I'll Drink to That (38 page)

Like Duboeuf, like Rougier, Bosse-Platière and, indeed, like everyone involved in the promotion and sale of Beaujolais, Jadot agreed that the region had been chastened by the explosive rise of foreign competition on the world wine market, but added that this very chastening had been salubrious in its effect: it had gone a long way toward eliminating the worst wines from the commercial circuit and persuading producers to lay off overreliance on the chemical industry for growing their grapes.

“Beaujolais wines have never been as good as they have become over the past five years or so,” he insisted, and the samples he poured for me that afternoon easily bore him out. With quality of that standard, with the shared enthusiasm that greeted Duboeuf’s selection at the Paris tasting session, with the kind of commentary delivered by connoisseurs like Bettane and Prial, it is always galling when Beaujolais wines are misapprehended as they frequently are, and all the more so when the disparagement arrives from within the camp, in France itself. In 2002, all the latent dread and insecurity that had been stalking the region’s vignerons came together in a single flash point when a nasty little affair erupted like an echo of Philip the Bold’s anathematizings. Starting from next to nothing, it blew out of all logical proportion and reached a point that threatened to do terrible damage to the reputation of the entire Beaujolais region. Around Beaujeu, Belleville and Villefranche it was known as
l’Affaire Lyon Mag
—or, in its most painful labeling, as
l’Affaire Vin de Merde.

Lyon Mag
is a glossy monthly similar to hundreds of other “city” magazines around the world, offering a predictable mix of local coverage— politics, sport, pocketbook economics, women’s pages and the like—and a young, ambitious editorial staff with a marked penchant for seeking out the sensational kinds of stories that tend to boost newsstand sales. In the summer of 2002, after Beaujolais producers had requested a governmental subsidy for sending to the distillery one hundred thousand hectoliters of unsold wine from the weak 2001 vintage, the magazine opportunistically splashed an article denouncing the request, in the name of defending taxpayers’ interests. The key to the article was a quote from François Mauss, a somewhat obscure Parisian wine personality: “They wanted to make money at all costs, and they are perfectly aware of selling a
vin de merde.
As a result, the Beaujolais producers don’t deserve state assistance.”

Vin de merde
: shit wine. The quote was heaven-sent. AN EXPERT ACCUSES, the magazine breathlessly headlined, “Beaujolais, It’s Not Wine.” It was tendentious, mean-spirited stuff that picked up on all the old rumors, prejudices, jealousies and stereotypes that had been laid out against Beaujolais for centuries—in effect, kicking someone who was already down. But the ploy worked like magic, better than anything the editors could have hoped for: the vignerons snapped at the bait. Wounded in their pride, already punished by flagging sales, the growers’ community saw red and reacted unthinkingly to defend its honor: sixty-three village and regional trade groups got together and sued
Lyon Mag
for denigration of their product.

With that, the ball got rolling, and soon it was out of control. The lawsuit turned a meretricious little article in an unimportant provincial magazine into a national cause célèbre. The Parisian press picked up the story, and from there it went international. As the most widely recognized name in red wines, Beaujolais had always made good copy, so this was much too good to miss. Within twenty-four hours, Beaujolais =
Vin de Merde
had flashed around the world. Duboeuf was depressed and horrified by the producers’ gaffe, because he guessed very accurately the path that the whole dreary business would be taking over the next few months.

“They should never have filed that lawsuit,” he told me. “All they’re accomplishing is to spread the calumny around the world. Things were already bad enough. Now they’ve made it much worse.”

It happened exactly as he had feared, and through the next weeks and months he gazed in stunned disbelief at his fellow countrymen great and small as they assiduously engaged themselves in a national exercise of shooting themselves in the foot, while at the same time sinking the Beaujolais. In first judgment and appeal,
Lyon Mag
was twice condemned and heavily fined, which unsurprisingly caused the national press and civil liberties groups of all ilk to leap to defend the cause of freedom of the press. Meanwhile, a venomous political squabble was developing between the United States and France, whose national administration seemed hell-bent on destroying the last shreds of more than two centuries of American affection for the land of
liberté, égalité and fraternité.
President Jacques Chirac was at his pompous best in displaying undisguised contempt for President Bush and threatening to use his Security Council veto against any UN help with the Iraq adventure. (The idea was right, the diplomatic manner wasn’t.) At the same time, his talented mouthpiece, Prime Minister Dominigue de Villepin, declaimed elegant polemics against America in general, and before anyone knew quite what was happening everything had spun into caricature: Uncle Sam was a warmonger, the entire French nation had been transmogrified into cheese-eating surrender monkeys, and Freedom Fries were just around the corner. Along with everything else French, sales of Beaujolais plummeted in the United States.

It was in this poisoned atmosphere that the Cour de Cassation, the French supreme court, finally threw out the earlier judgments against
Lyon Mag,
on the perfectly reasonable principle that the European Convention on Human Rights explicitly shielded freedom of speech. That ended it. The episode had proven to be nothing more than a useless, costly exercise in emotional gesticulation, one that made Beaujolais look silly around the world and gave undeserved honor to
Lyon Mag
as a doughty little bastion of freedom of the press. “Undeserved” because Mauss, the man at the origin of the affair, was furious at the magazine for having pulled a sensational story from thin air by manipulating him and his words—the traditional sin of low-flying journalists masquerading as crusaders.

“You’ve got to know the truth,” he told me urgently. “They called me at ten or ten-thirty at night, and we spoke about all sorts of things for almost an hour and a half. You know how it is when you talk on the phone, you let yourself go a little, so yes, I did say that those one hundred thousand hectoliters were
vin de merde,
but I was only referring to them, not all Beaujolais. When I finally saw the article in the magazine, I said damn—I’ve been had! I adore Beaujolais, and I absolutely didn’t want to say that the producers were no good. If they had consulted me before filing that lawsuit, I would have presented them a formal apology. What came out in
Lyon Mag
didn’t at all correspond to what I felt about Beaujolais wine.”

Three years after the start of this doleful affair, Duboeuf had cause to be horrified yet again, when an internal audit showed that the chief of the impressive new winery he had built in 2002 had lamentably screwed up his job, mixing together different
crus
that were meant to be stored and sold separately, then compounding the bungles by mixing Beaujolais-Villages in with certain
crus.
(With everyone harvesting at once over a few mad, hectic days and grapes arriving all day long and well into the night, it was perhaps understandable that fatigue would take its toll and cause a mess, but this one was of truly awful proportions.) Ironically, the errors came to light because Georges had installed a computerized tracking system that followed each batch of grapes from vineyard to bottle. On learning of the screwup, he immediately suspended his employee and blocked the wines in vats before they could be bottled. Blocked or not, though, the mixes constituted a breach of AOC rules. The matter came to the attention of the local tax and customs authorities, and the zealous new Villefranche prosecutor decided to make an example of Duboeuf. Once again
Lyon Mag
splashed a big story—Beaujolais always made good copy, but Beaujolais
and
Duboeuf was even better. DUBOEUF ACCUSED OF FRAUD, the headline shouted, and at length the case came to a trial. Despite the fact that the 2,090 hectoliters involved—less than 1 percent of his output—had remained in-house and unbottled, Les Vins Georges Duboeuf was fined 30,000 euros, or about $36,000, for “trickery and attempted trickery.” This looked like doubtful justice at best, but Duboeuf was not going to make the same mistake as the producers who sued
Lyon Mag
and see the humiliating story dragged out over years of appeals, judgments and further tendentious articles. He swallowed hard, shut up, downgraded all the litigious wines one notch, selling the
crus
as Beaujolais-Villages, and the Beaujolais-Villages as simple Beaujolais. In both cases, the wines had been ennobled by the mix with higher-value stuff, then sold beneath the price they would normally command, so the company took a beating and some customers got a good deal. But what counted most was this: although Les Vins Georges Duboeuf had been found guilty of unauthorized procedures, Georges himself was declared innocent. Honor was intact.

XI

WHITHER BEAUJOLAIS?

GLOBALIZATION AND THE RANSOM OF SUCCESS

A
s satisfying as it was for honor to be proven and to walk exonerated from a courtroom, the economic consequences of bad publicity remained imponderable, and after the successive attacks of
l’Affaire Vin de Merde
and
l’Affaire Duboeuf
, the Beaujolais was in something like a state of shock: unpleasant, baffling new forces had come to cloud the optimism that had swept over the region in earlier decades. Dealers and vignerons alike could understand and accept that their wines were encountering fierce new competition from abroad, but what mystified and troubled them was to discover so much cold antipathy coming from the French themselves, the same ones who only a generation earlier had raised Beaujolais nearly to the status of a national treasure. What had gone wrong? The peasant smallholders of the Beaujolais were supposed to be the good guys,
les bons petits gars,
brave little villagers taking on their rich and powerful competitors with the magic potion they brewed from the gamay grape. Certainly some among them had resorted to easy outs, grown and overgrown grapes in ill-suited grain terrain and dumped poor quality wine onto the market—there wasn’t a wine area anywhere in the world where hustlers hadn’t been similarly cutting corners—but they were exceptions. Why should the finger be pointed only at the Beaujolais? Why this vendetta?

Over and over again as I rambled around villages and vineyards I met the same uncomprehending headshakes and heard the same comparison between France and the United States brought forth: in America you admire success and try to emulate it; here, they hate you for it and try to tear you down. And then there was the matter of Lyon. That really hurt. The wonderful, easygoing old town astride the confluence of the Saône and the Rhône was France’s version of Chicago, the second city, with its own particular culture, history, folklore, slang and accent. It was the anti-Paris, laughing and insolent where the capital was pompous and self-important, comfortable with its frank accent on good living and sensuality where Paris was ambitious, proud and just a bit paranoiac; and, best of all, it was the national epicenter of good eating and good drinking, the gourmet’s earthly paradise of food and wine, where great chefs like Paul Bocuse and Jean-Paul Lacombe were much better known and admired than whoever happened to be mayor of the moment—and this marvelous place had turned its back on Beaujolais. It was distressing, incomprehensible. In the wine country this abandonment was felt like the breakup of a love affair, and not one that ended by mutual consent but rather by unilateral rupture—the Beaujolais had been jilted. Dismayed, the vignerons discovered a character trait in the Lyonnais that they had never suspected: they weren’t necessarily always so jolly, after all,
les gones
. They could be downright spiteful when they put their minds to it.

One drizzly April afternoon I drove down to Lyon to see for myself how bad the situation was. In a personal survey of no statistical value whatsoever, I visited ten cafés and bars in the vicinity of the sumptuous Part Dieu food market on the left bank of the Rhône, lifted a few glasses and asked a few bartenders and clients their opinion of Beaujolais wines. My first observation was that certain overriding national character traits always dominate: the French will be the French, whatever region or microculture they inhabit. As a kind of preamble to any opinion emitted on any subject, it was postulated by general agreement that (1) everyone always cheats, and (2) in any case the press is rotten and never tells anything but a pack of lies, so you can never really tell what’s what. The vote on that was unanimous. That being said, Beaujolais was out, definitely out. And what was striking—astonishing even—was the degree of antagonism:
not a single one of these bars was even serving Beaujolais.
Lyon, the city that had been identified with the wine of the gamay like none other, had decided that it would now drink Côtes du Rhône. More than a mere change of fashion, this was a major, implacable pout.

“The Beaujolais people should have paid more attention to their French clients instead of the foreign market,” sniffed the boss of a bar called the Aristo. Bingo—that was half the reason for the pout right there. The other half was articulated bluntly in another establishment a few blocks away. “Beaujolais is much more expensive than Côtes du Rhône,” explained the owner of the Brasserie du Palais as he poured me a generous
ballon
of his 2003 Belleruche. “The quality-price ratio is better with this.”

So it was about money, after all. But that wasn’t the whole story. Emotions were involved, too, and a good deal more than most people realized or would admit. Beaujolais—our Beaujolais, the wine we Lyonnais just about invented—had gone off and danced with other partners, then had the nerve to raise its prices. The big man behind the bar in the Brasserie du Palais delivered a final cruel announcement like a knockout punch. “I inherited this place from my mother,” he said with satisfaction. “When she had it, its name was Le Beaujolais.”