I'll Drink to That (37 page)

Fashion was changing, as it always does, and in the great traditional markets for Beaujolais in France, England, Germany and Switzerland, the wine of the gamay grape—especially Beaujolais Nouveau—was edging toward the dreaded category of been there, done that. Sales were picking up abroad, especially in more exotic markets like Japan, China, India and Russia, but in spite of this,
primeur
production had dropped to one-third of the total of all Beaujolais wines by 2006. The edge was off the novelty.

The trouble was not limited to Beaujolais alone. Far from it: almost everywhere in France except for the haughty, insanely expensive growths of super prestige, vignerons found themselves with unsold stock on their hands as the world spiraled once more into a situation of oversupply. With the new century, an entirely different situation had arisen. Thanks to vigorous, enterprising new winemakers in the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, the French monopoly on high-quality wines was under attack from all sides. The result was paradoxical: more and more people around the world were learning to appreciate good wine even as the French themselves were drinking less and less of it. And now, in large part thanks to the enormous influence of the American wine critic Robert Parker, the heavies—the dour, brooding Beethovens—were leading the pack of popularity. In the din, the melodies of the sprightly Vivaldis were being drowned out.

Within the cacophony of this overcrowded wine marketplace,
primeur
fell into an uncomfortable position. For as long as anyone could remember, it was Beaujolais Nouveau that had stood as the archetype of the Vivaldi category of wines, but it became a victim of its own success—exactly like the music of the Red Priest himself. When
The Four Seasons
reached the point of commercial exploitation where it was simultaneously wafting out of elevator loudspeakers in Omaha and Singapore and innumerable points between, it was soon condemned to that special purgatory reserved for Things We Don’t Do Anymore. With that, a fundamental truth got eclipsed: elevators and cell phone rings notwithstanding,
The Four Seasons
was still a terrific piece of music, a superb and thoroughly estimable contribution to the European classical tradition. So it went for
primeur.
When too many people—especially too many “other” people—had latched onto the pleasure of a glassful of red fruit and field flowers as of the third Thursday of November, that pleasure became obsolete and somehow unworthy for those wine lovers who had been there earlier.

But that was not the end of the vexing story, because the
primeur
phenomenon proved to be a double-edged sword for the rest of the Beaujolais. With each new market it conquered, the juvenile wine created such a stir of publicity that, year by passing year, people unconsciously began to identify Beaujolais Nouveau with the totality of the area’s wines, forgetting that they were not one but thirteen: Beaujolais, Beaujolais-Villages, the ten
crus
—and then
primeur
, too, like a jolly little bonus. But the baby wine, the little newcomer to the Beaujolais family, had a big voice, and that famous third Thursday of November crept surreptitiously into the public consciousness as the signal for a one-time celebration. Especially in foreign lands, too many of these seasonal drinkers assumed that after downing a glass of Beaujolais Noveau in November they could drop the wine of the gamay grape until the following year.

That was very bad karma for the
crus.
Wandering through those granite-speckled hills from Saint-Amour in the north to Brouilly in the south, I began hearing how distressingly these growths—rarer, more complex and more expensive—were suffering from the obtrusive presence of their cheerful little cousin. Sure we’re Beaujolais, the vignerons of the
crus
were saying, but we’re also Moulin-à-Vent and Fleurie and Morgon and Chénas. Our wines are exceptional,
vins de garde
that can keep for years and years. People should realize they can’t compare them to
primeur
, and they shouldn’t expect to be able to get them for the same price, either.

Most of these vignerons diplomatically refrained from using that fraught adjective “better” when they spoke of their wines, but of course that’s what they meant. And they were right, too. Beaujolais Nouveau never pretended to be anything more than a little wine, a glass of fun, and not even the most chauvinistic producer would dare claim that his sunny, fruit-juicey
primeur
could match the depth and complexity of the ten
crus
—same region, same grape, same methods of vinification, but the wines were totally different. Even so, the baby wine with the big voice had tended to blur distinctions, creating the erroneous perception that Beaujolais—all Beaujolais—was about the same: an amusing wisp of a wine that was enjoyable, but not really to be taken seriously.

I had a nice occasion to see just how misguided this perception could be when, in June of 2006, I joined a tasting in Paris to which Georges Duboeuf had invited the elite of France’s wine-tasting establishment. Two winners of the World’s Best Sommelier contest, Olivier Poussier and Philippe Faure-Brac, were there, along with one Meilleur Ouvrier de France (Master Craftsman in Wine), a couple of newspaper wine specialists, and the famously outspoken critic Michel Bettane, author of France’s most incisive wine guide. Georges had brought samples of all the
crus
with him, but the object of the tasting was not to put his guests through one of those blind which-one-is-which routines. He wanted to make a point about misperceptions of Beaujolais. All he asked his guests to do was to comment on their appreciation of differentyears of production—as far back as thirty years, as it turned out, because his first samples dated from 1976.

On the face of it this should have been an absurd exercise, because common wisdom had long ago decreed that Beaujolais wines do not keep longer than two or three years at the most. Common wisdom took a beating that morning as the wines succeeded one another. From the very first samples—Brouilly, Morgon and even one “ordinary” Beaujolais, all of them bottled in 1976—the adjectives flying around the spitting buckets were straight from the book of hyperbole usually reserved for
grands crus
: “elegant,” “distinguished,” “complex,” “delicate,” “structured,” “balanced” and, perhaps most pertinently, “surprising.”

Surprising, indeed, that Beaujolais wines could be so good and hold their strength so well after so many years, but Bettane only shrugged. He had known the secret all along. A man who takes great pleasure in knocking down popular misconceptions, he had already told me a thing or two, over lunch a few months earlier, about how and why the wines of the Beaujolais had become so
déconsidérés
in comparison with those of the officially pedigreed nobilities.

“The tragedy,” he explained, “is that the Beaujolais was administratively connected to Burgundy, and the dealers—
les négociants—
were all Burgundians. These people liked hierarchies, and they decided once and for all that the gamay was an inferior
cépage.
They are the ones who established the notion that Beaujolais was a lesser wine that had to be sold much cheaper than even the cheapest of the Burgundies. So it was the
négoce
that established these hierarchies, and unfortunately sommeliers and others in a position to form people’s opinions have been raised with these same ideas.”

Bettane was not saying that all Beaujolais was wonderful; in fact he energetically railed against unscrupulous merchants who had sold poor, thin stuff that they picked up for a pittance, profiting from the renown that Duboeuf and other quality dealers like Louis Tête and Jadot had brought to the wines. But his central argument was that the pricing system had gone all cockeyed over the years.

“Duboeuf himself has been guilty in this—the simple fact is that he is selling the best wines too cheaply! Selling a Moulin-à-Vent for only 20 percent or 30 percent more than a
primeur
is a monstrous error, because it is worth much more. In the old days, a high-quality Moulin-à-Vent used to go for the same price as a Gevrey-Chambertin-Villages. I started buying wines when I was twenty, and at that time a Moulin-à-Vent commanded the same price as a Mercurey First Growth or a Crozes-Hermitage. Now the Crozes-Hermitage costs two and a half times more. Beaujolais is underrated today because people don’t know it well enough.”

As an element of proof, he reached back considerably further than Duboeuf had done with the samples he brought to Paris—nearly half a century further, in fact—to recount an experiment he had organized by asking Beaujolais vignerons of his acquaintance to open some of the oldest bottles from their cellars. “At the Château des Jacques, I drank a 1929 Moulin-à-Vent that was absolutely sublime—you could have easily mistaken it for a Chambertin. Another time I had a 1929 Morgon that was better than the Romanée Saint-Vivant or the Chambertin of that same year. I’ve got two bottles of 1911 Morgon in my cellar right now. I’m just waiting for the right occasion to uncork them. So yes—Beaujolais can be a truly great wine. In my opinion, if you look at the quality/price ratio, Moulin-à-Vent is the best deal you can get in French wines.”

Frank Prial, the pope of American wine critics, went even further than Bettane. “I agree that Moulin-à-Vent is the best buy in French wines,” he said without hesitation, “but I would include all the
crus.
Moulin-à-Vent is usually the best, but Morgons from the Côte de Py can be even better in some years. And Chénas is a real sleeper. It’s right next to Moulin-à-Vent, and shares much of the same
terroir.
”

Prial, whose astute and eminently readable wine articles in the
New York Times
were educating American readers on the subtle joys of the grape when today’s generation of young critics were still in oenological swaddling clothes, has been around the business long enough and has popped enough corks to be able to offer some fairly trenchant illusion-killingof his own. “The great thing about Beaujolais for me,” he said, “is its consistency when compared with Burgundy. Great Burgundy is much superior to Beaujolais, but you simply can’t count on it and, truth to tell, it isn’t ‘great’ very often. Even the finest producers let you down regularly. Worse, the prices are outrageous even when the wine is mediocre. There are years when a $12 bottle of
cru
Beaujolais will beat out $150 bottles from Vosne-Romanée, Bonnes Mares or Chambertin.”

Prial’s comment recalled an anecdote recounted by Pierre-Antoine Rovani, the former specialist of Burgundy wines for Robert Parker’s
Wine Advocate.
Commenting on a 2004 tasting of a varied selection of unidentified wines, he singled out a 2003 Moulin-à-Vent from Duboeuf that had completely hornswoggled both him and his fellow Wine Nerds.

“Not a single member of the group guessed Beaujolais,” he wrote, “believing it was a top-flight Hermitage or Burgundy. Bravo!”

So, paradox again: if many Burgundy wines were apparently more expensive than their inherent worth, at the same time a lot of Beaujolais wines were too cheap. Extraordinary: after more than six centuries, the protectionist anathema against the gamay grape launched by Burgundy’s Philip the Bold in 1395 still holds fast. For the lean of wallet and pocketbook, this situation looks very much like an opportunity to be turned to advantage. If any of us had any brains, it would appear, we would all dash out and stock up forthwith on Moulin-à-Vent, Fleurie, Chénas, Morgon or their sister
crus,
leaving the great Burgundy growths and the noble Bordeaux châteaux to Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and our friendly neighborhood investment bankers.

After decades of tastings in company with Georges Duboeuf, his colleagues and vignerons too numerous to count, my education in the nuances of character and quality among the several wines of the Beaujolais has been fairly comprehensive, but none of this offered the sense of historical satisfaction that was delivered in another session, very recent this one, in the gloom of the huge, vaulted sixteenth-century cellar of the Château des Jacques in Romanèche-Thorins, the very place where Michel Bettane had enjoyed his instructive encounter with a remarkable 1929 Moulin-à-Vent.

Duboeuf City Romanèche most certainly is, but this time it was not Georges who led me down the stone steps to where the wine lay, but rather his friend Pierre-Henry Gagey, boss of the rival wine house Louis Jadot. The historical satisfaction of the occasion lay in the fact that Jadot is a Burgundy company par excellence, based in Beaune and producer of some of the finest, most expensive growths of the Côte d’Or—but when (perhaps inspired by Duboeuf’s tremendous success) they decided to establish their own official outpost in the Beaujolais, it looked very much like an act of commercial contrition. They were admitting that Beaujolais was OK, after all. In effect, the company was making amends for Burgundy’s having been so beastly about the gamay grape for so long.

Jadot made a first tentative venture south when it began buying acreage in Beaujolais-Villages vines in 1987; then the house followed that with the purchase of Château des Jacques in Romanèche nine years later, then Morgon’s Château Bellevue in 2001. With each of these purchases, Philip the Bold could distinctly be heard spinning in his fancy necropolis in Beaune, because that made it official: gamay was vile and noxious no more. The mountain had come to Mohammed.

How right Jadot was to have done it. The wines I tasted that afternoon—after a white Beaujolais of the chardonnay grape I was treated to a magnificent procession of wines from the Jadot properties in Beaujolais-Villages, Morgon and Moulin-à-Vent—all of them rich and round, succulent with mature fruit and balanced with the acidity and the tannin to allow them to hold for years and years. They were little short of stupendous, and I was not surprised when Gagey assured me that Jadot took the same painstaking care with a $10 Beaujolais as they did with a $300 Chambertin. But his earnest sincerity only led me in the direction of subversive thoughts. With stuff like this, I couldn’t help wondering, how could they manage to sell their top-of-the-line Burgundies at prices twenty or thirty times dearer? And when, at almost the very moment when I was tasting these fabulous gamays, the news emerged that the price of Bordeaux’s great Château Pétrus, jewel of Pomerol, had just topped $3,000 for a single bottle, my thoughts grew considerably more subversive. If it was hard enough to swallow the notion of a Chambertin being thirty times “better” than these wonderful bottles Gagey had uncorked for me, was I now to accept that a Pétrus was somehow
three hundred times
better? This was ridiculous. Any wine lover with half a palate, I was certain, would gladly take three hundred of Jadot’s wonderful gamays against a single Pétrus. Bettane and Prial had spoken lucidly: snobbery and the cash flowing from wine investors had created some very weird imbalances in the market.