I'll Drink to That (13 page)

“On the plus side, the
monts du Beaujolais
are beautiful and the
terroir
is perfect for gamay,” Professor Garrier explained, “but there’s a negative side to that: the lay of the land creates a local microclimate that is propitious for storms. It’s a simple physical mechanism: if winds from the west and northwest are carrying water when they hit the hills, that means trouble. When the wind sweeps up over the top of the mountains, the water drops can freeze, and that means hail. It’s just nature, and it’s particular to the Beaujolais. The hail problem is much worse here than up in the Côte d’Or. And in Bordeaux they’ve got no such problem at all.”

More than mildew, rot or even insects, hail is the most terrifying calamity a winegrower can imagine, because it strikes suddenly and without warning and can devastate an entire area in a matter of minutes. Reminded of the subject, Papa Bréchard unhesitatingly harked back to 1929 and 1966, displaying yet again that extraordinary faculty that seems to inhabit all vignerons: the unerring memory of annual events all the way back to their earliest youth. These people think not in days or weeks but in segments of
millésimes
(vintage years), and the longer you speak with them the more total their recall seems to be. In the awful August of 1929, Papa remembered, a cataclysmic hailstorm hit southern Beaujolais just before harvest time. So intense was the storm, and so enormous the hailstones, that the vines were not merely stripped of their leaves and grapes, but in certain vineyards the trunks themselves were snapped off by the barrage. In 1966, again just before harvest, he personally witnessed in Morgon a pile of hailstones nearly a yard high.

How can you fight against visitations like that? You can’t, really, but they tried. Less fatalistic than their ancestors, most vignerons by the turn of the century were unwilling to place their faith in holy candles, prayers and church bells anymore. Instead, they turned to the new religion of modern technology. What Our Lady of the Vine had not consented to protect, perhaps science and industry could. Rationalism, invention and the fantasy of triumph over nature were very much in the air of the time; Jules Verne was already a classic, and H. G. Wells was just hitting his stride. Surely hail could be defeated by machinery and mankind’s clever manipulations.

First up in the battle with the sky was the military approach: cannon aimed upward. Obscure and totally undocumented reports had claimed battlefield experiences wherein the rumble and smoke of artillery fire had chased clouds away. No one knew whether it was the noise or the rising gunpowder smoke that did the trick, but it was worth a try. Around 1890 the first anti-hail cannon appeared in the Beaujolais. Facing upward, the weapons’ muzzles were surmounted by sheet metal cones in the shape of three-storey-high megaphones, the better to aim and concentrate the noise and the smoke—whose particles, it was ardently expected, would cause ice to turn to rain. Papa Bréchard remembered his childhood’s bucolic peace being shattered by thunderous midsummer explosions, but nary a hailstorm was prevented. The failure, in fact, was Europe-wide, because the cannon experiment had been tried in several different vineyard zones.

Where artillery had failed, the more sophisticated approach of rockets was next in line: now cloud seeding became all the rage. Potassium iodide crystals that would precipitate rain, it was posited, could be sent by rockets high into the center of clouds, where cannon fire had not been able to reach. Alas, this early space age idea also flopped, even if the idea of cloud seeding has had a longer life. It is still occasionally attempted today in various parts of the world, in hopes of delivering rain to drought-stricken areas. The seeding element of choice is now silver iodide rather than potassium iodide, but the result is approximately the same.

The last gasp of scientific approach was the contraption called the Niagara (presumably named in anticipation of the floods of rainfall it would produce). In 1912 the Beaujolais Agricultural Union laid out a considerable sum to have seventeen of them erected at strategic points around the most hail-susceptible areas, and very impressive they were, too—all the more so since they were designed to use that mysterious new magic, electricity. Giant pylons like mini Eiffel Towers stood fifty yards high, topped with electrodes not unlike certain TV antennas of the future. These upper electrodes were connected by a copper cable to a second set buried underground, in contact with the water table. State-of-the-art for the time, the Niagara was based on an advanced and appropriately fuzzy logic. Somehow, its backers promised, differences of polarity would prevent the formation of hail by lowering the electrical tension of approaching clouds (whatever that meant). One more flop.

“Crooks!” snorted Papa Bréchard in appropriate praise of the Niagara’s inventors. The last pylons were finally dismantled in 1922 and sold for scrap. Beaujolais vignerons today have returned with a shrug to the old fatalism. Like death and taxes, hail will come when it comes. There’s always hail insurance to be bought, certainly, but it is expensive. Most growers just take their chances.

By the time the fourteen-year-old Louis Bréchard took over the family vineyard and farm in 1918, there weren’t many holdouts for the old ways left. The Beaujolais was modernizing, and not by machinery alone. Agronomic science was improving plant selection, and the big phylloxera scare had brought a greatly increased attention to cloning and grafting on a semi-industrial scale. Effective pest-control chemicals and potassium-rich fertilizers derived from the slag of the steel industry in eastern France were becoming available, while progressive industrialists like Vermorel were regularly disseminating information sheets on rationalizing traditional agricultural methods. As a result, wine production soared throughout the country even as the total acreage under cultivation dropped. Progress marched forward in the Beaujolais as everywhere else, and yields per acre jumped. To those who had known the old days, this came as a divine surprise. As matters turned out, though, the alchemy of greater yields proved to be very much of a mixed blessing. And how could it be otherwise? For the fatalistic vigneron, every plus always dragged a minus along with it.

“When I was a boy we used to dream of getting thirty hectoliters of wine from one hectare of vine,” Papa Bréchard told me in 1993—a time when any grower in the Beaujolais could easily produce two or three times that amount, if he hadn’t been restrained by the quality-control limits imposed by INAO (the National Institute of Certified Names). By the time I met him, the problem throughout French vineyards had become not how to produce enough wine to satisfy the national and international demand, but rather how to keep yields down within reasonable limits, thereby maintaining good prices and constant quality. The ancient worry of not enough wine to go around had flip-flopped into the new economic bête noire of oversupply.

This dilemma of too much wine and not enough buyers was to be a recurrent and painful theme in the ongoing history of French winemaking. Ironically, it was phylloxera that brought that dilemma to center stage for the first time. In those years of dearth, the commercial wise guys had learned how to make wine ex nihilo, or almost, and the parasitic sugar-wine industry continued to run full steam for several years even after the country’s vineyards had been reconstituted with phylloxera-resistant grafted plants, to produce real wine the old way. It was a curious and surprising anomaly—who, least of all among the French, could possibly prefer fake, factory-made “wine” to the real thing? A lot of people, as it turned out. Sugar wine was bulk stuff, aimed exclusively at the low-end of the spectrum—a cheap drunk—but there was a market for it, and a combination of dirt-cheap pricing and weak, unclear consumer-protection legislation made it possible. After all, why bother with all that specialized field labor and fastidious vinifying when mixing up a bit of cheap wine from Algeria or the Languedoc region with a jolt of tartaric acid, sugar and yeasts, all of it thinned out with plenty of water, delivered a nicely profitable drink that could be labeled with any fanciful name?

Sugar wine finally disappeared in 1908 when the government applied a new sugar tax specifically designed to deal with it, but it was not before peasants in the south, whose wine prices had been dramatically undercut by the factory-made stuff, had set off a series of violent demonstrations that turned to bloody rioting. In June 1907, six people were killed in clashes with police in Narbonne, and in nearby Perpignan the regional administration building was burned to the ground. With a quasi-insurrectional climate upon the land, the army had to be called in to restore order. It was high time to get rid of the vinous counterfeiters once and for all.

Through it all, the Beaujolais remained dead calm. Theirs were “lesser” wines than those of their rich and noble Burgundian cousins up in the Côte d’Or, but they were honest, traditionally made and sincere, miles above the sugar-based industrial plonk that was causing all the trouble down south. Since Beaujolais was in a higher category of prestige and price, there was no head-to-head competition, and hence no cause for strife. So the vignerons plugged along with their specialty, the peculiar little gamay grape that they knew better than anyone else and which apparently was happier on their granitic slopes than anywhere else, turning out the pleasant wine that over the years had conquered a modest but respectable corner of the national market. None of them could have illusions of accumulating anything like wealth from their labors; in fact, all the way through to the end of the Second World War, the Beaujolais could only have been classified as one of the poorer regions of France.

“It wasn’t so easy to be settled into neediness the way we were,” Papa recalled in a moment of retrospection, “but I suppose we weren’t all that ambitious. As long as we had about enough to eat and people liked our wine, and the neighbor liked it, too, we had a certain kind of contentment with our life. Everything considered, our misery was joyous enough. We might have been living close to the edge, but we were living, after all.”

Right up into the 1950s, the old ways and customs continued very much as they had been in Papa Bréchard’s youth, and the atmosphere of the Beaujolais country remained generally slow-paced and thrifty, closer to penury than to prosperity—getting by. But things were about to be shaken up. In March of 1957, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg signed the Treaty of Rome, the founding document of the European Economic Community. The Common Market was just around the corner, and the enlarged European Union was being sketched out on the horizon. It was to grow into the greatest market in the world, the economic powerhouse that over the next half century was to become one of the principal motors of the astonishing wealth-creating machine that now goes by the name of globalization.

The Beaujolais was to profit mightily from this wealth machine when the rest of France, and then Europe and finally the entire world, woke up to the fact that the much-belittled gamay had been given a seriously bum rap by Philip the Bold. That was a secret that the population of Lyon had known all along, of course. Because it was there, in France’s second city, that Beaujolais’s extraordinary run to worldwide popularity had begun.

IV

THE THREE RIVERS OF LYON

Scratch a grumpy French intellectual, and the chances are pretty good that beneath the bark and the bombast you’ll find an insecure little gourmet yearning to climb out. Léon Daudet (1867-1942) was an unabashed reactionary, a fire-breathing author, critic, politician and polemicist who hated just about everything in Republican France and democracy in general, and who was always ready to put up his dukes or his pistol (he is said to have fought at least fourteen duels) to lay low anyone who disagreed with his radically royalist and retrograde opinions. But set him into hot intimacy with the winsome breast and well-turned thigh of a Bressane hen, or the
volupté
of an elegant wine, and the Savonarola turned into a milksop.

“There are three reasons why Lyon is the capital of French gastronomy,” he wrote in 1927, doubtless with a tear in his eye and a glass of Brouilly or Moulin-à-Vent standing within easy reach. “The first is that this incomparably gastronomic city is neighbor to the Bresse region, with its unctuous quenelles and the best chickens in the world, raised the wise old way, and ringed with layers of golden fat.

“The second is that in her markets she has the crayfish that can’t be found anywhere else in the world and, when they are in season, black morel mushrooms.

“The third is that in addition to the Saône and the Rhône, she is served by a third river, the Beaujolais, which never dries up and is never muddy.”

If it was Pasteur who gave drinkers everywhere the ideal rationalization for having another glass (wine being the most hygienic of drinks), it was the ill-tempered Daudet whose riverine image became the single most famous and frequently repeated phrase used to characterize both France’s second largest city and the wine it loved to drink more than any other. As long as anyone could remember, the house wine in the wonderful restaurants for which Lyon was justly famous—often, in the simplest of them, the only wine available
—
was Beaujolais. For a gent sincerely zealous about his thirst like Daudet, it could, indeed, appear that Lyon was awash in a river of the wines of gamay. So fitting was Daudet’s image that the inveterate Beaujolais drinker became a national stereotype as the star attraction of the Lyonnais marionette theater invented by an out-of-work Lyonnais
canut
(silk worker) that continues to thrill French children today in spite of continuing aggression from the cathode ray tube. These hand-puppet shows feature a whole vocabulary of colorful characters, but the two principal ones are unfailingly Guignol in the left hand and Gnafron in the right. Guignol is the Lyonnais Everyman, the typical
gone
(guy in the street): quick, skeptical, bright and subversive. But it is Gnafron who gets most of the laughs, because he is both recognizable and irresistible—the barfly with a W. C. Fields nose as red as Abbé Ponosse’s, an amiable shoemaker who neglects his work in favor of homespun philosophizing and wicked political commentary over a
canon
of Beaujolais, the standard bar wineglass measuring an eighth of a pint.