I'll Drink to That (24 page)

VII

ONE OF US

A CHAMPION FOR THE BEAUJOLAIS

The Beaujolais harvest was small in 1957, a mere 240,000 hectoliters (the vines had suffered from the hail and deep frosts of the previous year), but the quality was excellent. Things were coming along nicely that year for young Georges Duboeuf, too.

At twenty-four he was just out of the army and freshly married to Rolande. He and his bride had set up in a wing of the family house in Chaintré, and the Duboeuf Frères Pouilly-Fuissé was selling well. His head was full of addresses for splendid wines both red and white, and thanks to Paul Blanc, he was becoming more and more widely known in French restaurant circles as a
courtier
(wine scout or broker) of unusual talent. He had already been selling to Lichine for a couple of years when he and Rolande loaded the Citroën Tube with six hundred bottles of Pouilly-Fuissé and a mattress and clattered off across the Massif Central to make his first personal delivery to Bordeaux. The great man wanted to meet him at home in his fiefdom.

Georges had no idea what to expect when he was ushered into Lichine’s office, and so, logically enough, he began by speaking about his Pouilly-Fuissé. Lichine said no, let’s not bother with that. I’m busy with journalists and distributors this afternoon, but we have to talk. This evening you’ll come to dinner at the Prieuré, and you’ll spend the night at Château Lascombes. I’ve got a nice room for you. The scene was like a general interviewing a newly arrived private. Refusal was out of the question for Georges, all the more so since he and Rolande had been expecting to spend the night in the back of the Tube after liberating it of its bottles. That was why they had packed the mattress.

Lichine was no dummy. He already knew all about the excellence of the Pouilly-Fuissé from Chaintré, and he had been hearing a lot about the talents of this Duboeuf boy. Now, sizing him up in person at dinner, he listened intently as Georges described his custom bottling operation. Even for an illusionless old pro like Lichine, hearing Duboeuf expatiate about wine was an impressive and edifying experience. “Georges,” he exclaimed, “that’s exactly what I’m looking for! You’re going to handle the Beaujolais and Mâconnais for me. You go to the domains, bottle the stuff and send it to me in Bordeaux. I’ll put the labels on and sell it. I only want domain wines—Moulin-à-Vent and Fleurie to start with, along with Pouilly-Fuissé. After that, we’ll see.”

The delivery of those six hundred bottles turned into a two-day sojourn in Margaux, during which Georges took the full atomic blast of Lichine’s hospitality, charm and salesmanship. Bordeaux—the money, the sophistication, the power—was dazzlingly different, miles above the little peasant world of the Beaujolais-Mâconnais. For Georges, that first visit was a commercial
coup de foudre
(love at first sight), as if destiny had meant him to work with Lichine. An entire new universe of business prospects was dancing in his head when he and Rolande took their leave of Prieuré-Lichine.

That night, the Duboeufs parked the Tube in a village in the Massif Central and bedded down on the mattress. When Georges awoke the next morning and, scratching and yawning, slid open the Citroën’s door, he found that they were installed smack in the middle of the town’s open-air market, making an embarrassing new attraction of themselves for early morning shoppers, between a butcher and a fishmonger. It was a salutary humbling after the glitter and luxury of Margaux, and a reminder: there was a lot of work to be done.

Over the next years Georges scouted so perspicaciously in the Beaujolais that a second promotion arrived: Lichine asked him to expand the operation and do the same throughout the whole of Burgundy. This unlikely collaboration of contrasting Franco-American temperaments was to last for a couple of decades, enriching both men and bonding the two in a solid friendship that lasted until Lichine’s death in 1989. Most importantly for Georges, it established a first-class reputation for him among wine distribution professionals. Although he remained virtually anonymous to the wine-buying public in America during most of that period (while the labels were all Lichine’s), the people who ordered and sold Burgundy and Beaujolais knew where it was coming from. When Lichine reoriented his operation to concentrate on Bordeaux wines alone, the distributors were already primed for Georges to step right in and take his place with Beaujolais wines, now under the Duboeuf label.

As yet, though, all that was in the future. For the moment, as he and Rolande motored homeward, east-northeast over the twisting roads of Central France, Georges’ business was still a shoestring operation, about as small as one could be: himself as wine prospector and bottler, Rolande as wife, assistant and all-purpose factotum. When Georges ran the bottling machinery, it was Rolande in her blue workman’s blouse who watched over the bottle-washing apparatus. When Georges was off scouting and tasting, she handled the phone, accounting and billing; and when they began hiring, it was Rolande who washed the employees’ work clothes and cracked the whip to encourage them to work as hard as Georges and herself. Or maybe just half as hard; that would be enough.

The French were still drinking about 150 bottles of wine a year per capita in those days, and it was a comfortable seller’s market—a good time to be in the wine business, then, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be improved. Georges had an idea, one that he had been caressing for several years. It centered on the
pot Beaujolais,
the graceful, thick-bottomed glass carafe containing exactly forty-six centiliters of gamay wine, mandatory accompaniment to the exertions of
boules
players, source of inspiration for countless hacks, poets and dreamers in bars in and around Lyon, the very one that the abbé Augustin Ponosse always emptied like an honest man as he made his parochial rounds in Clochemerle. Why not, Georges reasoned, sell Beaujolais in a bottle shaped like the
pot
? His innate sense of commerce told him that the novelty would be a hit with the wine-buying public, and events were to prove him entirely right. In 1957, though, there was a problem: no such bottle existed, and it would cost a lot of money to have one made.

The amount Georges needed to get the bottle made was 500,000 old francs, or somewhat less than $2,000. For any well-established company, or just a normally prosperous private citizen, raising that amount of money would have posed no particular problem, but even so, $2,000 was not a negligible sum in 1957. Considering inflation and the inevitable debasement of currencies over the years, its value would be at least ten times greater than today. It would have covered, for instance, a year’s tuition at an Ivy League college of the time, or bought a quite respectable new car.

Georges drew a sketch of his ideal bottle, compromising with the realities of commerce by bringing its capacity up from forty-six centiliters to half a liter, and took it to several of the glass manufacturers who had plants around the wine area. All of them but one, a little company in Chalon-sur-Saône, turned him away with more or less polite expressions of refusal: not worth it, no market for it. The company in Chalon at least took him seriously enough to quote him the 500,000 franc figure, but the matter was pretty much academic, because Georges didn’t have anything close to that amount of cash. He
did
have enough money, though, to pay a local craftsman to turn him a wooden demo model of the bottle on his lathe. That was step one. Step two was obviously to round up the funds, but the banks weren’t lenders in those tight-credit days before free-flowing commerce. There was another way—the old way, the same informal, clannish Beaujolais solidarity system that had allowed him to make his early deliveries with Constant Charbonnier’s Juva 4. Georges went to see Le Père Vermorel.

Fittingly enough, Old Man Vermorel lived in Vaux—Clochemerle itself. I’ve heard Georges tell the story of Père Vermorel more than once, and each time, unfailingly, his voice takes on a dreamy, tender tone as he remembers the time and the man, because everything he loves about his native land is reflected in the duality of person and place as it was that afternoon: the steep, snaking climb up Vaux’s rue Gabriel Chevallier, the church with its massive square clock tower and Romanesque portal, the
boulodrome,
the little bistro Chez la Jeanne, between the bakery and the château—and, of course, Old Man Vermorel. If anyone could advise him on how to get his bottle done, he would be the one.

“He was extraordinary: a perfect vigneron’s face, round, red-cheeked and mustachioed, a straw boater on his head and a cellar master’s apron over his belly. He had a house up on the ridge overlooking Vaux, and his wife was a former schoolteacher. Monsieur Vermorel was the village sage, like the unofficial priest or mayor. People used to come and consult him for advice on family matters, inheritances and the like. He would receive them up on his terrace, and then after having a talk you would always go down and drink a
canon
with him at La Jeanne’s place.

“So we talked and I had my drink with him and we talked some more, and that was all there was to it. A few weeks later I got a letter from him with his check for 500,000 francs. ‘Get your bottle made,’ he wrote. ‘Pay me back whenever you can.’ And that’s how I started my business.”

With that, the Duboeuf couple left Chaintré for new quarters in the village of Romanèche-Thorins, squeezed between the slopes of Moulin-à-Vent and the N. 6 main highway. Georges had his bottle made, patented the design and ordered the first consignment. It was then, late in 1957, that he had an uncharacteristically bad idea—or, rather, a very nice idea that proved disastrously impossible to carry out.

L’Écrin Mâconnais-Beaujolais
, he called it—the Mâcon-Beaujolais Showcase. Reasoning that his years of prospecting had acquainted him with the best that the region had to offer, he persuaded forty-five top vignerons to join him in a hybrid joint venture (essentially a winegrowers’ union, the first ever in the Beaujolais) for commercializing their wines. On paper, it looked perfect: the best vignerons, the best wines and a dynamic young man—a peasant and vigneron himself, not a bourgeois like the dealers whose arrogant ways had humiliated their caste for so long—to sell them. Georges would put the skill of his nose and palate to the task of selecting the best of each man’s vats, come around with his equipment to bottle them, then label and sell them with the individual vigneron’s name, under the Showcase logo.

The promise of the name on the label signified a recognition and legitimation of a sort that had never occurred before in the Beaujolais, certainly not for the smallholders that Georges had discovered in his wanderings. My wine, my name—my identity. Vigneron pride of personal accomplishment had never been taken into account before, but Georges saw it day after day as he sniffed, tasted, spat and entered into erudite discussions of yeasts, temperatures, fermentations, fungi, phases of the moon, rainfall, the north wind and all the other countless imponderables that each winegrower juggled in his own way to give birth to the expression of his talent and care that came once a year and once only—his sole professional chance to say: this is me. Considering how systematically and for how long the gamay grape and Beaujolais wines had been held in contempt by their wealthy confrères to the north and west, their sense of affronted dignity was all that much stronger. From his first juvenile turns of the grape crusher’s crank, the winemaking experience had taught Georges to never underestimate the motivating power of peasant pride. For the vignerons who signed up with
L’Écrin,
the personalized labels meant respect long overdue; and the prospect of their wines being sold to the widening list of restaurants clamoring for the Duboeuf super-selection was very much like a consecration.

“In a way, you could say that the dealers in the old days acted like medieval lords,” Georges reflected some years back as he thought back on his early days in the trade. “The peasant winegrowers were in a hopelesssituation with them. As a winegrower myself, I revolted, and I was right to do it.”

Georges always keeps a little supply of jotting paper or index cards in his shirt pocket to note down ideas and reminders, and his progress on the climb from zero to becoming the region’s top dealer and most widely respected wine expert can be traced directly back to these little slips of paper. One that he jotted down for himself was a personal code of conduct. It offers a revealing peek at the altar boy scruples that never quite abandoned him in adulthod. Eventually he had it printed out in black-and-white:

Words of that sort that can sound dangerously hokey or meretricious in the cut-and-thrust world of modern business—after all, the eternal rule of all business everywhere is to buy low and sell high, and entire advertising and PR staffs are hired to disguise or sugar that central fact— but Duboeuf is dead serious. He speaks with such grave sincerity that it would require a misanthrope of Olympic-level cynicism to doubt him. The forty-five vignerons of
Écrin
sensed the same thing as Paul Blanc, Lichine and all the others who dealt with him over any length of time. It was the George Washington syndrome: Georges Duboeuf could not tell a lie.

The vignerons believed him, and they believed
in
him, in spite of his youth. His energy and dedication were impressive, he was a straight talker, and he had good ideas: his new bottle, the
pot,
was a beauty, already widely praised by the restaurant trade. In short, everything augured well for the new association when it got under way. That was the theory, anyway. Unfortunately, practice didn’t follow theory, and the
Écrin
proved to be a quixotic bust. No sooner had Georges swung his little troop into action than he got that sinking feeling and began to realizewhat experience ought to have taught him already: each one of the forty-five vignerons was in love with his own wine and expected it to be promoted with the utmost vigor, sold first and in greater quantity than the others. Manager of the operation, Georges took the blame when it didn’t happen.