I'll Drink to That (32 page)

They had the tasting room all to themselves. Teeming with tourists in the summer months, the spacious room—picture windows overlooking the vines, neatly aligned tables and a bar constructed of old wine barrels—was deserted except for Monsieur Papillon and a pleasant lady rinsing
dégustation
glasses at the bar. She lugged a sawdust-filled spitting bucket to tableside, and the two friends set to work, jotting their conclusions in notebooks.

“Not bad,” said Georges of the first sample. “Possibly a
primeur.”
Léon agreed. Presently Georges was surprised to see that a vat he had disliked a few days earlier now struck him as excellent—the wine had evolved favorably. He upgraded the old mark he had given it. Next to Léon’s fine, meticulous handwriting, his notes looked like monkey scribbles. On and on the assessments went. Monsieur Papillon hovered.

“Supple, but murky.”

“Bizarre, this one. Very rich. It will keep.”

“Good nose, good character. A little bit of tannin.”

“Heavy, but opens up well.”

“Good nose. Almost like English rock candy. Sweet character.”

“Still has some sugar in it. To be tasted again later.”

“This one got wet. Rot from harvest storms.”

Monsieur Papillon stood stolidly behind them, hands in his pockets, beret screwed tightly down onto his head. His demeanor was impassive, but with this last announcement he betrayed his emotion. “Make us compliments, Monsieur Duboeuf,” he implored and then muttered an aside: “He’s always so tough.”

When it was all over, Georges pronounced Saint-Laurent’s production uniformly good, with only a few minor exceptions. Nothing to worry about, he assured Monsieur Papillon. He was still beaming as Georges drove off to pick up the main road northward. Next stop, Fleurie.

“Mint?” asked Léon, taking a package from his pocket and popping one into his mouth. “They’re very light.”

“
Quelle horreur,
” said Georges, making a face. For him, mints or chocolate were every bit as noxious to the taste buds as coffee. What if you get a cold? I asked.

“
Le désastre.
I load myself up with medicine—antibiotics, anything I can lay my hands on. I’ve got to get cured quick.”

The rest of the waning afternoon offered nothing but good news. In Fleurie, every vat of the
cave coopérative
was well balanced and impeccably vinified. Crouched next to the steel cover of yet another swimming pool of wine, Georges tasted and re-tasted with obvious pleasure. The wine was in good hands.

“I’m almost tempted to swallow,” he said. No compliment could have been higher.

Nor could the contrast be greater between Fleurie’s spacious, modern installation and the next stop in Corcelles, a village south of Romanèche lying in the shadow of a huge, dark, turreted château dating from the eleventh century. The farmhouse/winery where Georges parked had the bedraggled air of centuries of cohabitation between man and beast, both species having reached a relaxed compromise about the importance of neatness. Under inspection by chicken and goat, Georges penetrated into the combination
caveau
and vinification shed, where a thin old man with a cigarette on his lip was tending the eight modest vats that held his production of Beaujolais and Morgon. I recognized Joseph Boulon, “Saint Joseph,” the farmer-vigneron I had met three years earlier, tending a sick batch of wine with a glowing space heater. His was a negligible operation in the greater scheme of things—a true micro-production—but Boulon was well known as an instinctive genius of vinification, and Georges had to see what he had come up with.

“Putain!”
he exclaimed when he tasted. “Damn, that’s good! Typical Duboeuf.” The young wine exhaled a sweet breath of violets and black currant, and sure enough, out leaped the raspberries and the
bonbon anglais
in the mouth, fresh and lively. It was the best wine he had tasted all day.

“That’s worth a Beaujolais-Villages, isn’t it,” said Boulon, a question that was more like an affirmation. Not demurring, Georges went on to taste the other seven vats. When he had finished, it was clear that Boulon had been touched with oenological grace that year. Georges took virtually his entire production.

“It’s spoken, then,” he said. “I’ll send the paper later.”

They shook hands, and Georges hurried back to the office to drop off the day’s samples at the lab and make more phone calls. Within an hour the low autumn sun had sunk behind the hills of Moulin-à-Vent and Fleurie, and it was already night when Georges struck out for Régnié, where he knew the Rampon brothers were sitting on a harvest of quality. It was urgent to reach them before any competing dealer might have nailed down their best batches. An enormous orange harvest moon was just beginning to rise over the treetops when he pulled the Citroën into their courtyard. Accompanied by the yapping of a distant mutt, he strode toward the dim light over the doorway to the vinfying and storage shed.

Louis Tête, comradely with Georges like no other dealer, was already there, standing impatiently by the alignment of high, fiberglass-lined concrete vats,
tastevin
cup in his hand. The eldest of the three Rampon brothers scrambled up a ladder, dipped his pipette into the top of the vat, then descended to pour out samples. This was going to be very good wine, Georges and Tête agreed:
sérieux.
The Rampon brothers were pleased with their work, and it showed. When all the vats had been tasted, they knew they had a winner. Now the time had come to talk money. They were not disposed to be as
arrangeant
(easygoing, cooperative) as Joseph Boulon.

“What’s your price?” asked Georges.

Silence. No one looked at anyone else. Some studied their feet; others found the ceiling intensely interesting. Finally one of the Rampons spoke.

“Dites voir?”
What’s your offer?

“Non, non, non.
You’re the sellers, not us.”

More silence, and considerably longer this time. Finally a few words. Evasive, noncommittal. This was not going to be easy. For nearly an hour the parley drew on, a piece of rustic theater that hesitated between drama and comedy, complete with false exits, protestations of poverty, whispered huddles and even a small masterpiece of feigned outrage punctuated by a Soviet-style walkout by Louis Tête, until at length, at great, laborious length, a price with a little extra tacked on above the going rate was finally accepted with agonizing reluctance—almost adversarial now—by both sides: 1,860 francs for each
pièce
(equivalent of a barrel) of 215 liters. Tight-lipped, all business now, Duboeuf produced a sales agreement, the equivalent of a formal contract, and all parties signed it in triplicate.

“They’re hard to deal with,” he said in the car on the road back to Romanèche. “Their father didn’t used to be that way.”

The work out in the field was drawing to a close on a note of exasperation. Things were changing in the Beaujolais, and once again Georges was caught in the web of ambiguities that his own success had largely helped to create. With the rush of prosperity that was flowing into the region, the old days and the old ways were already beginning to fade, and before long the forms in triplicate—a whole world of symbolism lay in the legalese of those documents—would be replacing the customary handshake, artisan to artisan, in every vineyard he visited. Certainly many of the changes were welcome and entirely positive. A decade or so earlier, old-timers like Papa Bréchard could never have imagined the new schoolhouses, municipal tennis courts, gymnasiums and other public facilities that would be coming to the Beaujolais thanks to increased tax revenues derived from all those sales, but the sparkly new equipment would also be paid for with altered attitudes and lifestyle: chillier, faster, choppier, more individualistic and disconnected from tradition. The old village solidarities were eroding as money, cars, consumer goods and television—the great leveler—exercised a surprisingly powerful ascendancy, constantly singing a siren call to consumption, self-interest and acquisitiveness. Georges could hardly criticize self-interest or the profit motive—as a businessman he was deep into its dynamics himself—but even so the loss of the comforting old bonds and human certainties of his youth was regretful. When he was a boy, it had been common for villagers to plan their harvests together and help one another out when extra manpower was needed. If a neighbor was haying and the rumble of an approaching thunderstorm gave an alert, vignerons would spontaneously drop their work in the vines and rush to help get the hay in before the rain. Hard to imagine that today.

Georges dropped me off at the hotel in time for a late dinner. He would grab a bite at home, then head back to the office for more paperwork until close on to midnight. Nothing tempers nostalgia like a heavy workload, especially when that work is bringing present success. And the Beaujolais was enjoying success just then—big time. Those were the days when Michel Brun, Georges’ right-hand man and jack of all wine trades, was not afraid to proclaim that
primeur
was “the only food product that is so widely distributed in a single day,” and that was probably not too far from the truth, in view of the worldwide infatuation with the new wine and that magic November 15 date.

Duboeuf being Duboeuf, it was inevitable that he would think up something special to do with that date, and he did: he threw a party. The original idea was for a relatively straightforward going away blast—
la Fête du Départ
—to begin on the evening of November 14 and to climax at zero hour of the fifteenth, when the trucks laden with his pretty floral cases of Beaujolais Nouveau would be legally permitted to leave Romanèche and hit the road of commerce, ensuring that the wine would be available in cafés throughout France by breakfast time. Fittingly enough, it was in that pivotal year 1970—the year of his first floral labels, the first time
primeur
production broke through the bar of one hundred thousand hectoliters—that Georges organized the first
Fête du Départ.
He squeezed a hundred or so vignerons, restaurant owners, chefs and journalists into his personal
caveau
, gave them generous tastes of the new wine and a bit of dinner, then led them out at midnight to salute the enormous caterpillar of wine-laden semis as they rumbled off into the night.

But, naturally, Duboeuf couldn’t leave it at that. An incurable tinkerer, he was constantly revising, adding, improving. Within a few years the
Fête du Départ
had migrated from his
caveau
to the cavernous confines of his main warehouse and had grown into one of the most lavish and sought-after bashes anywhere in the wine trade. By the nineties it had become an all-day affair for more than eight hundred guests, the Parisians riding in style down to Romanèche in specially chartered first-class cars of the high-speed TGV bullet train, coddled along the way with coffee, croissants and Champagne, and then delivered for a gastronomic lunch at—where else?—the Chapon Fin in Thoissey, the place where Georges had made his first-ever sale of wine to Paul Blanc. Duboeuf doesn’t forget friends.

After visits to the massive bottling plant, wine tastings and perhaps a quick zizz back at the hotel, Georges’ guests filed back into the warehouse for the main event, a formal sit-down banquet at elegantly laid round tables where vignerons and the cream of French gastronomy— chefs, maîtres d’hôtel, sommeliers, restaurant owners—joined distributors, food industry professionals, journalists, politicians and a scattering of Georges’ old friends for a multicourse dinner of astonishingly high quality, catered by Jean-Paul Lacombe, chef and owner of the wonderful restaurant Léon de Lyon in downtown Lyon, possessor of two Michelin stars. (Lacombe also happened to be Georges’ son-in-law, having had the excellent idea of marrying Fabienne Duboeuf.)

Lacombe’s menus always featured five wines of Georges’ selection, beginning with Champagne and moving on to Saint Véran, Beaujolais Nouveau, Moulin-à-Vent and finally a “mystery” wine as a challenge for the guests to identify. Guests rarely left the table hungry or thirsty. A typical menu (this one from 1985) included: pumpkin soup with croutons; Burgundy ham terrine; hare filets
en gelée
; endive salad with walnuts; hot Lyon sausage cooked in red wine; potato salad; duckling terrine with conserved onions; guinea hen with braised cabbage; cheeses from the internationally acclaimed Mère Richard in Lyon; desserts and coffee.

Along the warehouse’s back wall was a wide stage equipped with a professional sound system and lighting, where jugglers, singers, dancers and acrobats did their numbers, replicating in the twentieth century the entertainment that medieval lords had provided for their banquet guests hundreds of years earlier, while a magician circulated from table to table picking pockets, removing watches from wrists and pulling large banknotes out of hairdos. Through it all, Georges indulged his secret grasshopper side. MC now, he took over the show, radio mike in hand, to introduce acts, encourage applause and describe the year’s growing conditions and the resulting wine.

“He’s reserved and he doesn’t make much noise, but secretly he’s always been
un homme de spectacle,”
Michel Brun said. “A showman. It’s obvious when you look at his marketing. He loves to organize and preside over these things.”

Georges was still wet behind the ears and a beginner to the trade when he had organized his very first event in Romanèche.
La Tasse d’Or
(the Gold Cup) he had named it, and its point was to honor his best winemaker suppliers, with the winner walking away with a gold
tastevin
cup. It was a relatively modest affair, but it was the ancestor of the grandiose
Fête du Départ
in its central purpose: to pay respect to the vignerons. At both the
Tasse d’Or
and the big party, the key to the evening was the moment when Georges called individual growers to the stage for prizes and certificates in reflection of the tasting medals their wines had won in the year. But this was not the end of his tributes. There were also trips to Disney World for vigneron families and, every February, an outing reserved for vignerons alone without intrusion from press, politicians or other such lowlife. It was rather special, this one: an invitation to more than a hundred of his best suppliers to join him in Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or for a three-star meal with his friend Paul Bocuse.