I'll Drink to That (18 page)

Although not reaching its full effectiveness until postwar days, INAO had been founded in 1935, when the wine situation throughout the country was in chaotic disorder, and had been that way for half a century or more. It all went back to the phylloxera plague, a viticultural earthquake the aftershocks of which had continued for decades. The desperate wine shortage of the worst years had birthed the worrisome new habit of import—wine from Italy, Algeria, Greece or any other place that could help stanch the national thirst—and spawned the monstrous industry of fake wines that not only contained no grape juice at all, but were occasionally grave dangers to health as well. Then, from undersupply to oversupply, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction after desperate vignerons around the country planted and overplanted, sometimes with native grafts on U.S. rootstock, sometimes with foreign “direct producers” and sometimes with various hybrid novelties like the notorious, high-yield Noah. When too much wine flooded onto the market, prices collapsed and growers found themselves once more on the brink of ruin. Clearly a fix of some sort had to be found, because allowing unregulated market forces to run wild had led only to mayhem and violence.

With riots, destruction and even death marking peasant revolts that had required the army to be out restoring order, the Ministry of Agriculture had tried to take remedial action as early as 1905. There were several obvious priorities: get rid of fakes; stop or at least limit imports; rationalize production by codifying the country’s huge palette of wines; and put a halt to overplanting in order to keep yields down to manageable levels that would not burden the market with unsellable wines. The overarching goal was to establish a national map of designated areas where the various different wines should be made, to limit them to those areas and to award specific place names to wines originating in them, according to “local, loyal and consistent custom.”

It was a dauntingly complex project. France was the powerhouse, the world’s number one wine producer, but the makeup of her soils and microclimates, and the grapes that performed best in each, were so tremendously varied that it was imperative to identify the best of each growth and each
terroir.
After all, a Volnay first-growth Clos de la Rougeotte was not the same thing as a Volnay first-growth Fermiets-Clos de la Rougeotte, was it? And certainly a Brouilly ought not to be confused with a Côte de Brouilly. It was only judicious to indicate these shades of difference, these nuances, so that connoisseurs could make their choices intelligently. The intention was laudable. Translating it into practical, user-friendly reality was another story.

The ministry’s earliest efforts at reform had failed miserably, mostly because local politicians and winegrowers always got involved, yanking the covers over to their side of the bed and demanding special favors for “their” wines. After the 1905 reform flopped, so did following ones in 1911, 1913 and 1919. After the First World War, with lawsuits crowding the courts, recrimination flying and a detestable atmosphere of nascent rebellion overlying the industry, the government finally learned from its failures and got serious in 1935, with a new, comprehensive set of regulations that drew clear and realistic limits around France’s best winegrowing areas, stipulating that only vineyards within these limits could enjoy the privilege of using their names: a Côtes de Beaune had to really be from the Côtes de Beaune, and a Haut Médoc really from the Haut Médoc. But that wasn’t enough. In order to be certified, each wine would have to present “particular characteristics due to natural and human factors.” In other words, they would have to be good, proper, honest wines—and someone would be watching to make sure that they were. The goal was to give a clear message and guarantee to consumers: these wines are what the labels say they are. The French state vouches for them.

The vehicle doing that vouching for the state would be INAO, a mixed government-private organization based in Paris and carrying the official stamp of the Ministry of Agriculture. Significantly, its all-powerful oversight committee was made up not of bureaucratic officials but of wine professionals who knew the business intimately: two-thirds growers and one-third dealers. They were the ones who delivered AOC, the stamp of approval.

Fundamentally, INAO sprang from the same sense of urgency and the same philosophy of response that gave birth to the European Common Market two decades later: there was a big mess, and a strong organization was required to fix it. Institution-building, rule-making and certifying were very much in the air during the cataclysmic period between and after the two great wars that had torn Europe to shreds. Now a new set of wine assessors was organized and given some surprisingly tough regulatory powers. INAO controlled the number of individual vine plants that could be grown per hectare of ground, the quantity of wine that could be produced from them, its alcoholic content, what fertilizers and chemical agents would be allowed, in what manner the vines should be pruned, staked and tied up, the dates when harvesting could begin and even such details as the order of words on labels. The requirement of respect for “local, loyal and consistent custom” was clearly a statutory shot at sugar wines and other fakes, and the flat, across-the-board prohibition of irrigation
⁵
underlined the concern for producing wines naturally, in reflection of the true nature of different
terroirs
through years both good and bad—in other words, the “particular characteristics due to natural and human factors.”

The heaviness of INAO’s regulatory hand (as in the rules of behavior in the old Soviet Union, everything that is not forbidden seems to be obligatory) often strikes modern newcomers to the winemaking business—North and South Americans, Australians, New Zealanders—as an overweening form of nannyism that would make life hell for imaginative entrepreneurs, but that’s precisely the point: France had
had
plenty of imaginative entrepreneurs after the phylloxera crisis, and they had come close to discrediting the entire trade. The time had come to impose some order. Everything considered, then, it’s hard to fault the reasoning that inspired INAO’s powers. The fake wines, the shady commercial practices of mixing, flavoring, tinting and mislabeling, the occasionally grotesque overproduction (
faire pisser la vigne
) that sent supply soaring over demand and ruined prices—all of this had to be brought to heel if the wine industry were to be prevented from lurching from crisis to crisis.

Papa Bréchard put it succinctly: “INAO put an end to a century of fraud in French wines.”

Unfortunately, if the reform was healthy and necessary, it was also subject to the same political pressures and human frailties as the Ministry of Agriculture’s earlier efforts. Once the process of INAO certification began in earnest, everyone naturally clamored to be awarded the AOC stamp, and too many got it: eventually 45 percent of France’s total production received the precious label. Result: nearly five hundred AOC wines, grouped into regional, subregional and local growing areas of twelve principal “basins of production.” Not all of the wines were really good enough for the coveted AOC; the rules that governed them were not universal, but varied from one area to another; and in any case the rules were often opaque or even contradictory. Making a complicated situation even more complicated, another category intruded into the clutter: VDQS,
vins délimités de qualité supérieure
, for “superior quality” wines—a consolation prize for production that was good, but not quite up to AOC standard.

With all that, INAO tripped itself up. By earnestly trying to do too much too well, it created a model of labyrinthian complexity that was maddeningly difficult to understand, even for the French themselves, who rather enjoy complexity. Overzealous, the institute had composed a parochial canon by and for specialists—winegrowers, dealers, brokers, sommeliers and the like—but which entirely neglected another segment of the wine chain, perhaps the most vital one of all: the last one down the line, the ordinary consumer. Having set themselves the task of classifying and bringing order to the wines under their supervision, INAO carried it through in a typically rational, Cartesian manner, but without lending thought to eventually selling the wines. It was all for theory and nothing for practice: the French disease.

For the moment, it didn’t matter. As the world’s leading producer of fine wines—nearly a monopoly—France ruled the roost, and demand nicely exceeded supply. Good or bad, French wines sold easily, because the market had no other choice. Half a century later, after the rest of the world discovered the pleasures of drinking wine and the profits to be made from producing it, the French would be biting their fingernails for having locked themselves into such a highly specialized system. No one had anticipated the depressing truth of retail: the average wine buyer in Los Angeles or Hamburg—let alone in Peoria or Gelsenkirchen—didn’t really care about the nuance between Volnay Clos de la Roche and Volnay Ferniets-Clos de la Roche.

Today, when the vastly simpler modes of naming and classifying wines from the United States, South America and the antipodes—often little more than the name of the grape and a flashy trademark—are running commercial circles around the complexities of the French wine trade, it is fashionable to laugh off the AOC system as archaic and somehow symptomatic of French intellectual arrogance, but INAO’s founders deserve credit all the same. In their high-minded manner, they were only trying to inform intelligent buyers, to protect them from fraud, and to underline a reality that every serious wine lover at the time took for an obvious truth: different
terroirs
create different wines, each one of which changes from year to year, depending on what sort of weather the vines have experienced. This kind of detailed information and this kind of protection are not offered by the great masses of semi-industrial varietals that fill supermarket and liquor store shelves in today’s globalized world. The idea of wines that remain constantly the same, year in and year out, like tonic water or Diet Coke, is repugnant to the French mentality and contradictory to the logic of nature. And, as for the difficulty of fathoming INAO’s labeling system, the French can legitimately ask whether consumers are better off with too little information than with too much.

In 1935, when the reform creating INAO was promulgated, the growers around Villefranche, Belleville and Beaujeu may have turned their eyes toward Paris with a certain anxiety, but they were quickly reassured: the wines of the gamay had definitely earned the respectability that Philip the Bold and his descendants in the Côte d’Or had always refused them. The six
crus
of Brouilly, Fleurie, Chiroubles, Chénas, Morgon and Moulin-à-Vent earned their AOC label in 1936, and generic Beaujolais and Beaujolais-Villages followed in 1937. One year later Côte de Brouilly and Juliénas were similarly honored. The prettily named Saint-Amour, the northernmost of the
crus,
had to wait until after the war, in 1946. And the nine
crus
became ten when the intensive lobbying of vignerons in the little village of Régnié finally paid off in 1988 with the AOC label which, they were certain, they had deserved all along.

At the end of the war, when the Germans had been chased away and the vines were slowly incubating the fabled
millésimes
of 1945 and 1947 over long, hot summers, a casual observer who dropped into the Beaujolais would have encountered mostly idyllic, timeless scenes that might have tempted a Millet or Corot. The five or six thousand vigneron families working the land still lived in something like autarky, growing their own vegetables, drinking their own milk, making their own cheeses, and keeping rabbits, goats, chickens and a few pigs for the traditional feasting days. The man of the house, perhaps still in wooden shoes, manhandled a plow behind his horse in the vines, his wife either worked at his side or in the house, and the kids walked to the village school. It was still very much a time of handwork and horsework. Where horse and plow couldn’t go—high up at the top of the steepest slopes where the ground was the best, the sun stayed the longest, and where the old vines gave the finest wine—the vigneron labored with nothing more sophisticated than clippers, pickax and hoe, unless he was one of those who had invested in a winch, a strange-looking machine that first began appearing in the vineyards in the mid-thirties.

The winch formed all by itself a curious little side chapter of the Beaujolais story. Heavy, ungainly and powered by a putt-putting gasoline engine, winches gained special popularity in the steeply escarped vineyards of the Côte de Brouilly and Vauxrenard, near Fleurie, but they demanded a lot of work. First they had to be humped up to the top of the slope and firmly anchored with heavy crowbars. Then, with the gearbox set in neutral, the winch’s long cable could be pulled down to the bottom of the hill and attached to a plow. Grasping the wide handles behind this mechanical horse, the plowman slowly let himself be pulled uphill, fighting to keep the plow steady and the furrow straight as he advanced up to the summit while the winch’s drum ate the cable back in. This mechanism offered the advantage of power against gravity, but it also obliged the vigneron to make his vine rows not only rectilinear, but also in a straight up-and-down direction—which of course made it easier for winter rains and summer flash storms to cause erosion and gullying. This could be parried, or attenuated, by scraping up earth on the hillside with long, sideways scarrings, but it was all that much more work. Labor-saving devices often have a way of creating more labor.

Even so, the winch was a significant harbinger of the modernization and mechanization that would soon be sweeping over not just the Beaujolais but the entire French winegrowing and winemaking trade. Immediately after the war, a limited number of standard agricultural tractors—primitive, underpowered little ponies, but tractors nonetheless—began arriving in the region, but most vignerons had little use for them beyond the usual farm chores. Too low and too wide, they were unsuited for working in the vineyard rows, where they would flatten the vines as they passed through. But then, first in 1949 and in a steady stream in the succeeding years, came the
enjambeuse
: the “straddler.” This narrow, high-legged rig on wheels, pulled behind the vigneron’s horse, had enough ground clearance to pass right over the vines, straddling the rows without damaging them. Furnished with a central tank, a pump and spraying arms that reached out on both sides, the rig could spray four rows of vine at a single pass. That was a real revolution for the vigneron who had been accustomed to slogging through his vines with a copper tank on his back and a single spray hose in his hand.