Spain, my wife and I had veered off the main road into the Beaujolais country in company with our friend Pierre Boulat, one of France’s top photographers and a man who knew his way around. There was a pretty good little restaurant in Juliénas, said Pierre, and we rolled into town on a surprisingly balmy October evening. Suddenly the long drudgery of our drive morphed into a wine lover’s dream, signaled by an auspicious set of road signs at the picture-postcard main square: Saint-Amour and Saint-Vérand to the north of us, Jullié to the west, Chénas, Fleurie and Chiroubles to the south. Down to the left of the bakery near the marketplace, the spire of a sixteenth-century church soared, as it should in all picture-postcard situations, high over the town. Years later, when I had grown to know Juliénas on more intimate terms, I learned that the regional diocese had deconsecrated the church 1868 and sold it to a local notable, a vigneron, of course, who had promptly put its cool stone embrace to practical use as a
chai
, a wine storage shed. Further progress came in 1954, when a wine dealer, restaurateur and local character named Victor Peyret transformed the church’s elegant choir into a
caveau
(wine-tasting cellar), complete with vineyard scenes on the stained glass windows and bacchanalian frescoes on the walls. The church is a drinking place today still, the town’s official
caveau
, signaled as such in books, posters and tourism leaflets. It is always just a bit disconcerting to pass under its portal and enter its stony interior only to discover a bar.

Presently we were seated in the dining room of a quirky little bistro called Chez La Rose, with a bottle of Juliénas, cool and fresh from the cellar, standing before us and
andouillettes grillées
, bathed in a reduction of white wine and chopped shallots, ordered and on the way. On the way for me and Pierre, that is. My wife sighed, ordered a civilized roast chicken and muttered insults about savages capable of making a meal out of intestine sausage.

The table next to us was occupied by a curious pair of gents: a short, agitated little man who emitted a steady stream of wisecracking chatter and a massive character, a head taller, with hands like grappling hooks, who bore a vague but still disquieting resemblance to Boris Karloff as Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. The first wore coat and tie, the second blue workman’s overalls.

Gradually, as the meal drew on, little sparks, little presages of dialogue, grew between the two tables. This was unusual, because the French, when dining, are usually sensible enough to concentrate on the appreciation of what they are eating, and courteous enough to leave space between themselves and those around them. But on that evening a voice perhaps too loud, a comment or two overheard, an accent unmistakably not French—whatever it was—conspired to set off a mutual joshing that was, if not aggressive, at least challenging in some unclear way. A few bottles of wine undoubtedly did their part, too. The upshot was that in the course of the dialogue they learned that Pierre and I were of the journalistic sort. The shorter man introduced himself as Pierre Martray,
régisseur
(manager) of Château de la Chaize; he and his cellar master were dining at Chez La Rose to celebrate the latter’s birthday. By the time we were tucking into a cheese platter (some absolutely remarkable goat’s milk creations), it somehow became established that we, the interloping outsiders, would be forever marked in history as the merest of churls and
poules mouillées
(wet hens) if we did not accompany them forthwith to the château to toast the birthday and gain an appreciation of different years and different batches of wine from different sections of its vineyard.