I'll Drink to That (21 page)

“There was a monsieur who came around with a little cart that he pulled from town to town, the
Caïffa.
‘
Caïffa, Caïffa!
’ he shouted outside the gate, and we’d all come running out of the house to see him. He wore a splendid green uniform, boots and a postman’s cap, and he was selling coffee and spices in little boxes. Then there was the
patti
, too, the junkman. ‘
A aux pattes!
’ he shouted. It was a question: any junk or rabbit skins for sale? He picked up anything imaginable, all the things you didn’t want anymore and were ready to throw out. All these people were part of the rhythm of the seasons for us, each thing in its time. Christmas, Easter, haying time, harvest time, time for killing the pig, time to release the wine, time for the distiller to come for making eau-de-vie . . . Everything contributed to a familiar routine that hardly changed from year to year.”

If anything, the ancient routines of country life became even more frozen into the tracks of tradition during the war and the German occupation. With no cars on the roads anymore and hardly any civilian trains, the norm for transportation was horse, foot or bicycle. Rationing prevailed throughout the country, but in any case there was hardly anything left in the shops to buy. The Beaujolais fell instinctively into its ancestral habits of farming for survival, and villages shuttered up and drew back into themselves, isolated little units waiting the war out, their populations virtually immobile, as if thrown back into the nineteenth century. Now the city dwellers in Lyon and Mâcon hungrily envied their country cousins, because they knew that whatever happened there would always be fresh food on the farms: milk, cheese, vegetables, eggs, and occasionally meat, too: chicken, rabbits, sometimes game and, most lusciously, fresh pork, blood sausage and andouillettes around pig-killing time. The entire year’s production of wine was supposed to be reserved for the German military authorities, but everyone knew that the peasants held back as much of it as they could, and enough of the excellent 1941 and 1943 vintages found a way into commerce to offer solace during the long wait for liberation.

One year before the war erupted, five-year-old Georges had begun his education by trudging up the hill behind the house to the Chaintré elementary school, a single room in the town hall. He carried a basket containing the lunch his mother had prepared for him, and at noon Madame Delancelot, the schoolmistress, ushered him and five or six other urchins into her apartment above the schoolroom and heated their food on her stove. The other children took lunch at home in the village. After elementary school Georges graduated to the secondary
école laïque
, a secular all-boys school, pendant to the
école de filles
into which the girls were segregated. Public morality still largely separated the sexes in those days, both in schooling and in civic responsibilities—French women, remember, were not trusted with the right to vote until Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government gave it to them in 1944.

With no cars, no movies, no comic books, no television and of course nothing even remotely resembling all the other transistorized amusements of young people today, Georges spent most of his early years like all the other sons and daughters of the vine: studying at school and working at home. The horizons opened up at war’s end. Just entering his teens now, he swam and fished in the Saône, joined a little theater group rehearsing in a room above the bakery in Chaintré under the guidance of the village priest and tested his physical endurance by biking through the Beaujolais hills. Professional bicycle racers were his heroes. He covered the walls of his bedroom with his own caricatures of the top competitors and listened to reports of races on the little crystal set radio that he built himself at the cost of a few francs. (Based on a crystal of galena, a rock that vibrates to radio waves, this granddaddy of all receptors uses neither electricity nor batteries, but requires headphones to be heard.) By the time he was fifteen and sixteen, his own bike trips had become long-range expeditions with friends—up to two hundred kilometers a day, once to Switzerland and back, another time to Nice, and a round trip to Marseille, carrying their own tents and provisions. He discovered on those trips, without quite realizing it, that he was a leader—or, rather, that if someone had ideas, others would follow. Young Georges wanted to do things and go places.

“I never intended to stay in Chaintré as a vigneron,” he told me one afternoon as we drove back from a visit with Roger in the old Duboeuf house at the edge of Chaintré, surrounded in every direction by a sea of vines. “I had this wonderful teacher in the
école laïque,
Mademoiselle Jeanine Frontier, and I told her I wanted to go live in Canada. She found me a Canadian pen pal whom I corresponded with for a while, but then my mother sent me for three years to Catholic boarding school in Mâcon, and there I really got interested in sports. That’s when I developed the ambition to make my life as a sports trainer.”

Normal schooling was finished at age sixteen. Georges read about a new discipline just then coming into the French educational network, the paramedical practice of
masseur-kinésiethérapeute,
similar to the American chiropractor. There were different options, but what interested him was the specific sports angle, which was taught at a specialized school in the Paris suburb of Maisons-Alfort. Georges studied for the entrance exam, easily passed it and boarded the train to the capital, where a cousin who had an apartment in the Latin Quarter on the Boulevard St. Michel had offered to put him up. Everything seemed to be in place for the beginning of a career in a white blouse with a handful of liniment.

Georges’s bright new ambition lasted exactly two months. The country boy hadn’t been able to imagine the realities of student life and commuting in the big city. “I spent more than two hours a day on the bus and in the metro. After a while I realized it just wasn’t possible, losing all that time going back and forth. It was stifling. The stress was too much. I finally said no. I couldn’t live in Paris like that. So I came back to Chaintré, where my professors were my brother and my uncle, and my school was the apprenticeship of winemaking.”

In truth, there wasn’t much about winemaking that he hadn’t already learned over the years since his first turns of the grape crusher’s crank, but he and Roger refined their methods and procedures with manic, perfectionist determination. “We turned away from a lot of the old local habits,” said Georges. “A lot of growers used to use rusty old buckets or tubs to collect the grapes. Impurities like that could affect the wine, and sometimes give it a metallic taste, so we ordered special wicker baskets instead. We were the first ones to use them. For the harvest, Roger insisted that we had to clean the vinifying room and all the equipment a week early—hose down and scrub the floor, clean the filters, then hose down the press and the vats and wipe them with eau-de-vie. There were just the two of us, but we were very, very meticulous about the work, because we shared the same respect for wine and the same passion for making it right.”

For the Duboeuf brothers, the only right Pouilly-Fuissé was a perfect Pouilly-Fuissé: bright gold with glints of green, mellow, richly redolent of ripe fruit, grilled almonds and nuts, but at the same time balanced with enough of the citric touch of acidity to prevent it from turning soft and flabby. Severely trimming back their vines and clipping their buds, the brothers deliberately lowered their yield per hectare, to ensure that their grapes developed harmoniously by drawing the optimum of nourishment from the soil.

As estimable as this policy was, though, it was confounded by the realities of the economic chain of command. Like all the other growers, Georges and Roger were victims of the syndrome of the little window in Villefranche: for selling their wine, they were a tributary to the dealers—
le négoce
—and the dealers set the price, take it or leave it. The price was the same for everyone, low yields or high, passion for perfection or not. So what was the point of limiting the yield, when you could make a lot more money by the ancient dodge known as
faire pisser la vigne
?

And that wasn’t the end of it. Once the samples had been tested and the sale agreement signed, the dealers sent their tank trucks around, siphoned off the storage vats, carted the wine away, bottled it at their premises and sold it under their own labels. All the lovely Pouilly-Fuissé that Roger and Georges had worked so devotedly to bring to perfection disappeared into anonymous bulk batches. That hurt almost worse than the money they lost by limiting their yields. It was an insult to their pride as artisans, and it wasn’t even smart, because the system only encouraged sloppy winemaking. Georges knew there had to be a better way. In 1951 he set off in search of it. He was in his eighteenth year when he stuck a couple of bottles of Pouilly-Fuissé into the saddlebag of his blue bike and set out in the direction of Thoissey.

The story of Georges Duboeuf’s beginning in the wine business has been frequently written, but what is most significant is his prescience: he was the first to see what should have been glaringly obvious to everyone, and he was young enough—not settled into the stultifying ruts of routine—to go out and do something about it. His idea of selling restaurants exceptional wine in bottles, directly from selected producers, rather than relying on the traditional practice of selling whole barrels to bistros, was an inspired anticipation of the changing trends of the modern world, and it had never been done before—not in the Beaujolais, in any event. The days when bistros and restaurants bought wine in bulk and bottled it by hand in their cellars (usually reached via a trapdoor in the floor by the bar, then a vertiginous ladder down into the black hole) were drawing to a close. Professionalism and specialization were entering the modern world; the old folklore was on the way out. And Georges Duboeuf, the kid solemnly leaning on the pedals that afternoon as he left Chaintré, was gifted with an extraordinary lucidity that in following years was to make him the author of a considerable pack of innovations that, put together, constituted something very much like a revolution in the wine trade.

The famous first bike ride to Thoissey was easy, a mere ten kilometers or so down the N. 6, then a hook left across the Saône and a pleasant promenade in the shade of a majestic canopy of towering roadside plane trees to Paul Blanc’s famous restaurant, Le Chapon Fin. The great chef received the boy in the bar. The standard version of the story is that Blanc tasted on the spot, but I suspect that he took Georges’ samples, put them in his cellar or the fridge to settle and cool off, then contacted him a day or so later. At any event the result was this: “
Petit
,” he growled, “I’ll take your white wine. And if you can find me some reds as good as this, I’ll take them, too.”

He found them, and then some. In coming years the spectacle of this black-haired youth with the soft voice and the inquiring brown eyes, as skinny as a Giacometti statue and hardly any more voluble, single- mindedly nosing through vineyards, cellars and
caves coopératives
in a quest to do as Chef Blanc had said, was to become one of the unfailing constants of Beaujolais life. Sooner or later, everyone who had anything to do with wine would have met or heard about Georges Duboeuf. For the moment, though, all that interested him in 1951 was to squirm free of the dealers’ armlock and sell his own Pouilly-Fuissé, under his own label, as he and Roger made it.

That took a little doing. For one thing, he had no proper bottling equipment—almost no individual vignerons did. Bottling in any appreciable quantity had always been the exclusive domain of the dealers; growers had only simple hand devices in their cellars, often no more sophisticated than funnels and a basic corking device, for their use at home or for filling the sample bottles they brought on their yearly treks to the little window in Villefranche. Georges went a notch up from that. Biking north to Mâcon, he picked up a secondhand pump, some piping, filters and a slightly more sophisticated corking device, and arranged with a printer for a supply of labels of his own design. It was still all hand-operated gear, but it was enough to put their own production into bottles.

“We were so confident of the quality of our wine that we dared to go knocking on some more doors after Paul Blanc encouraged us,” Georges explained. “I wasn’t really a born businessman, but I was proud of my product and I could personally guarantee its quality. I suppose I had more of a feeling for communication than Roger. He stayed in Chaintré watching over the wine and studying archaeology and genealogy, while I went out and did the selling. At the start, it was only our own Pouilly-Fuissé, and we were using the labels that we designed together. I used to sit up at night cutting them out of the printer’s sheets, because I didn’t have a machine for that.

“Paul Blanc helped us tremendously, because he liked what we were doing and the way we did it. He came and visited us in Chaintré, then talked to his fellow cooks about us. Next thing we knew, we got orders from some very prestigious places: the Hôtel de Paris in Sens, the Grand Monarque in Chartres, the Aigle Noir in Fontainebleau, Chez Pauline in Paris, le Mouscardin in St. Tropez.”

Still a teenager, Georges found himself with privileged entry to some of the heavy hitters of French gastronomy. It was a very considerable hand-up for his budding enterprise, but as unexpected as this may seem, it was also something like the norm within the cooking trade. Although frequently factious and disputatious in most normal pursuits, the French can demonstrate extraordinary depths of solidarity within certain professions whose roots lie in the world of medieval artisanry and the cooperative traditions of
les Compagnons du Devoir
, the ancestors of today’s Freemasons. Nowhere is this truer than in haute cuisine, where an improvised, shifting but constantly active tom-tom beat of phone calls, faxes and e-mails keeps top chefs apprised of what the others are doing, how they are doing and why—all the while passing tips, contacts and warnings back and forth. Naturally there are tendencies, leanings, clans, cliques, divisions and schisms within the whole, but the information goes around nonetheless, and at lightning speed: if some farmer grows truly exceptional leeks, beets or turnips, he won’t remain anonymous for long. Paul Blanc was only following the traditions he had learned during his own apprenticeship when he passed the word into his network of restaurateur friends that there was some unusually fine Pouilly-Fuissé to be had from the Duboeuf brothers in Chaintré.