I'll Drink to That (34 page)

“It is difficult to assemble a convincing explanation of why the British should apply themselves so assiduously to a race to get Beaujolais Nouveau,” wrote a bemused Hall just before the start of the 1976 campaign, and then he went on to enumerate a new high of three hundred entrants, most of them satisfyingly silly. There was a coach party from Westcliff-on-Sea who, he was certain, would consume their supply of
primeur
long before arriving back in London. There was also, he assured his readers, the entire town of Boston, Lincolnshire. (Which sounded plausible enough until I checked on its population: 35,400. Apparently Westcliff dwellers weren’t the only ones into the Beaujolais.) Hall further promised a hot air balloonist, an American health nut who promised to jog up the
autoroute
with a case strapped to his back, a major from the Sandhurst Military Academy and a team from Berkshire called Les Nouveaux Pauvres who proposed to go down and back by hitchhiking.

Sniffing a free publicity bonanza, other non-Brits horned in on the act, making the Run into an international event. Most notable were a Danish Formula One driver who ran a load at top speed from Saint-Amour to the premises of a Copenhagen wine merchant, and a Dutch team promoting Holland cigars by moseying down to the Beaujolais country in a horse-drawn wagon, handing out free smokes along the way. The foreigners were mere amateurs of absurdity compared to the Brits, though. A team from Milton Keynes invaded first Belgium and then France with a load of British wine called Hambledon. (The Belgian part went all right, but at the French border two hours of palavers and the intervention of a senior French diplomatic official were required to let them through.) Another team, my favorite, whose origins and purpose were obscure, made the Run in a white Bentley Continental with a flashing blue police light mounted on the roof, while wearing gorilla suits.

Most bookmakers gave as pre-race favorites the Ford GT-40 driven by London businessman Robert Horne, but his red, white and blue monster, of the same breed that had won the Le Mans race a few years earlier, shredded a tire near Paris and limped home at half speed. All was not lost, though: the GT-40 team had the distinction of being the only one to present the judges with a case of Beaujolais still piping hot from its proximity to the enormously powerful central engine.

A Ferrari 365 GTC-4 inherited the lead from the crippled Ford and went on to win by catching that famous 4:20 A.M. ferry. The record also showed that four athletes on BMW 900s won the motorcycle class, that the husband-and-wife team of David and Anne Ricketts, flying a pressurized Piper Navajo, finally beat Patterson’s airborne record by ninety seconds and that the winning truck was a thirty-two-ton, twelve-liter Seddon-Atkinson with a forty-foot trailer. But the true moral winners (in the nonexistent category of history and decorum) were London businessmen Derek Atkinson and Tony Cattle, who flew to Gatwick, took a train to London and then switched to a coach and four and rolled up to the finish line dressed as Louis XIV and the Duke of Orléans. They were unanimously voted the nonexistent Judges’ Cup.

Everyone remembered 1976 as a great year, for the exceptionally hot summer, for the wonderful quality of the Beaujolais, and for the silliness of the racing. Berkmann recalled the story of the truck driver who went AWOL by detouring his wine-laden semi into Paris to engage in some cultural exchange with the ladies of Place Pigalle. Being short of currency to pay his debts to them, he found himself denounced to the police and obliged to spend the night on-site until the banks opened the next morning. His load arrived late, and Berkmann lost a few clients.

Other truckers slipped up differently. Two of Berkmann’s crack drivers crashed the buffet that Duboeuf had laid on for press and VIPs, and ate and drank their fill before driving off at midnight. They covered about a kilometer before pulling over to the side of the road and sleeping through the rest of the night. A few years earlier the same scenario had bedeviled Franz Keller, owner of the Schwarzer Adler Inn in the Black Forest town of Oberbergen, whose German drivers arrived three hours behind schedule because of the generosity of Duboeuf’s buffet.

“Franz called to bawl me out,” Duboeuf recalled. “He was shouting so hard in German and French that I could barely understand what it was all about. He said the delay was a catastrophe that made him lose face.”

That great wine year of 1976 proved to be the swan song of the Beaujolais race,
ancien style
, because two things happened to change the picture. First Alan Hall at the
Times
received a visit from a Scotland Yard inspector who crisply informed him that his newspaper articles were tantamount to encouraging racing on Her Majesty’s roads, an offense for which both he and the competitors could be liable for severe penalties. Faced with the iron arm of the law, Hall wrote a column amending the rules to turn the race away from pure speed into a rally for the least number of kilometers covered. Second, and even more disastrous for the spirit of competition, the modality for releasing
primeur
was dramatically altered in response to pressure from foreign wholesalers. INAO’s new ruling decreed that although
primeur
could not be sold before November 15, it could be shipped anywhere in France as of the twelfth— and to Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Canada and Japan as well—all of whom offered ironclad guarantees against cheating—and held for release until the fifteenth. The ruling changed the face of the New Beaujolais Run entirely. For the English, it meant that would-be racers had only to pop across the Channel and pick up their stock at a Calais warehouse.

“Who wants to race from Calais to London?” asked Stirling Moss, the great English Formula One driver, who nevertheless signed on a couple of times to do just that, as part of some dealer’s PR campaign.

In 1977 the early shipping date rule came into effect, guaranteeing that almost anyone this side of the Solomon Islands could have a glass of
primeur
by lunchtime on the fifteenth. Efficiency was served, but folklore suffered. In 1979 Duboeuf persuaded Air France, Pan American and UTA to serve his
primeur
with inflight meals, and the Comité Interprofessionnel rushed four hundred bottles to the dining room of the Assemblée Nationale in Paris. Three days later they were obliged to supply four hundred more. Lawmaking is thirsty business.

After a pause to think it over, the British resurrected the race by the simple expedient of pretending that the early shipping ruling was not there and, once again, the roads around Romanèche were invaded by a motley army of
Rosbifs
(Roastbeefs), as the English are universally known in France, demanding Beaujolais in loud pidgin French. Off they clattered once again, sometimes on the road and sometimes into neighboring fields, while the natives smiled benevolently and counted their money. In 1981 the long-promised hot air balloon finally materialized when an English aviator named Ian Williams ascended majestically from the village of Saint-Georges-de-Reneins, his wicker basket ballasted with a consignment of
primeur.
As luck had it, the winds were from the north that day, and Williams soared away in the direction of the Mediterranean rather than the Channel, finally putting down north of Lyon to avoid the ignominy of having to deliver his wine to Marseille or Mallorca.

In 1982—not a very good vintage—Duboeuf was offering assorted hot sausages, coq au vin with fresh noodles, cheeses, dessert and the usual five sorts of wine at his send-off banquet, and arranged for racing drivers Jean-Pierre Beltoise and Jacky Ickx to thunder dramatically away from Romanèche. Like balloonist Williams they went only a few kilometers and then came back to the party, but onlookers had enjoyed the spectacle. Action on the international scene was highlighted in Chicago when Mayor Jane Byrne issued an official proclamation declaring the period of November 15 to 22 Beaujolais Nouveau Week. In Germany, a Munich restaurant dramatically brought a load into city center by helicopter, and in Oberbergen Franz Keller finally had his tasting on schedule at eight in the morning.

From a place called Peakirk to a place called Northborough (England, of course), someone delivered a very small load by motorized hang glider, while down in London the Red Devils, the British Army’s crack parachute team, spilled out of helicopters hovering over the city and splashed down in the Thames, bottles of
primeur
strapped to their thighs. One of the bottles went astray, tumbled off out of sight and finished its flight a quarter of a mile away, exploding at the feet of Mrs. Susan Weston, a forty-year-old Hampshire lady who had a stall in the Covent Garden Market.
The Guinness Book of Records
thereby missed its first entry for “Death by Falling Beaujolais.”

The Run itself, now a rally devoted almost exclusively to vintage cars, was won by Keith Butti, a driver from Brentwood in a 1927 Bugatti Grand Prix racer. With neither mudguards nor headlights to help him along, Butti drove through the night in torrential rain- and hailstorms with two flashlights tied to the front of his vehicle, following the tail-lights of a fellow competitor. He arrived in London with a heavy cold. I say: jolly good show.

Among the competitors whom Butti defeated were one man in a 1929 Bentley fire engine, one in an armored car and one in a red double-decker London bus. Its navigators carried a survival kit consisting of a French-English dictionary, bars of chocolate, headache pills, a jungle survival book and suntan cream. Another crew, in kilts (wearing nothing underneath, naturally) offered the citizens of Villefranche an impromptu bagpipe concert.

“There’s no other nation but the British for this,” reflected Stirling Moss, looking back over the history of the Run in the comfort of his souvenir-filled London flat. “Only the English would do something as stupid as this year after year.”

Those were wonderful years for the Beaujolais. With
primeur
as the locomotive pulling the rest along with it, the whole world appeared to have had signed on to the habit of drinking the wine of the gamay grape. Sales grew healthily through the eighties, and by 1998 fully 64 percent of normal Beaujolais and 62 percent of Beaujolais-Villages was being vinifed as new wine for November consumption—well over half of the region’s entire production.

The party couldn’t go on forever, though. Like a favorite song played a few times too many, the Run finally petered out, leaving fond memories and a determination within the British national bosom to go aquesting for other sources of fun: lobbying for tiddlywinks to be accepted as an Olympic sport, for instance, or the baffling pleasures of week-long cricket matches. Meanwhile, North Americans and Latin Americans alike were making more and more wine of better and better quality, Aussies and New Zealanders and South Africans were doing the same, Italians, Spaniards and Eastern Europeans were improving their vineyards and increasing production, the Chinese were rolling up their sleeves, and just about everywhere else in the world where there was plenty of sun and a grudging, rocky soil, investors were either already planting vines or surveying for the best spots to do it. Serious new competition was on the way. The days of easy glory for the Beaujolais had been surprisingly short-lived. Harder times were creeping up.

X

LABOR AND HONOR

A PEASANT’S LIFE IN THE VINES

“
"Voilà,” Marcel cried, “you’re seeing the birth of wine.”

Not many Beaujolais vignerons jump in and trample their grapes anymore, but Marcel Pariaud is a man who likes to do things traditionally, and he vinifies the old way, the same way his father and grandfather did. Decorously dressed in clean shorts and rubber boots, glistening crimson from the mashed grapes massaging his thighs and flowing over his arms, he stood inside his big cylindrical press stomping vigorously while directing a stream of fermenting fruit from a wide flexible tube fed by an Archimedes’ screw. Winemakers have many moments in their eternally repeated yearly rituals that might be labeled as crucial, but this one—pressing time—was something like the climax. Now everything was happening at once, and Marcel had only himself and Guillaume, a local lad paid by the hour, to make sure that this, his last batch of Morgon, came out right. Completely hidden from view within the upright oaken vat wherein he was laboring, and similarly stripped to shorts and boots, Guillaume shoveled the mass of grapes that had been macerating there for more than a week up into the mouth of the Archimedes’ screw, sending it cascading down to the press below, while Marcel stomped and stomped. The heavy, intoxicating odor of fermentation filled the entire room. Deep red, sweet as a soft drink and treacherously delicious, the juice dripping through the slats at the bottom of the press into the pan below already contained a few degrees of alcohol and bore a name that could not be more fitting:
Paradis.

The vinifying shed that Marcel had designed and built himself was not exactly a high-tech model of modern efficiency. Certainly he had configured it to be as labor-saving as possible by using the force of gravity from start to finish: outside, an inclined plane led to a high ramp for his tractor, from which he dumped the freshly harvested grapes down to a second level for macerating in vats, then a third for pressing and finally a fourth for storage. Even so, his radically limited budget had always obliged him to use mostly secondhand gear, arranged as best as he could make it. His big, 750-hectoliter oak vats were more than seventy-five years old and looked positively quaint in an era when stainless steel and fiberglass prevailed just about everywhere else, but he had gotten them secondhand at a good price from a co-op in Roanne and, everything considered, was very pleased to have them. The vats absorbed certain ethers that stainless steel could not, he insisted, so modern plants have to use expensive micro-oxygenation systems to do what his wood does naturally. Old equipment and secondhand gear did not bother Marcel in the least. It meant a lot of handwork—shoveling, shifting, pumping, connecting and disconnecting, lugging heavy equipment and loads from one location to another—but so what? He saw nothing wrong with that.