I'll Drink to That (39 page)

Relaxing with a pre-lunch glass of Mâcon white in his comfortable Art Deco house near the university in downtown Lyon, Professor Garrier added a third angle to the explanation. “Toward the end of the last century there were two or three years when a lot of mediocre Beaujolais was produced. It was coming out acid and sometimes mildewed, while the Côtes du Rhône was OK. The old generation of vignerons from the days of
les trente glorieuses
hadn’t always updated their equipment and had gotten a little bit sloppy about maintaining their installations. Not many of them were as scrupulous as Georges Duboeuf, so the result was poor wine. Add that to the snobbery of the Lyonnais—since the Japanese like our Beaujolais so much, we won’t drink it anymore—and you’ve got a very powerful negative argument:
l’amour trompé.
Infidelity in love.”

A few months after my lunch with Professor Garrier I dropped in on Michel Rougier, director-general of InterBeaujolais in Villefranche. As it happened, he was gazing at a selection of withering anti-wine articles and postings on his computer when I walked into his office. As the man whose job was to represent both the growers and the dealers, he was sorely vexed by what he was seeing.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said and sighed. “Yes, we’re in a time of crisis now, and I’m afraid its going to last a number of years. Look at this.” He made a gesture of disgust toward the screen. “The political class has been manipulated by health professionals. Now they’re acting as if alcohol is a medicine, or a drug to be regulated. It’s almost as if they want to prohibit wine. But we’re Latins, not binge drinkers like the Anglo-Saxons or Scandinavians. We don’t go out and get drunk on Saturday night. We drink regularly, but reasonably.”

Undeniably, Rougier had a point. While the consumption of wine is an integral part of the French daily social routine, drinking alcohol fast and deep to get seriously drunk is not viewed as normal or acceptable behavior. Early in my years in France—the mid-sixties—when the average per capita consumption of wine was still over one hundred liters a year, a journalistic colleague of mine, himself no stranger to the charms of alcohol, was moved to a lapidary observation: “You know,” he said with something like confraternal admiration, “I’ve rarely seen a Frenchman completely drunk. But then again I’ve rarely seen one completely sober, either.”

That’s changed. Today, average per capita consumption has dropped to less than fifty liters a year, and there are more and more French men and women who spend their entire lives dead sober. The decline in wine consumption has been slow but cumulative. Until recent times, the only signs of any anti-drink campaigning that anyone might have encounteredwere the work of vaguely prohibitionist do-good organizations that bought advertising space in busses and metro cars where they installed a clumsily drawn cartoon of a sad little girl addressing an admonition to her staggering father: “
Papa, ne bois pas, pense à moi.
” Daddy, don’t drink, think of me. The campaign was remarkably ineffective.

Meanwhile, out in real life on the highways, French drivers reveled (or shrank in terror, depending on their psyche) in an environment that brought to mind images of a giant automotive pinball machine: enforcement of speed limits was virtually nonexistent, stop signs and red lights were viewed as optional and alcohol tests were unknown except ex post facto, at the sites of serious accidents.
Priorité à droite
—the horse-and-buggy rule obliging the car on the left to cede right of way to the car on the right—seemed to be the single, overriding rule that everyone knew by heart, and it was viewed as a driver’s absolute entitlement, whatever the circumstance. Naturally, this caused mayhem at poorly marked crossroads, because drivers habitually entered them at breakneck speed. Lacking a national superhighway grid, the
routes nationales
of the old three-lane geometry, ideal for head-on collisions, were a murderous travel adventure. Successive French administrations, alarmed at the cost to the nation of road deaths and maimings, finally took a look at the figures, saw that their country was leading Western Europe as the most dangerous place to take to the highway, and decided to do something about it. The statistics were awful, it must be said. In the ghastly record year of 1972, 18,113 persons were killed on French roads. The first and most noticeable reaction of the authorities was to rush construction of what is now an admirable and thoroughly modern superhighway system. After that, the cops were given new powers and new equipment. By 2001, road deaths had fallen to 8,000, then down to 4,975 in 2005.
Le tout-répressif,
the new national policy was called: the crackdown. With automatic flash-camera radars installed throughout the country and speed traps and random gendarme checks becoming generalized, French drivers finally began resigning themselves to maybe obeying the traffic laws.

At the same time, the dreaded balloon became a fixture of everyday road life: the unannounced ambush by a squad of gendarmes, the smart military salute and the polite but totally imperative request to blow into the balloon. Anything more than the equivalent of a couple of glasses of wine led to a forced wait by the roadside to get the alcohol rate down, and a few points off the twelve-point driver’s license. Higher rates meant immediate suspension of the license, immobilization of the car in situ and a trip to the gendarmerie or commissariat for a much longer sobering-up wait—in a cell or holding room this time—and loss of the license for up to six months. It was draconian and painful, but there was no arguing with the statistics of dramatically fewer road deaths. In the face of that, it was difficult to argue that people ought to be able to drink as much as they wanted at lunch or dinner and carry on with their lives as before. Professionals of wine were caught in an ethical and semantic bind.

“Everything’s changing,” said Rougier despondently. “The police, the market, the competition, the consumers, the techniques of production, the
cépages
, the public’s tastes—everything. Tradition doesn’t hold anymore.”

There it was. Ad lib, Rougier had summed up the predicament facing winegrowers in every corner of France except a few niche producers of specialty wines and, of course, those with happy names like Pétrus, Richebourg, Krug or Yquem. The ones at the very high end were sitting as pretty as ever, but the vast middle ground was an overcrowded sea of trouble.
Everything’s changing
. And it never stops changing, either—that’s what was so unsettling about it. The primeval soup called globalization is a fantastic machine for creating wealth, variety and innovation, but it is also a kind of monster, a dog-eat-dog combat that permanently threatens the status quo. It is a very unsettling thing, and a great national debate rages in France, where the tug of tradition is strong, about how to come to terms with it. Nothing is sure anymore, nothing is safe, whether here or anywhere else—and that goes for every kind of enterprise, whether wine, warplanes or widgets. If everyone can do anything and sell it anywhere, the inescapable corollary is that today’s darling is in permanent danger of being tomorrow’s discard.

Seething at the bad news on his computer screen, Rougier railed against “
les vins body-buildés,
” the powerful, tannic Beethovens that had come to worldwide favor at the expense of less muscular stuff, while stubbornly predicting that drinkers around the world would soon tire of this strong medicine and return to the subtler, less overwhelming charms of the gamay grape. “Those heavy wines will finally become undrinkable,” he insisted. “Beaujolais is a wine for
drinking
, not for winning complexity prizes at tasting sessions. With our
cépage,
we can’t make heavy wines. Beaujolais is going to be the wine of the third millennium.”

But he didn’t really sound all that sure of himself. There was a lot of whistling in the dark going on in the Beaujolais. As 2006 moved into 2007 the region boasted fewer than thirty-five hundred individual exploitations, compared to five-thousand-plus in the glory days, and the number looked certain to drop even further. Even though the Beaujolais had not been nearly as overplanted as the vast Bordeaux region, it was looking at a probable loss of a further quarter of its acreage under vines. New measures were hastily installed to allow desperate Beaujolais vignerons to double their yields per acre—on condition of selling their output more cheaply as simple table wine or a new regional wine to be called Vin du Pays des Gaules. It was a depressing admission of defeat: Beaujolais, or certain parts of the Beaujolais, anyway, was seeking salvation by going down-market.

“We’re at a turning point now,” Marcel Laplanche said gravely. This veteran vigneron from Blacé, he of the prodigious memory and illusionless judgment, is one of the most respected sages of the Beaujolais, a man who has known every twist of the region’s fortunes from well before World War II. “Twenty years ago we were able to sell as much as we could produce, but now we’ve hit the wall. A lot of the guys are facing bankruptcy. We’ve lost Lyon now. We’re going to be seeing some deaths around here, for sure.”

Suicides in the Beaujolais would have seemed unthinkable a decade or so earlier, but the economic realities of expenses too high for returns too small are the same for a stockbroker, a hairdresser or a vigneron. For many, the numbers were adding up seriously wrong, and it was not difficult to understand expressions of gloom like the ones I met in the handsome reception room of the
cave coopérative
in Saint-Laurent-d’Oingt, where twenty-five years earlier, in the golden days, I had accompanied Georges Duboeuf and Patrick Léon on a part of their marathon wine-tasting duties.

“Globalization is hitting all of us hard,” admitted René Bothier, president of the
cave.
“The competition’s getting to be ferocious. Now on top of that, everyone’s afraid of the cops. Our
caveau
used to be full on Sundays. People came from all over to have a drink, meet other people, talk and have a good time. Now it’s empty here. Customers come to buy their wine, but they don’t even taste it, because the gendarmes might be waiting for them down the road. Sales are down 20 percent over the last five years.”

The big rectangular room with the long bar, wooden tables and sweeping panoramic view out over the vines had been purpose-built for drinking, fun and partying—the old ways of the old days—but it was now strangely incongruous and bereft, like a house without furniture. Our voices echoed off the walls—just as they do, come to think of it, in the empty churches all over the Beaujolais. A few decades earlier, Joseph Berkmann had been fighting tooth and nail to get his
primeur
to London faster than his competitors because the Brits were crazy about French wines, and in particular the wines of the gamay grape. In those days, French wines were miles ahead of all others in sales on the other side of the Channel. But by the fall of 2006, they had fallen to third place in UK sales, behind Australia (number one) and the United States (number two).

The United States! To be outstripped in the great national specialty by the hamburger-chomping philistines from across the pond, traditional butts of all French food and wine commentary, was a sobering comeuppance, but that, too, was globalization. Unquestionably, some serious rethinking was called for, along with a good dose of commercial humility. The seller’s market was finished; it was time to court the consumer.

To their credit, it has to be said that French producers and dealers recognized the danger and reacted as quickly and energetically as they could, within the bounds of what was permitted under INAO
⁶
regulations. A trip to Vinexpo, the enormous biennial trade show in Bordeaux, offered plenty of proof that everyone involved in the wine business had been thinking long and hard about ways to attract attention to their wares. From stand to stand, every imaginable, ingenious size, shape and color of bottle was on display—tall bottles, short bottles, thin bottles, fat bottles, squat bottles, twisted bottles, you name it—along with an anthology of polychrome labels screaming
buy me, buy me
. More than a few of them were shameless imitations of the most successful offbeat brand names and graphics from the United States and Australia, and there was a great profusion of
cépage
wines—varietals—that lay outside the grasp of INAO’s AOC parameters: here a sauvignon, there a syrah, everywhere a chardonnay. They were trying hard.

At his big, double-sized stand, Georges Duboeuf was playing it cool, testing a few new approaches but not quite joining the feeding frenzy of graphics that had seized so many of his confrères. The man who had revolutionized wine labeling in the first place had expanded his now-classical (and endlessly plagiarized) floral labels through a wide range of his wines, but was also experimenting with some splashier stuff: labels and, in some cases, entire bottles decorated by the hand of the Lyon designer Alain Vavro, a man who goes for bright, eye-catching Matisse-like flashes of color. In addition to the traditional stock of wines with which he had begun his career, he had added a range from the Rhône Valley and, further south toward the Spanish frontier, the very interesting vinous regions of Languedoc-Roussillon. There were blended table wines like GD Red and GD White, varietals like gamay and viognier from the Ardèche, plenty of chardonnay, merlot and syrah, pinot noir from the Pays d’Oc, an elegant muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise and even some Bordeaux. All of this proved that Georges was covering the bases, but a simple glance at his catalogue or his Web site was enough to show where both his heart and his pocketbook lay: the Beaujolais-Mâconnais, his beloved, was and always will be up front, and way above all the others.

The innovative spirit and workaholic ways that had led Georges to dominate all the other dealers in the business of selecting and selling the region’s wines inevitably led to the idea—the hope, the wish, the desire—that somewhere within Duboeuf’s well-made noggin might reside a magic formula that could somehow lead the Beaujolais out of crisis. He had become the region’s icon and father figure, but now, with the arrival of hard times, a weightier role was thrust his way: he was the one, more than any other individual, to whom peasants, bourgeois and bureaucrats alike looked for a route toward salvation. Time after time in these last years I have heard variations on the theme of a wish I first heard expressed a few years ago by a winemaker in Saint-Amour: “If only we had ten Duboeufs, there would be no problems at all here in the Beaujolais.”