I'll Drink to That (25 page)

For three exhausting years he plugged along in the three separate functions that he had assumed for himself: selecting his wines batch by batch; bottling them at the property; then trying to sell them equitably, giving each member of the association equal time and attention and paying each producer individually according to the number of his bottles sold. His brainstorm was going nicely, too—by the third year of activity he’d reached the magic plateau of a million bottles of
Écrin
wine sold. That should have made everybody happy, but it didn’t. The multiple, cross-referenced system that Georges had invented was complicated to begin with, but the hurt feelings, the jealousies and the suggestions of favoritism that it generated increased the complications exponentially.

“Vignerons will be vignerons,” said Georges with a fatalistic shrug. “They quarreled then the way they quarrel now. Nothing’s changed. Everyone wanted to be first. Chiroubles thought I was favoring Morgon, and Morgon didn’t like what I was doing for Fleurie. And so on and so on.”

Finally it was all too much. The unanticipated fourth function of playing nanny to a querulous pack of Gallic
artistes
of winemaking overwhelmed his patience and gifts for diplomacy. He threw up his hands and resigned. By 1961 the
Écrin
was finished.

It was time for a serious reappraisal. At age twenty-seven, his worldly advantages were several: a dwelling house and a grime-sided old workshop building with adjacent storage sheds in Romanèche-Thorins, purchased three years earlier for the
Écrin
; a devoted, industrious wife, baby daughter Fabienne and newborn son Franck; the beat-up Citroën Tube; a fat address book for top-level wines; the Lichine connection; the unanimous respect of Beaujolais and Mâconnais vignerons; and the placement of his wines in an enviably high number of prestigious restaurants throughout France. A nice little niche. A man could live comfortably enough with that.

Circumstances, though, were not shaping up for Georges Duboeuf to remain in a little niche. For one thing, Paul Bocuse had come into his life. The future emperor of French cuisine had not even earned his first Michelin star yet—that was to come in 1962, followed a year later by a second one and then, in 1965, by the third—but it was inevitable that Paul Blanc’s grapevine would finally lead Georges to the Lyon suburb of Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or, home of this force of nature seven years his senior and infinitely more schooled by natural inclination in the art of public relations, publicity and the care and handling of the press.

Paul Bocuse had always carried a lot of space around with him: big personality, big aura. Apart from his unsurpassed native talent for the preparation and presentation of food, he also possessed a sunny, sybaritic disposition, prodigious reserves of energy and an easy, unforced charisma. In many ways he was Duboeuf’s opposite: a robust, spontaneous, frequently brash extrovert and something of a heller where Georges was careful, meticulous, reserved, reined-in. But each man sensed the uncommon human and professional qualities of the other, and the comradeship that developed between them was virtually instantaneous. Best friends, they would soon be roaming the world together with their wives, on vacations that were partly professional inspection and comparison tours (restaurants, vineyards), partly establishing business contacts and partly the simple pleasures of ground-level ethnology among the mysterious inhabitants in enormous automobiles and wooden houses on the other side of the Atlantic: Bocuse fastidiously peeling a hot dog with his Opinel pocketknife; Duboeuf sticking his learned nose into a glass of foxy New York State wine and keeping a straight face.

Naturally, Bocuse stocked his wine cellar with a range of Duboeuf Beaujolais and maintained it there right through and into his ascension to the gastronomic firmament of three Michelin stars. This was relatively unusual. Many three-star restaurants considered the prestige level (and the profit potential) of the wine of the gamay grape to be below their lofty standards. The old prejudices hang on hard.

Where Bocuse led, others followed. His enthusiastic endorsement spread Duboeuf wines beyond Paul Blanc’s network into his own more extensive one, the elite world of France’s haute cuisine establishment, then around Europe, and eventually America and Japan, too, because this was a man of singular influence. More and more frequently now, Duboeuf’s name was appearing on wine lists of serious restaurants everywhere. Clients liked the prices, liked the look of the elegant oval labels Georges had designed and, most of all, liked what they were drinking. The news got around.

But there was more: it was one thing when Bocuse passed the word to his fellow chefs—the likes of Jean and Pierre Troisgros, Roger Vergé, Michel Guérard, Paul Haeberlin—but quite another when he corralled and oriented the herds of international journalists who flocked to Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or, eager to meet this chef whom everyone was talking about and who, before long, would be known as one of the principal founders of the movement called nouvelle cuisine. Majestic in his brilliant white, floor-length apron, his high starched toque (chef’s hat) and his imperial manner, Bocuse force-fed them
poulet en vessie
and
loup en croûte
, poured Brouilly down their throats until they gagged with pleasure, then sent them on to Romanèche-Thorins to meet the man he was already describing as
le roi du Beaujolais
(the king of Beaujolais).

“
Formidable!
” Paul would exclaim. “
Extraordinaire!
” Off the scriveners went, and for the first time there was an opportunity for them to write about the personality Georges Duboeuf himself and not just the wines he sold. A short exposure to the man made it obvious that Bocuse’s recommendation was not a line of bogus goods, but they found it too frustratingly difficult to make good striking copy from this Duboeuf guy. At the time, he was a mere
courtier,
a small operator compared to the major
négociants
, so there was no particular money angle to write about. He wasn’t funny and outrageous like Bocuse, so the eccentricity angle didn’t work, either. Deprived of easy outs, the press usually fell back on the wines. Some of the more discerning ones even picked up on an interesting phenomenon lying just over the horizon: the growing popularity of the new wine, the one that the growers called
primeur.
But the real story of Georges Duboeuf—his intelligence, his encyclopedic knowledge of wine, his passionate love for the Beaujolais countryside, his quiet determination, the sense of ethics and esthetics that gripped him, his essential role as advisor to vignerons, his prodigious capacity for work, the almost painful sincerity that drove him—remained largely undiscovered.

When the journalists left, Georges turned back to work, as usual. The more he had, the more new work developed. He began hiring his first personnel well before age thirty—a few warehousemen, drivers and freight handlers, others to man the bottling line—but the specializations were very much open-ended. As often with young enterprises, everyone did a bit of everything, including the boss, and what they didn’t know they learned by improvising.

“He took me on even though I didn’t have any qualifications,” said Jean Bererd, a seventy-five-year-old retired vigneron from Le Perréon who in 1962 became one of Georges’ earliest employees after he threw his back out defying gravity as he clung to his winch plow on the steep slopes of the climb up to Vaux-en-Beaujolais. I met Bererd in company with his son Bruno, forty, in the handsome salon-style
caveau
of his house, a few dozen yards behind the church in Le Perréon. As usual—as always with the vignerons of the Beaujolais—one of the first subjects to arise was Duboeuf’s legendary capacity for work.

“He was always in the office before anybody else, of course, and stayed much later, too—really an exceptional worker. When the bottling line broke down, we went to see him and he came and fixed it himself—took off his jacket, fixed it, then went back to the office for more paperwork, or out to the vineyards to taste more wine. He was like that all the time. Never stopped.

“He was young, but he was born to lead, not follow. That’s why he left the
Écrin
. You could see it immediately—a very big personality. We liked him a lot. He knew how to motivate people without ever raising his voice. Rolande, she did raise her voice sometimes, but she kept on us. She was everywhere. Strong, tough woman. She worked almost as hard as he did.”

“Aw, Duboeuf’s just a normal guy,” cracked Bruno. “He’s twice as old as me, so he works twice as hard.”

From the very first day of his career—that seminal meeting with Paul Blanc in Thoissey—Georges had recognized a special kinship with restaurant professionals, particularly chefs. Almost unfailingly, the natural complementarity of wine and food was reflected in the relations between the men and women who had built their lives around either discipline; the kitchen and the cellar understood and respected each other immediately and instinctively, without need for the conventional diplomatic niceties and mannerisms that are de rigueur in most sectors of French society. With the Michelin red restaurant guide his indispensable companion as he delivered bottles and took away empties, Georges frequented a good number of the elite of the French culinary establishment and bonded effortlessly with them: fellow artisans on their way up in the world. None of them gave him more work in those early days than Jean Ducloux, owner and chef of the wonderful two-star restaurant Greuze in the riverside city of Tournus, twenty miles north of Mâcon.

He was a case, this Ducloux, an authentic character of the Beaujolais-Burgundy region, a brusque, no-nonsense, hustling entrepreneur of the old school who had been everywhere and done everything in a cooking career that had begun on the day he turned thirteen. He had a voice like a foghorn, a pugnacious in-your-face manner, a command of slang like a French version of a Damon Runyon character, and a jet-black wig covering the pate that had gone bald overnight after he lived through the terror of discovering himself in the middle of the impact zone of an American bombardment of Lyon in 1944. Ducloux had built up a thriving catering business that he ran simultaneously with his very traditional Escoffier-style restaurant, and his specialty was feeding gourmet meals to large—often very large—numbers of diners. Wherever a lot of people wanted to sit down and eat together, Ducloux was prepared to go there and feed them. Equipped with an army surplus field kitchen left over from World War I, a jeep to pull it and a small fleet of accompanying trucks, he led gastronomic caravans that crept at 25 mph through the Burgundy countryside like a circus, trailing fragrances of onion soup, roast veal and snails in garlic, butter and parsley. In young Georges Duboeuf he found his preferred purveyor of wine, because Georges’ Beaujolais and Pouilly-Fuissé were authentic gems of the region, reasonably priced and always available. They were always available because Georges never said no to a Ducloux order, even if he had to deliver it himself—which he chose to do rather frequently, because joining Ducloux’s circus was like briefly playing hooky from the routine of normal work and entering another reality, one that had a touch of magic to it. There was more than a bit of theater to the lunch and dinner celebrations that Ducloux organized, and the soft-spoken, impassive young wine scout harbored a secret passion—his carefully concealed grasshopper side—for the world of spectacles. In time, he would be doing some serious organizing of them himself.

“Ah, là là,”
he said, recalling these heroic days of his professional youth. “I did dozens of events with Jean, and it was always an adventure. Once he did a dinner for two thousand people in Montceau-les-Mines. I opened two thousand bottles of Beaujolais that day all by myself, one by one. Jean was an important client for me, and a friend, too. So I took good care of him.”

One bottle of wine for each person at the table was just about the minimum in those days. Neither traffic cops, Breathalyzers nor the systematic pursuit of boozy drivers had yet come into practice, and the Renaults, Peugeots, Talbots, Simcas and the ridiculous little 2CV, the Citroën Deux Chevaux, the engineering aberration with the sewing machine engine, the corrugated sheet metal body and baby carriage suspension, rocked and rolled around French highways with an ethylic abandon that would be unthinkable today.

The country was booming in the sixties, the first decade of the great postwar expansion that was to see Paris leading Europe into its future as one of the world’s most muscular economic powerhouses. France had been chased out of its North African colonies, had happily passed the hot potato of Vietnam over to the Americans and, under the astonishingly theatrical leadership of Charles de Gaulle, was insistently assuring the world that it had reassumed its rightful place as a great power, exploding an atomic bomb here, then a hydrogen bomb there, building missiles, launching nuclear subs, walking out of NATO in high dudgeon and thumbing its nose simultaneously at Washington and London, all the while gesticulating on the global stage, in the grandiloquent manner that would be imitated half a century later by Kim Jong Il of North Korea. In short, it was a time for thinking big.

Down in Romanèche-Thorins, far removed from the seat of world events, Georges Duboeuf took the cue. He saw opportunity beckon when he learned that Pierre Crozet, the local
négociant
, had decided to put his business up for sale and retire. He decided to go for it. Crozet’s operation was only a relatively small-time affair compared to powerful
négociants
like Piat, Mommessin or Thorin, but even so the purchase of a wholesale wine dealership was a heavy investment, vastly more so than anything he had undertaken before, and well beyond the folklore of Beaujolais self-help or the ministrations of Old Man Vermorel. As matters resolved themselves, though, there was a nice little historical pirouette, because the solution he found for raising his seed money did hark back to Vaux and Père Vermorel, after all. Georges knew that he had a trump card in his possession, one that was seriously coveted: his
pot Beaujolais—
his
patented pot Beaujolais.