I'll Drink to That (27 page)

There it was again. The work leitmotif returns unfailingly in conversations about Duboeuf, again and again. Sooner or later, it seems, every wine professional in the Beaujolais is confronted in one way or another with Duboeuf’s nonstop zeal. Michel Brun got it on his very first day on the job. Brun is an energetic and remarkably good-natured jack-of-all-trades who knocked around Les Vins Georges Duboeuf for more than thirty years in a variety of jobs ranging from bottling technician to sales director, but his original assignment was
chef de chai
(cellar master).

“August 25, 1966,” he said. “I’ll never forget it. I was supposed to start work at eight in the morning, but since I was new I thought I’d make a good impression by showing up half an hour early. I got there at seven-thirty, but the boss was in his office and he had already unlocked the cellar door. So next day I got there at seven o’clock. Same thing. Next day I tried six-thirty—same thing again. I gave up after that. A man’s got to sleep sometime.”

A few days on the job were enough for Brun to learn what most winegrowers of the Beaujolais already knew: if you wanted to reach the boss himself, all you had to do was dial the company number at five in the morning. Duboeuf the CEO kept peasant hours.

The wine trade was then entering an odd, hectic and often rather messy period. Simply put, the French had had it too easy for too long. Coasting along for years with little serious competition, growers and dealers became accustomed to selling their wines more or less automatically, and that made plenty of temptation to cut corners. Around Villefranche and Belleville the bistro braggart
négociants
of the sort that Michel Rougier decried could content themselves with buying and bottling the mediocre as well as the good, because sales of Beaujolais were on the rise in France, next door in Switzerland and Germany and across the Channel in the British Isles. Presently they would be ranging out across the pond to America, then in the other direction, on to Japan. Beaujolais appeared to have squared the commercial circle: a first-rate wine that wasn’t expensive, wasn’t pretentious and didn’t seek to intimidate new buyers with a complex pedigree. Even its name was a salesman’s dream: euphonious, musical and easy to pronounce, it had a lilt that evoked images of lighthearted fun. Magic: everyone everywhere in the world could enunciate the three syllables of bo-jo-lay. And it was
good
, too.

Or rather, most of it was good. A serious image and quality problem was developing for French wines in general, because in the seventies a wave of scandals swept over the country, implicating not only fly-by-night hustlers but also a few reputable dealers who could not resist the opportunity of repairing bad years and turning a quick profit via the simple expedient of transforming their worst wines, acidic and low in alcohol, by mixing them into batches of cheap, potent
vins médecins
(doctor wines) from the Midi, Sicily, Spain or Algeria. Over the years several documented cases of chicanery appeared in Chablis, Muscadet and Bordeaux, but few were as blatant as the Burgundy dealer who was caught flogging to gullible Americans some sixty-four thousand bottles of
grands crus
(great growths) that were nothing but plonk bought for cheap in other regions and tarted up with sweeteners to appeal to Yankee tastes.

Of course Beaujolais had its doses of cheating, too. At different times, both Duboeuf and Papa Bréchard, the two men most trusted to represent Beaujolais integrity, guardedly told me—“guardedly” because one doesn’t spit in the soup, and they were careful to avoid naming names—of dealers who in the past had obviously imported doctor wines to beef up their sickly local stuff or who had brazenly stuck fantasy Beaujolais labels on the doctor wines without even bothering to mix in a bit of Beaujolais. Crooks will be crooks, and the games were not exclusively French. Duboeuf pointed out that before the UK joined the Common Market there had been little to prevent unscrupulous English entrepreneurs, unbound by European regulations, from brewing up lakes of phony Beaujolais that they hawked at unbeatable bargain prices on their domestic market. Their innocent customers, treating themselves to a glass or two of wine to accompany their baked bean sandwiches and bangers and mash, may well have wondered how it was that so many people could say Beaujolais was such a lovely wine.

There was a particularly painful irony implicit in these swindles. As much as any other factor, it was Duboeuf’s tireless scouting for the best batches of wine from the best vignerons that created the burgeoning new popularity of the wines of the Beaujolais, but it was precisely this popularity that allowed the con men to thrive with their mischievous brews. The irony even doubled back on itself: the more Duboeuf demonstrated just how good a high-quality Beaujolais could be, the better would be the chances to sell poor or phony Beaujolais like the English brews that became known as “Château Ipswich.”

When an item sells, inevitably more items will appear on the market. Now companies and private entrepreneurs joined growers already in place to make extensive new plantings of vines throughout the French wine regions. In the Beaujolais, acreage under vines eventually rose from about 18,000 to 22,500 hectares. In the enormous winegrowing regions of the Midi and Bordeaux, the increment was vastly greater. Production shot up in consequence, but at the risk of reproducing the same old feast-or-famine story that had bedeviled France’s wine industry for centuries. In years when undersupply led to oversupply, prices fell, unsold wine backed up in storage vats needed for the next harvest, and furious vignerons demanded that the government bail them out, all the while keeping their eyes peeled for tank trucks carrying wine from competing Italian or Spanish winemakers. The lucky competitors only had their contents spilled out onto the highway; those who resisted were rewarded with a beating as well.

The mess of the recurrent economic seesaw was compounded by the fact that much of the newly planted vine stock was being raised in poorly suited “grain terrain” where wheat or sugar beet would have been a more rational choice of crop. And whether his vines were rooted in sugar beet soil or perfect old granitic
terroirs
, the typical Beaujolais vigneron always faced the seductive possibility of pushing his yields—
faire pisser la vigne
—above the authorized limits. More wine = more money, and everyone knew that INAO did not have anything like enough inspectors to control who was doing what.

How many of them were doing it, and how high did they go? The subject is delicate. Suspicious by nature, some French critics viewed Beaujolais’ popularity and ubiquity as de facto evidence of cheating and made wild pronouncements about the extent of the overrun, condemning anywhere from 10 percent to half of Beaujolais as undrinkable. In any case, it’s safe to say that a lot, if not most, of the increased production from the new plantings was mediocre stuff. If the price was right, though, there would always be one dealer or another willing to put it into bottles and unload it on markets where low cost was enough to make it sell—Germany, for instance. Germans are notoriously thrifty, and German intermediaries are so skilled at squeezing prices to the bone that even Wal-Mart, the
Tyrannosaurus rex
of American commerce, was obliged in 2006 to give up its eighty-five stores and slink away back to America with its retail between its legs. German shoppers are both a joy and a despair. There are a lot of them, and they have a lot of money, but they stubbornly tend to seek out bargain prices above other considerations. This was disastrous for the long-term image of Beaujolais, because this tendency filled the shelves of German stores mostly with cut-rate wines that were almost invariably acidic and thin. If this poor stuff was Beaujolais, the local consumers logically concluded, then all Beaujolais was acid and thin.

“There was and there still is too much irregularity in quality,” admitted Michel Bosse-Platière, president of the Beaujolais Interprofessional Committee. “The French system is based on controlled, or certified, origin. It’s a very good concept, but it’s not working—the origin is controlled, all right, but not the quality. The system of
agrément
[tasting and approving wines before authorizing them to go out to market] is out of kilter. Today, only about 1 percent of French wines are refused
agrément.
I’ll be frank with you: this is a joke. Why? Because when really good, serious controls are carried out, the percentage of refusals is closer to 10 or 15 percent. So of course all that bad wine perverts the image of the product. For a long time people thought that the AOC system offered them a guarantee of quality, but it doesn’t. The result is that we all lose credit with the consumer.”

Michel Bettane, author of a guide to French wines and one of the country’s top tasters and experts, was rather more succinct when I asked him what he thought about the quality protection offered by the old AOC system. Entirely agreeing with Bosse-Platière’s indictment, he felt constrained to add that it was not only foreigners who allowed themselves to be victimized. “The whole French wine industry,” he drawled, “should be eternally grateful that we have so many citizens in this country who are patriotic enough to drink
de la merde.
”

So there it was: there will always be a certain amount of shabby stuff in any wine country, noble or peasant, whether from traditional producers or newcomers, and it’s up to the buyer to beware. In the Beaujolais, Georges Duboeuf had his own Stakhanovite nose and palate—finicky arbiters carrying out their own
agrément
several hundred times a day— to back up and substitute for INAO’s quality control. But of course not everyone had that same level of expertise and dedication, and hardly more than 20 percent of the Beaujolais wine production would ever be sold through Duboeuf’s operation. That left plenty of room for the mediocre, the dubious and the fake to slip out into the channels of world commerce.

Clearly, the French wine industry had not yet cleaned up its act when Georges Duboeuf appeared on the scene and rapidly showed himself to be a major new force for innovation. For Michel Brun, the old act will forever be exemplified by the great storage depots at Bercy, the former center of wine commerce on the right bank of the Seine in Paris. Anyone who dealt in wine would always have reason to go to Bercy at one time or another, and for Brun his first visit there was like a vision of vinous apocalypse. “It was so filthy that you had to wear boots to wade through the mud and protect yourself from the rats,” he told me. “When I went to work for Duboeuf, I found a place that was so clean I could have eaten off the floor.”

The old depots are gone now; grubby old Bercy has been reconverted into one of the most modern business and administrative quarters of Paris, and the wine industry has generally hoisted itself up to a level of hygiene that can almost be compared to Dubouef’s sparkly installations in Romanèche. This greater, industry-wide transformation was not directly Duboeuf’s doing, of course, but his nose is as sharp for new ideas and trends as it is for judging wines, and it has always tended to set him at the forefront of anything that is smart, interesting and new. Early in 1970, he came up with the idea that was to define Les Vins Georges Duboeuf for the wine-buying public thereafter, would set the company apart from all others and would go on to exert a considerable and lasting influence on the presentation of wine everywhere in the world: the famous Duboeuf floral labels.

It was quite obvious, really. All it took was someone to think of it, and Dubouef thought of it. For as long as anyone could remember, wine labels had been boring—businesslike, administrative and boring, offering enough information to fulfill INAO’s requirements and little more. About the closest any of them came to fantasy or artistry in layout was to present the domain’s name on faux medieval scrolls or parchments. But who ever said they had to be so tiresome? As early as 1967 Georges had been designing labels with floral trim—vines and grape bunches around the edges—but in 1970 his eye caught a bouquet of flowers. The lightbulb lit up over his head.

He was in London for a wine fair, staying in a country hotel in the suburbs, one of those cozy, homey, fluffy places, a touch old-fashioned, that only the English seem to be able to carry off without appearing ridiculous. And there, on a windowside table, was a bouquet of violets, daisies, poppies and blue cornflowers.
Mais voilà!
The idea struck him immediately. Georges bought himself a set of colored pencils and began making some sketches. On his return to Romanèche, he turned his sketches over to a professional illustrator, and within a few months an entirely new genre of wine labels was born, one that has been endlessly copied throughout the world. Eye-catching illustrative labels of every imaginative sort are now commonplace in the wine business, but they all have a common parenthood in that bouquet in Duboeuf’s English country hotel.

Ever since his creation as a dynamic teenager of the first private
caveau
in the Beaujolais, it had been obvious that Georges Duboeuf did not intend to remain just one more obscure peasant among others. His STOP—COME IN AND TASTE THE DUBOEUF WINES was the first indication of a native sense of customer relations that would mark every step of his fast-developing career. In travels to the United States and Japan with Bocuse, Georges saw time and again the capital role that advertising, marketing and public relations of all sorts played in the economies. The floral labels were only the latest indication of his ability to project himself beyond his wines into the minds of his future customers.

“Le bon dieu est bien connu, mais ça n’empêche pas le curé de sonner les cloches,”
Bocuse was always saying. (God is well known, but the pastor still rings the church bells.) Georges heeded his friend well, then went on to undertake some clangorous pulling of the bell rope himself. One of the most striking and effective efforts, also inaugurated in that year 1970, was the first installment of an ongoing series of publications that, taken together, constitute something like a Duboeuf oratorio—praise to his company, certainly, but beyond that to what he loves and cherishes more than anything else: the land, the people and the wines of the Beaujolais.His initial offering, a booklet of fifty-six heavily illustrated pages, was a bit awkward and amateurish compared to the slick professional stuff that would follow in later years, but there was an indubitable ring of sincerity to every page. One by one, Georges presented the region’s wines, beginning with ordinary Beaujolais, moving on to Beaujolais-Villages and the
crus
and ending with a final salvo of accolades to Mâcon Blanc and Pouilly-Fuissé. Each wine had its own little illustrated section with photos and text blocks, in prose that was both didactic and sentimental. Pure Duboeuf: the reader had to be edified, seduced and instructed at the same time.