I'll Drink to That (17 page)

The joyous troupe of gamayphiliacs succeeded so well in their enterprise that they defeated their original purpose of innocently irresponsible merriment and became something very much like a movement. The competition for the best
pot
of Beaujolais was destined to outgrow Lyon and move on, first to Paris and other major French cities and then, eventually, to the world at large.

By the late thirties, the luck of the Beaujolais really seemed to be turning. The unassuming drink was gradually gaining recognition beyond its regional boundaries as a respectable growth that could take its place alongside the
grands seigneurs
of France’s unparalleled palette of wine varieties. Beaujolais was not merely legitimate, in spite of the
oïdium
that had been heaped upon the gamay grape since Duke Philip took his famous umbrage in the fourteenth century: it was
good.

But history runs in cycles. Now, just as matters were beginning to look very good, calamity struck again, this time in the form of human folly: World War II was upon the land. Catastrophically overconfident in their strategic thinking, the French military brass entirely misjudged the capacities and ingenuity of the German forces, and their modern, well-equipped army was ridiculed by Hitler’s
blitzkrieg
tactics. Five cruel years of occupation began on the day that German troops marched down the Champs Elysées.

As matters turned out, the Beaujolais country had relatively good luck, to the extent that luck could be considered good in hungry, distressing times such as those. The Germans’ agreement with the collaborationist Vichy government split the country roughly in two, and the east-west demarcation line left Mâcon, Villefranche and Lyon in the southern “free zone” under Vichy, while the Germans occupied the northern half, which of course included Paris (and Champagne).

In the wine country, life slowly returned to something resembling normalcy. Mourning the hundreds of their brethren who had died in the fighting, the Beaujolais peasantry returned to the vine and the familiar seasonal gestures of its timeless life cycle. There was more handwork now, and more horse and mule work, because the severely limited suppliesof gasoline and oil were monopolized by the German forces, with only a tiny fraction allowed for the official vehicles of the Vichy government. Gas-powered machinery gathered dust and rust in their hangars, and chemical fertilizers and products for protecting grapes from mildew and insects became things of the past. There was no more sugar, so chaptalization, too, was finished. In spite of themselves, and for want of any alternative, vignerons throughout France went over 100 percent into the camp of what today would be called organic winegrowing.

Lacking the usual artifices for helping the vines along and giving their wines’ alcoholic content a nudge, the Beaujolais peasantry may have felt disarmed, but Mother Nature generously intervened, delivering a series of wonderful, even fantastic years. In 1941, 1943 and 1945 the output per hectare dropped severely, averaging scarcely better than thirty-five hectoliters per hectare, but the quality of the wine was astonishingly good. In 1947, wartime shortages and restrictions still remained, but the rains came at just the right moments and the sun was unfailing. To these ideal maturing conditions was added a month of September so infernally hot that Beaujolais vignerons found themselves obliged to harvest at night, lest their grapes begin fermenting in the transport bins before they could be dumped into the fermentation vats—but it made a truly memorable wine.

“We got 15.7 and even 15.8 degrees of alcohol that year without the help of any sugar at all,” remembered Marcel Laplanche, a veteran vigneron in the Beaujolais-Villages town of Blacé. In that same memorable year, the famous vigneron and wine dealer Jules Chauvet, father of modern wine-tasting methodology, reported hitting a high of 17 degrees with some of his
parcelles
of vine in La Chapelle de Guinchay. “The wine was so strong that people who were accustomed to swallowing a certain amount when they tasted in the
caveaux
were staggering all over the place when they emerged into the sunlight. Restaurant owners complained that we were deliberately getting their clients drunk. But it wasn’t our fault.”

Harsh years, great wine—the antithetical ironies continued to pile up, and in the end it had to be said that, as appalling as it was for the country as a whole, the German occupation proved in the long run to be beneficial, in a delayed, unexpected, backhand kind of way, for the wines of the Beaujolais.

Once again, as so often where wine is concerned, the reason was directly related to the press. With the debacle in 1939, thousands of northern dwellers fled southward to take up residence as best they could in the Vichy-administered zone. Parisians were heavily represented in this impromptu refugee flow, of course, and among them were large numbers of newspapermen, many of whom had signed anti-German tirades that were now frozen in print, marking them out for retribution by the occupiers and the various quislings who flocked to help them. For the duration of war, then, Lyon became something like the journalistic capital of France, but the journalists were effectively muzzled: although the southern zone was free of Germans, the Vichy authorities were just as zealous as their Wehrmacht tutors to the north in imposing a draconian censorship over the press. And so, bored and
désoeuvré
, the typical Parisian hack did what he always had done best when not holding a pen: he held a glass.

Haunting the
bouchons
in companionship with his Lyonnais confrères, dozens of these Parisian exiles discovered the Lyonnais habit of merry melancholy and passed the war years philosophizing over innumerable
pots
of Beaujolais in little back corners of little cafés on little back streets, where they could remake the world in peace and quiet.

It didn’t take them long to acquire a lasting taste for the wines of the gamay grape, and at war’s end they returned to the capital with a deep affection for the city that had harbored them in their time of distress and for the Beaujolais that had made their exile bearable. That affection was to serve the Beaujolais well as French life slowly returned to normal in the fifties and then during
les trente glorieuses
, the thirty glorious years of uninterrupted economic growth that began in the early sixties and rocketed the country to a pinnacle of prosperity the likes of which it had never known before.

Part of the fun of enjoying this prosperity was the
Concours du Meilleur Pot
, which the formerly exiled newspapermen imported lock, stock and barrel from Lyon. It was only natural for this same band of journalistic elbow-benders to lend their editorial support to that other curious Lyonnais institution that would soon be arriving in the big city: the mid-November tasting of the new Beaujolais wine.

Cynical, jaded old Paris took to both of these adventures with surprising, almost juvenile enthusiasm. In a trice, Beaujolais became the capital’s darling—and what Paris loved, the rest of the world would soon be adoring. Down around Villefranche, Belleville and Beaujeu, peasant vignerons just one generation removed from the hardscrabble days of the credit list at the baker’s and the cow as social security rubbed their eyes at the sales figures and wondered how it all had happened. It seemed almost too good to be true.

As usual, peasant good sense had seen clearly. In a way it
was
too good to be true. The Lyonnais were already beginning to grumble about this theft of their traditions and the commercialization of their confidential little pleasure. Nothing succeeds like success, they say, but then nothing goes out of fashion as fast as fashion, either. The newly successful peasants of the Beaujolais had never concerned themselves with fashion, not a whit. But in time they would be suffering from it.

V

INTERLUDE

THE GLORY YEARS APPROACH

It is a proven scientific fact that prominent among the identifying characteristics of
Homo journalisticus
is a partiality to liquid solutions of the alcoholic variety, most especially cherished if they are free. It was, then, a stroke of purest promotional genius when, in September of 1934, a Lyonnais newspaperman turned vigneron named Toto Dubois teamed up with grower-dealer-hustler-restaurant owner Victor Peyret (the very one who had transformed a sixteenth-century church into a wine cellar and bar) to invite the editorial team of
Le Canard Enchainé
down from Paris to dine at Peyret’s restaurant, Le Coq au Vin, located smack at the crossroads in the center of Juliénas. As the story has it today, the guys simply strolled out onto the street, hailed a passing cab or two and (doubtless having figured a way to charge the boondoggle to their expense accounts) made the five-hour trip in familiar Parisian comfort on the old pre-
autoroute
roads. On Peyret’s menu that evening were hot Lyonnais sausages
en brioche,
crackling andouillettes, coq au vin, steak grilled over grapevine twigs and trimmings,
gratin dauphinois
(scalloped potatoes wallowing in butter and crème fraiche), salads, a selection of cheeses and tarts—and, of course, limitless bottles of wine from the fields surrounding the village in every direction.

In essence, Dubois and Peyret were only carrying on with the grand old Beaujolais tradition of getting visitors good and drunk, but since in this case the visitors were journalists, they naturally bent their backs and elbows to the task with professional application. The result was, according to local legend, one of the most glorious acts of mass intemperance that the town had ever witnessed. Grateful for the food, the drink and the break from the dreary Depression-era routine of reporting on yet another strike and yet another government crisis, the
Canard
remained steadfastly loyal to Juliénas and the Beaujolais ever afterward, not hesitating to testify, in print, to its pivotal role in some of the newspaper’s most important editorial decisions.

The
Canard Enchainé
, the exotically named “Chained Duck,” is a French institution, a hybrid weekly that artfully combines political analysis, satire, gossip and enough whistle-blowing to topple governments or ruin the careers of politicians caught with their pants down or their hands in the public till. Free of ads and fiercely independent, the little paper punches far above the nominal weight of its slender eight pages: everyone who is in power or simply interested in power reads the
Canard.
It is respected, feared and very influential. The
Canard
’s account of the evening at the Coq au Vin, augmented afterward by regular references in its columns to the healthy, restorative powers of its preferred wine, proved to be a godsend for sales of Juliénas, thenceforward known as “the most Parisian” of the Beaujolais
crus.

Where the
Canard
’s team led, other brothers of the corporation were not far behind in helping the cause along. Returning to Paris after their wartime sojourns in Lyon, a coterie of refugee journalists who had advanced the principles of the Friends of Guignol by emptying uncounted
pots
in back-street
bouchons
decided to found their own similarly dedicated fellowship. The Académie Rabelais, they named it, and its mission was to bring to the bistros of the capital the noble Lyonnais tradition of briefly playing hooky from the responsibilities of adulthood with the help of several delicious
ballons
of cool Beaujolais. In 1954 the academy awarded its first Parisian
Coupe du Meilleur Pot
to a now-forgotten bistro, and if the impact of the story in the Paris press was not quite as striking and immediate as it had been in Lyon, where wine always has been a matter of serious and scholarly concern, the good word began spreading around town nonetheless. And “good” was the operative word, because times were at last beginning to look a little less grim. If memories of wartime deprivation, humiliation and destruction were still acute, the detested food rationing of the occupation was a thing of the past, France was rebuilding fast, and her shattered economy was approaching a mighty springboard of economic growth. For the investment of a few francs, a glass of the amiable thirst-quencher from the gamay grape was like a foretaste of the better life that lay just around the corner.

The symbiosis between Beaujolais and the press was well and truly launched, and the French were drinking wine again with gusto, averaging 150 liters a year per person by the early fifties. Beaujolais enjoyed its part in this renewal of the country’s traditional thirst, of course, and presently a new word was finding its way into the national vocabulary, an adjective of undocumented origin but pointedly specific application:
gouleyant.
A
gouleyant
wine was one that was light, supple and benevolent, free of complexes and pretension, one that slipped with pleasurable ease down the gullet. The adjective could be properly applied only to Beaujolais. With no other wine did it make any sense at all. Beaujolais owns
gouleyant
the way the Loire Valley’s white wines of the sauvignon grape own their curious nose of
pipi de chat
(cat pee) or gewürztraminers their characteristic signature of rose petals and litchis.

It was in this crucial period of reorganization and reconstruction that the French authorities finally managed to make some real headway in the huge task of putting their wine house in order. The vector for this redoubtably complex undertaking was INAO, and its primary weapon was AOC. We need to spend a little bit of time on these two cabalistic acronyms because, as baffling as they are for most foreigners (and for a lot of the French, too, for that matter), they are crucially important. INAO is
Institut National des Appellations d’Origine
and AOC is
appellationd’origine contrôlée
: the National Institute of Certified
⁴
Names and name of certified origin. Anyone with any interest at all in French wines should be familiar with some of the basic history lying behind the initials INAO and AOC, because they constitute the bedrock on which the entire industry is based.