I'll Drink to That (29 page)

From the very beginning of his career Georges had insisted that a certain kind of Beaujolais represented the most true and faithful expression of the gamay grape: a wine that was friendly, candid and unpretentious, fragrant with hints of field flowers and the fruit native to the region: blackberries, cherries, currants, strawberries, raspberries.
Un vin de soif
(a wine of thirst), it was easy to drink, but was also buttressed by a structural bite of acidity, lacking which it would merely be an agreeable but undistinguished alcoholized drink. This was what wine professionals would soon be calling
le goût Duboeuf
(the Duboeuf taste), the one he doggedly sought out in those relentless treks of his to peasant domains and
caves coopératives.
What was most significant for the Beaujolais was this: the Duboeuf taste corresponded perfectly to the qualities of a good
primeur.

That taste alone—the personal preference—was not enough, however, to shake up the Beaujolais as thoroughly as Georges Duboeuf’s arrival on the scene did. There was something else, too, this one rather more technical. Call it the Duboeuf touch. It was not exactly a professional secret, because the option had been there all along, but rather a different approach to the genius and potential of the gamay grape, one that he gradually persuaded many of the region’s best winemakers to share with him. His own experience as vigneron and then
courtier
had convinced him that the best way to capture the charm of the gamay in the final product was to vinify quickly and bottle early. When, still young in the business, he began bottling the
crus
in mid-December—always starting with Chiroubles, because its vines were the highest in altitude, closest to the sun and the quickest to ripen—Beaujolais traditionalists cried heresy and madness. Reigning wisdom dictated that the
crus
had to have “done their Easter” before they could leave the vats and be imprisoned in glass. But it was Duboeuf who best captured the fruit and the flower of the gamay by rushing his wines into bottles in the prime of their youth.

If early bottling worked well for the noble
crus,
it was all that much more suited to the less complex Beaujolais and Beaujolais-Villages, which were precocious by nature, and it was these that gave birth to
primeur,
that extraordinary exception to winemaking’s usual rules. When Georges spotted the Beaujolais Nouveau fashion and correctly guessed that it had not only not peaked but was set to bloom into a worldwide phenomenon, he was right in his comfort zone, because he knew that the new wine would give a foretaste of the later releases of mature, fully finished Beaujolais, and everything he loved in the gamay would already be there, in cheery adolescent form. Whenever someone asks Georges for a description of his ideal Beaujolais he invariably falls back on two key words, the virtually untranslatable French adjectives
friand
and
espiègle.
Roughly, this means delicious but at the same time roguish and perky, like a slightly risqué old song by Maurice Chevalier, grinning rakishly, cap canted down over one eye.
Bonbon anglais,
he will say, too—English rock candy, the equivalent of American sourballs, metaphors for the touch of acidity indispensable to any respectable wine.

As soon as the first juice began flowing from the freshly picked grapes of each new harvest, Georges turned on the sophisticated aroma-seeking device he carried on the front of his face and set off to track down, batch by batch, the wines—or rather the future wines—that nose and palate assured him would develop into
le goût Duboeuf.
Hound dogs have nothing on Duboeuf when he is on the prowl.

“He calls me every morning at six-thirty,” Pierre Siraudin explained to me in Saint-Amour. “He knows everyone’s cellar vat by vat, and he never forgets them—all the barrels and tuns and vats, every single one. If there’s a vat he doesn’t like in a cellar, you can’t slip it past him. Even if they change the number, he’ll find it. No one else can do that. He can’t stand it if a vigneron holds anything back from him, even if it’s just information—he has to know everything about the cellar, even the vats that aren’t for sale. Other dealers make wine to the taste of their clients—more fruit, more tannin and so forth—but he only chooses for
le goût Duboeuf
. Always, always, always. And he is the only one in the Beaujolais who is capable of buying wine after only four or five days, when it is still bubbling in fermentation. He already knows which vats will be the good ones.”

Siraudin is something of an exception among Beaujolais vignerons. Although deeply attached to his land—ten hectares of Saint-Amour and eight of Saint Véran—he is not of peasant stock, but rather a bourgeois who inherited a lovely little mansion,
le Château de Saint-Amour
, and did university studies of agronomy. His time with the books may or may not be partly responsible for the quality of his wine, but his stuff is wonderfully delicious. Now a somewhat elderly gent (and coquettish about his age), he received me like a true chatelain—gray suit, conservative tie, knickknack-cluttered sitting room—at ten o’clock on a bright June morning. At precisely 11:00, Madame Siraudin appeared with a frosty bottle of Champagne and poured us all a tingling pre-lunch libation. It was, he explained, part of his regular morning ritual—“
mon péché mignon
.” My little treat. The wine business has done well by Pierre Siraudin.

The functional, concrete-walled office where I met with Jean-Pierre Thomas, boss of the Liergues
cave coopérative
, was considerably less elegantthan Siraudin’s mansion, but the tone of the talk about Duboeuf was exactly the same. Liergues is true, classical Beaujolais territory in the south, and its warm, sandy soil produces an early-ripening grape that is perfect for
primeur.
Duboeuf has been sniffing out its best vats for as long as anyone can remember. Like Siraudin, what impresses Thomas the most is the constancy, the straight, beeline, unvarying constancy, as predictable as the tides.

“Other dealers come here, taste maybe ten vats, and then, as often as not, they choose two wines of completely different character,” he said. “And they change from year to year, too. But Georges never varies. He always chooses the same style of wine—elegant, aromatic and perfumed. And he does it fast, fast. Others will hesitate and drag out their choices. Not Duboeuf. He knows what he wants, he gets right to it, and he’s adamant about getting just that and nothing else.”

Thomas winced with a rueful little smile and went off on a tangent to tell a story on himself about the Duboeuf intransigence. “I’ve only ever had one run-in with him. It happened in 1985. You know, this is a big place. We’ve got two hundred different storage vats here. That time, we had picked out thirty of them for him to taste, and he chose twenty. Each one was twenty thousand or thirty thousand liters, so it was a lot of wine. I thought maybe he wouldn’t notice if I sold one of the vats—just one—to another buyer. But, sure enough, he noticed when he tasted those twenty samples again back at his place later. All of them corresponded to the quality he wanted—all except one. Well, of course he wanted it back. He was very firm about it. Almost angry. He got his vat back. You can’t hide anything from him. He is rigorous, and he imposes that rigor on all of us.”

Today, after more than half a century of roaming through the countryside and rummaging in the most obscure little backwater cellars, Georges carries in his head an unparalleled mental map of the Beaujolais vineyards and a minutely detailed assessment of each one’s possibilities and performance: who’s having a good year, who isn’t and why. With each new vintage he updates the assessment, of course, but he knows he can trust this extraordinary memory only so far, so he is careful to back it up with blind tests: each vat he pre-chooses will get six, seven or eight tastings as it evolves, before he makes the final purchase and brings it back to Romanèche.

There is a dismayingly great amount of it. Working as he does with twenty-four
caves coopératives
and four-hundred-plus individual vignernons, he faces a Niagara of samples: every working day without fail he tastes for at least two hours, in company with his two top laboratory technicians. The basic daily slots are 12 noon to 1 P.M. and then 6 to 7 P.M., but this shoots up to considerably more time during the wild, manic few weeks every year when he has to choose fast for his
primeur—
three to four hundred samples to be appraised daily, putting his money and his reputation on the line with each one, because what he chooses will appear later in shops and restaurants with the Duboeuf label. There are few, if any, wine professionals in the world who are capable of holding such a pace with such accuracy. I certainly have not met or heard of any who can do it, but in any case it underlines an essential point of his success: the
goût Duboeuf
is not so much made as
found
.

It was in one of the regular laboratory tasting sessions, in December or January, after the mad
primeur
days had passed, that Georges’ erudite nose and palate picked up on a far more egregious diddle than Jean-Pierre Thomas’s attempt to do a favor for a friend with one vat out of twenty. It is one of Michel Brun’s favorite stories.

“It happened in the mid-eighties. I was tasting with Monsieur Duboeuf at a vigneron’s place in the Pierres Dorées (golden stone) area, and there were two vats side by side at the far end of his cellar, each one 7,200 liters. He sampled both of them and chose the vat on the left, shook hands on it, and we left to continue tasting at other domains. Three months later, when the tank truck brought the contents of the vat to Romanèche, he tasted it and said: ‘
Merde!
They’ve given us the vat on the right. Get over there quick.’

“I drove down and went straight to the guy’s
cave.
When I walked in, there he was—pumping out the vat on the left and transferring it over into the vat on the right.” The poor devil was trying to hide the evidence of sin. With that, he lost his position as a Duboeuf supplier.

Georges’ gustatory prowess, his memory and his ironclad work ethic made him the undisputed world champion of Beaujolais Nouveau, and he has sold more of it than any other single
négociant
. This has not, however, always conduced to his advantage. In later years, after the Parisian passion of the seventies and eighties had begun to cool and Beaujolais Nouveau was no longer the acme of fashion, it became common to hear critics—a great many of them winemakers from other regions, wracked with jealousy at the insolent success of this despised upstart—dismissing
primeur
with any number of derogatory epithets: half-made wine, fake wine, alcoholized fruit juice. Often the criticisms were worse, sometimes downright slanderous, and the 747s en route to New York, Chicago, Tokyo or Toronto in November, their holds stuffed with new wine, offered an easy whipping boy symbol for cynics and the disenchanted who had adored Beaujolais Nouveau when it was fashionable. In short, they reacted like the Lyonnais of a few years earlier: if the Americans and Japanese were drinking the stuff, it wasn’t authentic anymore. It was precisely the same psychological situation as two divas arriving at a reception in the same dress.

The French didn’t turn their backs entirely on
primeur
, to be sure, and its annual release continues to be celebrated around the country, but the thrill of discovery and trendiness has now pretty much become quotidian routine. Further, a couple of perfectly senisible rule changes by INAO contributed mightily to destroying the mystique of that traditional old release date. Reasoning that November 15 could in certain years fall on a Sunday, causing all sorts of logistical problems, the institute allowed the far more practical option of the third Thursday in November. The second rule change simplified life for shippers. So long as the Beaujolais Nouveau was not
released
until the third Thursday, INAO decreed, it could be shipped earlier to sealed warehouses and held there until the famous third Thursday. The wine industry’s operations were eased, and the new regulations meant that drinkers the world over would be able to pop their bottles of
primeur
on the very same day—but all this commercial utilitarianism seriously sapped the aura of spontaneity, novelty and romance that had been attached to those barrels burping through straws as they coasted down the Saône toward Lyon. Eliminating November 15 was a bit like officially declaring the nonexistence of Santa Claus.

Inevitably, critics of Beaujolais Nouveau carped especially at Duboeuf, because he was the one who had bet most heavily on
primeur
and whose efforts had, far and away, paid off in the most spectacular manner. There could be no doubt that Duboeuf was guilty, because he had chosen those batches of wine, he had blended them, bottled them, packaged them and sold them with whatever marketing blandishments his native talents inspired. Certainly he could take comfort from the fact that his guilt was shared by the millions who lifted a glass of Beaujolais Nouveau every year in all innocence because they found the ritual congenial and the wine tasted good. But wine snobs—especially French wine snobs—tend to get cross with reasoning as straightforward and simple as that. A brooding Beethoven of a wine will always be accorded reverent respect, but a sprightly Vivaldi reaps scorn—doubly so if it is selling well.

Whatever the opinion of the chattering classes, Georges’ efforts were rewarded many times over, and the phenomenal success of his Beaujolais Nouveau was the most conspicuous signal that the polite, soft-voiced young man from Chaintré had arrived as a new powerhouse in the French wine business. A few other companies on the national scene were (and today still are) bigger and richer, but none had the flair or the personal prestige of Duboeuf. The secondhand truck with the pumps and filters in the back was soon relegated to the status of museum piece, and a series of enormous modern structures for stocking, bottling and shipping sprang up behind Monsieur Crozet’s old headquarters. Pure white with neat red trim, surmounted with the steer’s head logo that he had designed years earlier, the new buildings loomed like the statement of an inescapable economic fact: Georges Duboeuf had arrived, and Romanèche-Thorins was Duboeuf City. The artisan was beginning to look very much like an industrialist. For many, this was clearly bad. Today still, large segments of French public opinion, influenced by journalists and other opinion-makers heavily in debt to the vague Marxist noodlings that no amount of reality ever seems to be able to chase from the intellectual discourse here, remain deeply mistrustful of entrepreneurial success in capitalism, while yearning instead for some ideal, mythic socioeconomic system where the country could live in joyous communal fraternity like the comic strip inhabitants of the Gallic village of Astérix and Obélix.