I'll Drink to That (31 page)

“In Beaujeu they call him Croesus, he’s so rich,” Georges said, poker-faced, but deliberately loud enough for anyone to hear it. Tête rolled his eyes and sighed.

Leaving the Citroën’s door open so he could hear if the phone rang, Georges followed Tête into the barn’s beautiful, double-arched stone cellar, where a long plank on sawhorses held twenty-two sample bottles, unidentifiable except by numbers chalked on the plank in front of each. Tête had aligned them with military precision, and a single large tasting glass stood in front of each. This was no fancy
dégustation
for show; everyone would be sharing the same glass in turn. The wine was the color of young raspberries. Several more cases were stacked under the table, to be opened when the first batch had been finished. In all, sixty different samples were to be tried.

“
Voilà, messieurs
, everything’s ready,” Tête said. “I’ve told the maid to bring in the sausage and bread.”

“Kind of cold, isn’t it?” Georges observed, rubbing his hands in the morning chill. He could see his breath. Two
courtiers,
men who scouted wine for both Duboeuf and Tête, waited respectfully for the big guns to start first. Big Gun Tête was eager to get going. Everyone always wanted to see how Duboeuf would react.

“
Goûte!
” Tête roared. Taste! A young woman entered the room carrying a tray laden with a big round loaf of country bread cut into rough chunks, along with a platter of steaming hot garlic sausage. Outside in the yard a rooster crowed.

“
Goûte!
” Tête thundered again. Georges cocked an ear and heard his car phone beeping. He sprinted out to take the call. Tête tapped his foot impatiently.

At length Georges returned and the
dégustation
got under way. He started at the right end of the table, and the immutable professional routine began: the small portion of wine splashed into the glass, the long, thoughtful analysis via the nasal passages, plunged as far as they could go below the rim, the careful sip, the sucking, slurping and chewing, then the few paces to the sawdust-filled bucket to spit it out and move on to the next sample. In scarcely more than a minute the year’s work of some unknown producer was judged, undiplomatically and irreversibly.

“
Goût métallique
,” Georges said. Metallic taste. Now, as the samples succeeded one another, the room echoed with the watery sibilants and the smacking and clacking of wine entering mouths, being assessed and then departing in admirably precise crimson streams to the sawdust bucket, followed by sotto voce murmurings of judgments being passed. Much opinion was exchanged about
la malo,
the secondary fermentation that may or may not have happened.

“Not my style at all,” said Georges, rejecting number two. “Too harsh.”

Some minutes later, Tête remarked that he had liked number ten quite a lot. Without a word, Georges pointed to the chalk mark he had already made in front of it.

“
Ooh, là là,
” he exclaimed now, jerking his nose free of a succeeding sample. “This one I won’t even taste.”

Shortly after that he had an even more dramatic experience. After a dubitative sniff of a sample, he decided to give it a second chance and took a taste. Suddenly his poker face convulsed into a mask of astonished indignation, as if he had been goosed in church. He pumped his forearms up and down, his whole body shuddering with revulsion. In three quick strides he was over to the bucket to rid himself of the execrable intrusion. He spat and re-spat with emphasis, fastidiously wiping his lips with his handkerchief and casting a mournful glance of reproach at Tête.

“
Pas bon, hein?
” asked Tête. Not good, eh? He was enjoying the spectacle.

“
Ah, là là
” Georges replied. “That one makes me cold in the back.”

Within less than an hour he had tasted all sixty samples and concluded that the lot were generally mediocre. That was all right—there would be plenty of others. But he was already behind schedule. He grabbed a chunk of bread and a slice of still-warm sausage and hightailed it out to the car. Speeding off southward, he held his hasty breakfast with two fingers of his left hand and steered with the other three. He was expected at the
cave coopérative
in the village of Quincié-en-Beaujolais.

“Last year there was about 10 percent of very good wine,” he was saying. “This year, 90 percent is good, and of that 90 percent, 10 percent will be extraordinary. It’s a serious wine, more body and character than last year. Some of the ones I’ve tasted are so intense that you’d think there was pinot in them—powerful, well-constructed stuff—but this isn’t my kind of wine. I’m having trouble finding ones that are light and elegant, but yesterday I tasted an extraordinary sample from a vigneron I’d never bought from before. I don’t know why it was so good. Maybe he harvested at exactly the right moment. There are so many imponderables, and sometimes you just get lucky. But his wine was extraordinary.”

He didn’t say
le goût Duboeuf
, but out came the magic adjectives
friand
and
espiègle
again. In Quincié he alighted from the Citroën glass in hand and marched up to greet the
chef de cave.
With his lean frame and resolute gait, his alert brown eyes and purposeful expression, he could have passed for a perfectly reasonable Hollywood cowboy if that were a shootin’ arm rather than a
dégustation
glass dangling in his right hand. No fancy stuff here, either: the Quincié storage field was purely utilitarian, a yard of impeccable white gravel punctuated by a series of what appeared to be manhole covers. The
chef de cave
heaved up one of the steel covers, removed a stopper and dipped a yard-long aluminum pipette into the mysterious depths. The silver cylinder emerged glistening with streams of crimson. Georges held out his glass.

“Good,” he said, swirling and sniffing. The vat under our feet contained twenty-seven hundred hectoliters of young wine, a subterranean swimming pool of Beaujolais-Villages. “Three weeks ago this was still grapes,” Georges said with unconcealed satisfaction. “In five more days they’ll bottle it as Beaujolais Nouveau. There’s no other place anywhere in the world where you can do wine like that.”

He told the
chef de cave
to reserve him 250 hectoliters, took a couple of sample bottles for analysis in his lab (percentage of alcohol, malic acid and volatile acidity, iron, copper and at least a dozen other components) and returned to the road for a long haul south past Villefranche and then westward into the steeply escarped hills of the Pierres Dorées, where the sun, just then glancing through the cloud cover, suddenly illuminated a scattering of villages huddled in clefts among the yellow, amber and russet of the autumnal vine leaves. Houses, walls and church steeples glowed like honey.

“C’est pas beau, ça?”
Isn’t that beautiful? Georges had slowed to a crawl and now gazed amorously over the countryside, unable to restrain his pride and the urgent need to share his feelings. The view was indeed gorgeous, as perfect as a tintype illustration of
la douce France
(sweet France), the soft, rich, benevolent countryside that all the French carry in their hearts as proof and justification of their long centuries of tending,taming and civilizing nature into harmony with mankind’s wants and needs. Time and time again on rambles like these, Georges would pull over to contemplate a view, indicate a local curiosity, offer up an anecdote from his childhood or maybe take a picture. The landscape of the Beaujolais exalts him the way the Lake District did Wordsworth or the Vermont woodlands Robert Frost.

But then it was straight back to business. Georges’ next appointment was at the
cave coopérative
of Létra, dramatically sited on a hill at the extreme western limit of Beaujolais territory, where the pine forests began over on the other side of the Azergues River. Monsieur Coquard, the co-op’s president, incongruously dressed in a blue, white-striped training suit (the trappings of globalization had come to Létra, too), was there in person to greet Duboeuf, and the two men plunged into the obscurity of the winery, Georges with his tasting glass, Monsieur Coquard with his racing stripes.

Their conversation followed the same dual track that it always does with wine professionals: weather and prices. Monsieur Coquard agreed that it was a pity that both Juliénas and Chiroubles had suffered from frost and then explained that it was only
logique,
given the circumstances of the market, that Létra’s price would be going up 22 percent that year. Georges replied with a dubious shrug. He was the one who would have to pass on the increase to his customers, and the last thing he wanted was for Beaujolais to become a pricey wine—danger lay in that direction.

This glum speculation was erased by the majestic arrival of Paul Bocuse in his Mercedes 300 TD station wagon. The emperor was in fine form, as usual, and the imperatives of his business—he was off to Tokyo the next day, then on to Hong Kong—called for no time to be wasted. “
Allez, Jojo
,” he said. “Let’s get to it.”

Apart from the wines of his own vineyard, Bocuse was eager to taste the super cuvée, the special selection of Létra Beaujolais that Duboeuf would be choosing for the Japanese market, to be sold under the Paul Bocuse label. From tank to tank they marched for the best part of an hour, each with his own glass, tasting and spitting into the concrete gutter and exchanging scholarly opinions like Jesuits in a cloister.

“The one I liked best is the one all the way over on the right on the second floor,” Georges concluded when they had returned to the glass cubicle that served as the
cave’s
lab and office. “Now, how about price?”

There ensued the long, painful silence that always leads off bargaining encounters, each party waiting for the other to name a first figure, which naturally will be judged outrageous. No one had yet spoken when an insistent beeping drifted down from the Citroën’s open door. “
Merde
,” said Georges, and sprinted out to the parking lot.

“He’s really equipped, isn’t he?” observed the
chef de cave.

“He’s the James Bond of the Beaujolais,” said Bocuse.

The meeting finally adjourned without any firm commitment one way or the other, but at least it was clear which wine was the one Duboeuf wanted. Bocuse cruised off to Collonges-au-Mont d’Or to oversee preparations for lunch, which reminded Georges that it was coming up time to have some ourselves. In a country bistro hard by a gushing river we were joined by Patrick Léon, Alexis Lichine’s purchasing director. Over salad and steak the two men analyzed pricing trends against the year’s yields of the different
crus.
At one point of the conversation Léon named a
courtier
of his acquaintance and wondered whether Georges happened to know him. Negative, but when Léon went on to describe the fellow’s behavior at a recent tasting, Georges’ face froze in disbelief.

“
Il boit?”
he asked—you mean he
drinks
?

Georges was scandalized. Oh, come on, I said, perhaps a bit too lightly and hastily, surely that’s a normal occupational hazard, isn’t it? Georges swiftly corrected me. No, he said, that was not tolerable in a professional. Already in deep water, I compounded my faux pas with yet another barbarism: but everyone gets drunk from time to time. He ought to be able to understand that a colleague could occasionally slip from monastic rectitude. Which I followed up with a predictable question, purely rhetorical, I thought: why, you’ve been drunk a few times yourself, haven’t you?

Again that look of disbelief. “No. Of course not.”

Never?

“Never.”

After that I shut up. Some years later, I experienced a remarkably similar occasion for shutting up when I asked Garry Kasparov, reigning chess champion and strongest player of all time, if he had ever experimented with drugs, as most young people of his age bracket had so liberally done.

“What for?” he shot back, fixing me with the same stony, uncomprehending gaze that Georges had shot at me just then.

I was insistently reminded of both these exchanges in succeeding years as I spent time around Georges in different situations, especially meals and
vins d’honneur.
The
vin d’honneur
is a specifically French institution, practiced at all levels of society and at any occasion that calls for people to gather and “honor” some event, anniversary or person with a glass of wine. Whether it be fine Champagne for a gathering of wealthy bourgeois in Paris or a glass of local plonk from a keg at the annual meeting of the
pétanque
club of an obscure village, the practice is ancient and immutable. Duboeuf is invited to innumerable
vins d’honneur,
of course, and his routine never varies. He accepts the proffered glass, takes a real or a pretend sip, mingles with the crowd, and then discreetly deposits the glass in an opportune corner at an opportune moment. At meals he does drink—I have seen him empty a glass—but it is always in tiny, precautionary sips, savoring each little mouthful. (While diligently avoiding water, of course. One is not Beaujolais for nothing.)

“Wine is for health and pleasure, not drunkenness,” he says gravely. Even when admitting the eventuality of a certain inebriation, though, he draws a fine semantic line between the routes of excess that may bring a guilty party to fault. “The whiskey drinker is a drunk; the wine drinker is an alcoholic.”

Duboeuf’s asceticism, so unlike the cheerfully indulgent nature of most Beaujolais natives, is well known throughout the region, of course, and often earns him monkish or priestly comparisons, but it is generally forgiven as an inherited family trait, like a genetic aberration.

Braced by the lunch, palates cleared by careful doses of mineral water (not too much, though), Duboeuf and Léon moved on to the next scheduled tasting, this one at the
cave coopérative
of Saint-Laurent-d’Oingt, a picture-postcard town in the very heart of the Golden Stone area, halfway between the sublime little villages of Ternand and Oingt, itself hard by the felicitously named hamlet of Paradis. Like Juliénas and Chiroubles, this high-lying district had been badly hurt by the spring frosts, and this year there would be only thirty-one vats to taste, whereas in 1973, a year of superabundance throughout French vineyards and of Saint-Laurent’s greatest production, there had been no less than eighty-one of them. No matter: Monsieur Papillon (Butterfly), the co-op’s president, assured the visitors that the quality was much better than 1973, and that quantity did not necessarily mean quality. With this undisputable folk wisdom established, Georges and Léon set to work.