I'll Drink to That (15 page)

Naturally the father of the bride served his best wine to the hundreds of guests, setting up a barrel with a wooden spigot at the bottom, free to anyone who cared to draw off a glass or a pitcher. When the barrel was emptied, out came another one from the cellar, and the dancing, singing and eating continued through the night, to the more or less expert notes of one or more of the village’s accordionists. When energy flagged, there was always at hand a bottle of the winemaker’s rough white lightning,
marc
, made from the re-pressed and distilled grape mash, to crank it back up again.

As with these stupefying wedding feasts, the workers sitting down to the once-yearly
fête des vendanges
were allowed to drink the vigneron’s wine—his real wine this time, not the thin
piquette
with which they had quenched their thirst while out working in the vines. Such generosity represented a real expense, but to do otherwise would have been bad for business, because guaranteeing the return of happy harvesters was of first importance: no grape pickers, no wine. An army of harvesters some thirty thousand to forty thousand strong invades the Beaujolais every year in late August or early September, and the winegrowers would be lost without them. Unlike most other wine regions of France, winegrowers of Beaujolais-Villages and the ten
crus
share with their rich professional cousins up in Champagne the distinction of being
required
to pick their grapes by hand. In both cases, this requirement is related to vinification: the grapes must enter the vinifying vats undamaged. Harvesting machines are much cheaper to use than hand labor, but even the best of them cause some damage to the grapes. It was only in 2004 that mechanization was permitted in vineyards of the lesser, “generic” Beaujolais.

Whatever the overindulgence at the wedding or harvesting blow-outs, though, and however aching the heads, the Beaujolais vigneron and his
vigneronne
would be back to the flinty realities of work at dawn the next day, he in the fields or the vinifying shed, and she with the children, the animals and the house. The feasting had briefly allowed them to thumb their noses at the relative penury of their existence, but the single, unyielding imperative that gripped them was to ensure the self-sufficiency of the family and the farm, the basic unit for survival. In those days, the vines were still a mere adjunct. In a good year, they might provide enough extra money to buy new equipment, pay off back debts or perhaps fulfill the ancient peasant’s longing for more land. In a bad year—or worse, in a succession of bad years, when the wine was poor and the prices low—the vigneron and his wife had to rely on the farm alone to get through to the next harvest. The family survived mostly on home-grown vegetables, milk from their cow, and whatever cheeses the lady of the house was clever enough to make.

“We could never be certain of getting through tomorrow,” remarked Papa Bréchard matter-of-factly. Every Beaujolais peasant could recall miserable seasons when hail, drought or attacks of insects and fungus came close to wiping out an entire year’s crop of grapes. “Very often, the baker was the banker,” Bréchard explained, “because we weren’t always able to pay him for his bread.”

The credit list at the baker’s is a thematic memory that always returns in conversation with elderly retired vignerons who had known the period between the two great wars when subsidies were nonexistent, social protection mostly a matter of charity, and when an informal cartel of wholesale wine merchants, the most powerful of them based in Beaune and Dijon, ruled the roost. Those were the hard times, the days when the little window in the dealers’ offices in Villefranche symbolized the quasi-feudal commercial subjection that bound the winemaker to the big dealers. Mondays—it was always a Monday—the vigneron brought his sample bottles to that little window, where a clerk took down his name, address and noted how much of the stuff he had for sale. Come back in a week, he said, and that was that.

“A week later we’d go back to see whether or not they had accepted the wine, and if they did, at what price,” one of these veterans of innumerable Beaujolais campaigns told me. “Then it was take it or leave it—period.”

“We were all alone against the dealers in those days,” Papa Bréchard explained. “We weren’t organized, and we didn’t have any unions or anything like that. We had a lot to learn.”

In those days a real corporatist antipathy separated vignerons and wine wholesalers, because the latter were the only significant commercial outlet for the former, who were consequently in a permanent position of weakness. On-site direct sales at the vineyard or farm were virtually unknown, because few peasants owned anything other than the most rudimentary of bottling equipment, and the automobile civilization that would eventually see thousands of tourists and weekend drivers from Lyon and elsewhere cruising deep into Beaujolais territory did not even begin developing until the mid- to late fifties. The little window in Villefranche—or the Café des Promeneurs, or Chez Coco, the two bars where wholesalers’ reps commonly received petitioners in preference to their stuffy offices—were, then, the frowzy little mini-Meccas to which the typical vigneron was obliged to entrust his hopes for a year’s revenues.

“It was impersonal and it was humiliating,” said Gérard Canard, the passionate son of the Beaujolais who for thirty-five years directed the Beaujolais Wine Promotion Committee. “There was no harmony, and certainly no fellowship between the two trades, none whatsoever. It was two completely separate worlds. The dealers didn’t even have to invest in the personnel to go around and seek out the best wines—with their system, the vignerons came to them. The dealers’ reps just sat around in the cafés and drank
canons
all day long. They exploited the peasants, of course. Very often, the guys didn’t have enough money to pay their harvesters, so they would borrow from the dealers, with their wine as collateral. Naturally, this put them at a big disadvantage when it came to negotiating the price of that wine.”

The dirtiest trick of all—again, a canker that repeatedly arises in conversation with old-timers—was the village credit rating scenario: the most ruthless dealers would occasionally send investigators around to interview bakers and butchers in order to discover which vignerons owed the biggest tabs. The deeper the debt, the worse would be their bargaining position for the price of the year’s wine. It was pretty unscrupulous stuff, and word of the practice quickly flew around the village, of course. The animosity between grower and buyer grew even more solidly entrenched.

Down in Lyon, the
canut
silk weavers had been similarly exploited by both the big silk dealers known as
les soyeux
and by the owners of the hundreds of small, family-owned workshops that dotted the city. Like the rural artisans of the Beaujolais, these urban proletarians—for the most part peasants who had removed to the city in search of a better life—worked twelve- to sixteen-hour days at their looms in stuffy, overcrowded firetrap ateliers and earned a pittance that barely lifted them above the minimum for their families’ survival. Theirs was a Dickensian existence of economic wretchedness, as pinched as the hard times that Papa Bréchard remembered from his childhood up in the wine country. But history avenged the workers of the loom, because today, when the old silk-weaving industry has disappeared, it is the skeptical, rebellious, wise-guy
canut
who is acknowledged and proudly held up as the true representative of the soul of the place, the one who exemplifies Lyon’s character the way the cool, unflappable
titi parisien
does for the capital city up north.

Like the Beaujolais vigneron, his cousin in austerity, the
canut
fed himself and his family on day-to-day rations of extreme modesty, with the traditional Sunday chicken in a casserole or boiled beef pot-au-feu being the only truly respectable meat dish of the week (heavy on the leeks, carrots, turnips and potatoes, more miserly on the beef). Daily fare centered mostly around bread, cheese and the evening soup, as it did with the rural peasantry. To this was added a whole vocabulary of poor man’s nourishment of a style as surprising, rib-sticking and deliciousas the American soul food that owed its invention to the same kind of poverty. Named with the wry, self-deprecating humor that is native to the city, all of these specialties are inextricably bound up with the culinary identity of Lyon today. Mention any item on this list to a food-conscious citizen anywhere in France, and the spark of recognition will be immediate—it can only mean Lyon. A short compendium, far from inclusive, would have to include:

By common assent, nothing went better with Lyon’s traditional cooking than the friendly, fruity, refreshingly tangy wine of the gamay from up north. Like the food itself, it was plentiful, free of artifice and easy on the pocketbook. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Beaujolais automatically accompanied Lyon’s rise to its enviable situation as the gastronomic capital of France, the city uniquely situated to take advantage of the ideal natural larder that lies at all points around it: poultry of unparalleled quality from the Bresse, beef from the Charolais, freshwater fish from the Rhône and the Saône, magnificent crayfish and cheeses from the Jura, fruits and vegetables from the Rhône Valley and, a bit further to the south, the profusion of seafood, oils, herbs and spices of the Mediterranean regions.

By geography alone—it lies at the confluence of two great rivers, next door to Switzerland, Italy and the Mediterranean but at a safe distance from the intrusions of plunderers and rapparees from England, until recently the most aggressively, never-endingly expansionist of nations—Lyon was a much more logical choice than Paris to be chosen as France’s capital city, as it had been for the Gauls in Caesar’s days. For a while it seemed that history might just turn out that way, because the great monarch François I had taken a liking to the place, so much so that he was considering settling there for good. Alas, in 1536 in Lyon his son the dauphin François shocked his system by draining a glass of chilled water after a particularly heated game of
jeu de paume
(court tennis) and died shortly thereafter. That water may not have been entirely innocent—suggestions of poisoning have floated around the story ever since—but King François removed his crown and his court to Paris, and Lyon never had a second chance.

No matter. The Lyonnais have liberally consoled themselves ever since with food and drink and humor, and no one feels worse off for the bargain. The city’s aura as the world’s capital of great eating was already growing in François’ reign, when the Dutch humanist scholar Erasmus remarked that he didn’t understand “how the innkeepers of Lyon manage to serve such sumptuous food at such modest prices.” Even those who for one reason or another did not hold the place in affection were forced to admit that it harbored special talents where food was concerned. “I know of only one thing that they do very well in Lyon” wrote Stendhal, author of
Le Rouge et le Noir.
“You eat admirably well there and, in my opinion, better than in Paris.”