I'll Drink to That (4 page)

Well, now. Château de la Chaize is a big, prestigious name, known around the world. It is one of the brightest stars of the Brouilly growth, and at nearly 250 acres its vineyard is one of the region’s largest single holdings. Its enormous vaulted cellar, considerably greater in length than a football field, is the longest in the Beaujolais, and is officially classified as a French historical monument. This was, in short, a serious reference, and Martray’s proposition was a serious one that we would have been remiss to neglect.

We accepted. Midnight had come and gone by the time we left the restaurant, and the hostilities commenced without delay. At the wheel of his powerful German car, Pierre found to his dismay that he was hard put to keep up with Martray, who shot away from Juliénas in nothing better than a boxy, battered old Renault van that looked like an automotive caricature of itself. But he knew by heart every curve and bump in the roads winding through the vineyards back to the Brouilly hills, and he negotiated them at breakneck speed. The stock-car race that ensued was pure foolishness, of course, but on we roared after him, up hill and down dale, Pierre manically intent on not losing sight of the shaky tail-lights disappearing around the next bend, and it was probably just as well that in the dark of night we were unable to see just how precipitous were the slopes on either side of us. We arrived at the château with an apocalyptic clamor of brakes, and Martray led us without delay down into his beautiful subterranean domain. Tasting glasses in hand, we were soon treading the cellar’s central alleyway of dank clay, preceded at a shambling, languorous pace by our very own Frankenstein, a syringe-like glass pipette in hand. Twin rows of enormous wooden tuns on either side of us stretched away in perfect parallax to a dimly perceived conclusion somewhere at the far end of the ill-lit tunnel. Not even bothering with a ladder, the cellar master clambered skillfully up the supporting framework of one of the first tuns, removed the bung on top, inserted the pipette into the hole and drew forth a column of glistening, ruby red liquid. He nodded at us, and we held out our glasses. He lifted his thumb from the little orifice on top of the pipette, and atmospheric pressure did the rest: before you could say Jacques Robinson, a crimson stream shot out to fill our glasses.

I don’t know how many of that endless array of tuns we drank from that night, but I do remember that there was a perfectly plausible oenological reason for every one of them—a different year, a younger or older set of vines, a different
parcelle
of the vineyard and so forth—that our hosts watched intently to be certain that we drank every drop, and that we ended the visit in Martray’s office, where Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy smiled down on us from a large photo on the wall. Martray produced a bottle of Champagne, and we drank it in honor of the birthday boy, or of the Kennedys, or of andouillette sausages. (By then it could have been anything at all.) It was close to two-thirty in the morning when Martray finally released us, and Pierre crept away from Château de la Chaize at half speed—which did not prevent him, however, from motoring straight into a cow pasture at the road’s first sharp turn to the left.

Although today, nearly four decades after the fact, I can still imagine Martray laughing as he watched us stumble out to the car and inch away from Château de la Chaize, I bear him no retrospective ill will. We didn’t have to go back there with him, and we didn’t have to drink all that Brouilly and Champagne. We did it of our own free will, and truth be told, we enjoyed it, too, even if we suffered somewhat for our excesses the next day.

This sort of encounter is not, you may have imagined by now, an altogether infrequent occurrence in the Beaujolais. Let me underline, though, that this kind of challenge is not the sole explanation for their behavior. These people are proud of what they labor all year to produce, and sincerely want you to love it as much as they do themselves—but at the same time they also rather like to determine how well you can hold it. Wine is the social grease and catalyst of the Beaujolais, and the natives give it away with a liberality that would scandalize the purse holders of the more hoity-toity growths to the north and west of them, in Burgundy and Bordeaux. Stop at any Beaujolais vigneron’s house, knock on the door, announce your presence and intentions; there will be a handshake, a few curt words—and then, inevitably, you will adjourn to his
caveau.
It is only when he is in his element, surrounded by his barrels and his bottles, when he has tapped a vat or pulled a cork to fill his glass and yours, that hospitality will have been served and custom respected. Comfortable now, he will open up and you can start to talk business. The practice is ancient, immutable and immensely agreeable, but carried to the extreme, it can be a test of the simple act of remaining vertical.

Please do not mistake me: by no means do I intend this account to be anything like an apologia for drunkenness. It does happen from time to time, of course, but there are many different degrees of alcoholic euphoria, and they rarely reach downright debauch. Here, as in every vineyard region in the world, wine is a serious business, and the 150 million or so bottles that the Beaujolais produces every year, depending on the vagaries of weather and harvest, represent a serious investment in time, toil and expertise, one that returns a weighty contribution of tax revenues to the French treasury. On the consumer’s side of matters, it is obvious that a reasoned investigation of the range and subtleties of wine, rather than just dumb chugalug boozing, is a thoroughly respectable and rewarding undertaking; few activities could be more civilized than the measured—you might almost say sober—consumption that such an investigation requires. Wine tasting, and indeed the whole spectrum of oenology, rife as it is with books, magazines, clubs, computer programs, games, competitions and who knows what other spinoffs, has become a social and business phenomenon of the first order: big money, big prestige, big opportunities.

So: wine is fashionable. No need to labor that point any further. But with that fashion, a curtain of tiresome solemnity often descends upon the subject, and we Anglo-Saxons are perhaps more guilty than most when it comes to vinous posturing and affectation. Wine today is ever so gravely classified, parsed and analyzed to death with a vocabulary worthy of the cabala, and the high-end stuff gets bought and sold exactly like stock market shares or sowbelly futures (an excellent investment, I understand). I wish the analysts and speculators every bit of the success they deserve, but for all the times I have rubbed shoulders with the swells of the trade at château tastings in Bordeaux, for all the pomp, pageantry and bizarre costumes I have had occasion to admire at enthronement ceremonies of the Chevaliers du Tastevin, that superbly organized PR stunt of the Burgundy wine establishment, and for all the free Champagne I have swilled at press junkets in the chalky cellars of Épernay and Reims, it is always to the Beaujolais hills that I return when I grow weary of the splendors of our globalized iPod Age and yearn for a less self-important, less technologically correct form of human intercourse. Am I the only one who feels a need to flee the artifice of it all and seek out an earlier, simpler time when my cell phone didn’t communicate with my refrigerator, and where I could enjoy a glass of wine without being held to a doctoral discourse? Whatever the case, it is the land of the Beaujolais that constitutes my best cure for the blues. You get your transcendence where you can find it.

Because there is so much more to Beaujolais than just the wine. To begin with, the country itself is soothingly, heart-stoppingly beautiful, far more so than Burgundy, Bordeaux or the Champagne area. All three of these regions make very fine wines, but their landscape and architecture are as boring as flat Perrier water for the most part. The Beaujolais is in glorious, gorgeous contrast to this. It is what a storybook illustration would look like if you sought to depict ideal wine country: a dramatic collection of steep hillsides springing up from the plain and shouldering against one another, forested when the Romans arrived but covered today in an undulant carpet of vines. At the high ground to the west in the direction of Roanne and the Loire is the “Green Beaujolais,” a land of cow and sheep pastures, deeply carved escarpments, canyons and pine forests that suddenly give way to a vine-friendly, mineral-rich subsoil of granite, gneiss, clay and limestone, where the vines grow in perfect geometric formation, as neat as cabbages in a curate’s garden. Little ribbons of roads—they keep them narrow, lest they eat up too much valuable vine-growing space—wind around the hillsides like seams on a baseball, then dip down into the shaded vales where the villages sit, clustered around the inevitable church steeple.

The villages themselves are masterpieces of rural architecture. In jewels like Bully and Oingt in the southern Pierres Dorées (golden stone) area, the houses are positively aglow with an ochre effulgence, thanks to the iron oxide permeating the locally quarried limestone. Farther north, in the equally beautiful white wine country around Leynes, the building stone reflects the veined, pinkish hue of potter’s clay. Between these two extremes, on the hills where the great shiftings of the Tertiary Period littered the ground with crushed granite, the wine is the best and the houses have a bluish tint—in the Beaujolais, you can read the composition of the soil from the facades of the buildings. Nothing is better than this architectural tagging to illustrate the concept of the
terroir,
the localized pockets of rock, soil and minerals distributed throughout the countryside. People built with the materials they took from the ground where they had settled, and it is this ground, this
terroir
, that determines the character of the local wines. A Beaujolais-Villages is different from a simple Beaujolais, and a Morgon from a Saint-Amour for the same reason that a Puligny-Montrachet differs from a Bâtard-Montrachet up in Burgundy: the composition of the soil—the
terroir—
is different, and whatever tricks of vinification are used, it is always the
terroir
that shines through in the bouquet and the taste of the finished product.

“The poorer the soil, the richer the wine,” vignerons like to say, and it’s not just a casual phrase. Burgundy’s most divine white wines, the Montrachet family, come from a
terroir
whose name means “a place where nothing grows.” Wine grapes can’t deliver the goods in the rich, creamy loam that grains love, but give them a pauper’s bed of rocky, pebbly, flinty or even sandy soil, and their clever rootlets will insinuate themselves down through the tiniest cracks and fissures to suck mineral nourishment from the niggardly stone and send it up to headquarters, where the grapes are basking in the sun. Another favorite maxim speaks the same truth: to make the best wine, the vine has to suffer. So does the winemaker: Beaujolais old-timers still remember the days when their fathers and grandfathers had recourse to blasting powder for loosening up the stony ground to plant vines where their picks couldn’t penetrate.

It was with this kind of heads-down, single-minded labor that generation upon generation of peasants turned the angular hills of the Beaujolais into the beautifully tended garden that the area is today. Set yourself up on high ground anywhere in the region and you are greeted by the same ocean of green: terrestrial wave upon wave of vine-planted hillsides, many of them so steep that no tractor could possibly work there, and where a man can just barely stand erect to tend the plants by hand.

The best viewpoint, though, is from the crest of Mont Genas, towering above the blessed town of Fleurie. Twice blessed: first by the wonderfully subtle wine produced there, and then again by the Madonna whose statue stands benevolently over the chapel that the locals built at the summit of Mont Genas in 1857 to beg divine protection for their vines against the violent flash storms and hailstones that the physiognomy of the Beaujolais seems to encourage. Due east, yonder far past the Saône, an alert eye can make out Mont Blanc’s white flank, but closer to hand, down in the village, some more mundane wonders of the Beaujolais await the interested visitor. There is the municipal water tower that Marguerite Chabert filled with wine in 1960; there is the charcuterie (pork butcher’s shop) founded by her father, François, who, upon returning from the trenches of World War I, invented the
andouillette Beaujolaise
as we know it today, the very one that I wolfed down in Juliénas on that memorable night in the early seventies when I got my comeuppance at Château de la Chaize; and there is Le Cep, for my book—that is to say right here, where I’m in control of things—one of the finest restaurants anyone could hope to discover, where Chantal Chagny (bless her, too, while we’re at it) stubbornly continues to fly in the face of fashion by serving the marvelous classics of French country cooking with nary a kiwi, a drop of coconut milk or a dash of wasabi.

The Beaujolais has a long tradition of breeding strong women, and both Marguerite and Chantal could be statufied right now as exemplars of that population’s character: as strong-willed and uncompromising as they are singular. Marguerite would be somewhat stony up there on her pedestal, because she is long gone now, but her old friend, the (sixtyish) Chantal, is as present and redoubtable as ever in the Le Cep’s dining room, at the cash desk and behind every cook,
commis
and
chef de partie
in her kitchen, making sure that the guys do it her way, and do it right.

Chantal it was who made history by becoming the first chef to voluntarily demote herself in the Michelin, the holy of holies among French restaurant guides. She had opened her little bistro in 1969, single-handedly cooking, serving and washing the dishes for a ridiculously cheap menu (the equivalent of $2) that included appetizer, main course, cheese and dessert. She did it so well that in 1973 Michelin accorded her a star. After she brought in Gérard Cortembert, a talented young chef who became her companion, a second star arrived in due course, and the reputation of Le Cep went worldwide. Unhappily, Cortembert’s heart gave out in 1990, and Chantal was faced with the choice of maintaining his sophisticated menu or returning to the simpler home-style regional cooking that she had practiced when she was alone.