I'll Drink to That (40 page)

A hint of a smile plays on Georges’ face when he hears the compliment, but it is a pained and reluctant smile, because his native reserve and modesty make him mistrust hyperbole, and in any case there is only so much he can do. Businessmen are supposed to cause their companies to prosper, create jobs and spin money for themselves and others involved in their commerce. He already had done that. What else could be expected of him?

Everyone groped for an answer, but perhaps it was staring them right in the face after all, just across the way from the Duboeuf headquarters building in Romanèche. There was more than a bit of irony to this situation, too, because the solid, bricks-and-mortar outline of that possible answer was also the source of the worst pain and humbling that Georges had known in more than half a century in the wine business:
le vendangeoir
, the winery where his weary, muddleheaded employee had mixed his batches of grapes and gotten the company in trouble with the authorities. Sitting like a spaceship on a knoll amid the vines along the road to Fleurie, Duboeuf’s enormous vinifying and storage plant is a strikingly elegant modern structure of sweeping Frank Lloyd Wright lines in black, white and raspberry sherbet colors, sharply contrasting with traditional Beaujolais village architecture.

It is a very new addition to his enterprise, unlike anything he had done before. Georges surprised many, friends as well as competitors, when he had it built in 2002. For as long as anyone could remember he had insisted that his business was strictly selecting, buying and selling wines, not making them. But he had understood that it was time to adapt, because change was in the air. It had been for several years, as Professor Garrier had explained to me over lunch in Lyon: many of the traditional Beaujolais vignerons had been unable or unwilling to keep up with the fast-moving technical expertise of their counterparts in the New World and Down Under, who were producing a steady flow of soft, pleasant, clearly recognizable, moderately priced wines whose taste and quality hardly varied from year to year—the Coca-Cola effect, some called it, and the image wasn’t entirely fallacious. In contrast to this new, semi-industrial reality, most artisans of the Beaujolais had continued to follow their old habits, trusting their
terroirs
to deliver the gamay’s familiar flower and fruit and keeping their fingers crossed that the weather would cooperate. When it did, in exceptional years like 2003 and 2005, it was not a great challenge to turn out fine wines, but when the rains were too persistent or the temperatures too flighty, only the best—vignerons as skilled as Nicole Savoye Descombes, Paulo Cinquin or Marcel Pariaud—could cope with the variables and save what otherwise would have been a poor year.

There was a new reality in the overcrowded wine market, one that was painful for French traditionalists to contemplate: poor years were no longer permissible. Until recent times French consumers, rooted as they were in custom and tradition reaching all the way back to the very first glimmers of their wine-drinking civilization a couple of thousand years ago, had been wedded to the concepts of
terroir
and vintages that changed from year to year. Accepting annual variations in the quality of wines as part of the natural course of things, they rather enjoyed the game of ferreting out good deals from among the offerings of the country’s myriad producers. The impatient new generations, however, were not so easygoing. More and more of them were expecting to be able to find the wines they liked, as they liked them, right now and every year, too. With a plethoric supply of competing brands and labels crying out to seduce them, they could cherry-pick their choices and, if they weren’t happy, abandon today what they had been drinking yesterday. Foreign consumers were even more demanding, more price-conscious and more fickle, and—here was the scary part—the Beaujolais sold half or more of its total production in export. What seemed to count most, then— especially in the overcrowded field of mid-range wines—was constancy of the product. The wise winemaker made sure that that he always had optimum conditions for treating and raising his grapes, for vinifying them, for bottling and storing them.

Modern vinification is very technical, very manipulative stuff, and if it cannot make good wine out of bad grapes, it can very much attenuate the negative effects of poor weather. Purists will often say that by lopping off the lows modern vinification also chops the highs, creating so-so wines that are always OK, but never truly great the way they had been in the old days. The debate is endless and insoluble, of course, but what is certain is that never in history has the bending of nature away from vinegar and into wine been studied as thoroughly and understood as well as today, and where serious producers are concerned, never has more care been lavished on the grapes from which wine is made.

All of which explains Duboeuf’s
vendangeoir
. In the Beaujolais-Villages area and in certain of the
crus
, he knew many vignerons who were expert agronomists growing fine grapes on interesting
terroirs
, but whose talents and equipment for vinification were not always up to standard. After years of reflection and talking it over with them, he finally decided to go ahead and become a
négociant-producteur
—both a dealer and a producer. Rather than finished wine, it was the grapes alone he would be buying from these growers, in order to turn them into wine himself, using the most modern gear in the best possible conditions. It would not be all that much—the winery today represents no more than 5 percent of his total sales—but it would be the chance for him to put his hand to some potentially exceptional wines. And his new plant would place him in excellent company. His friend and colleague Marcel Guigal, the most famous dealer of Côtes du Rhône wines, much admired and covered with accolades by Robert Parker and England’s wine goddess Jancis Robinson, had long been both
négociant
and producer, and Pierre-Henry Gagey of the Louis Jadot company had preceded him with a modern winery for his southern Beaujolais wines in 1998.

Georges finally took the step in 2002, and with that the wheel came full circle and then some. The peasant vigneron who had begun in revolt against the
négociant
cartel was not only a
négociant
himself but had become an important Beaujolais winemaker as well. The tool he built for attacking this new role was an impressive piece of work, and— typical of Duboeuf—it was original and unlike any others. Visitors making their way to the new winery on foot passed first through the pathways of
un jardin en Beaujolais
, the botanical garden that Georges had directed to be planted to the southeast of the entrance. Why a botanical garden should have been associated with a winery was never really explained, but around Romanèche the locals just shrugged—why not? That was just the Duboeuf way. He did things like that all the time, and by all appearances he was much more proud of the garden than of the multimillion-dollar behemoth that sat next to it. The garden—ever so carefully laid out, arrows pointing directions for a properly sequential stroll through a collection of trees, shrubs, plants, herbs and flowers, all of them didactically labeled—merited a special celebration and press conference for its opening, while the
vendangeoir
, the big tool, simply went to operation after a few workmanlike switches had been flipped.

The winery itself is open for guided tours. Visitors enter through a side door giving access to platforms from which some of the intricacies of vinification can be explained, but the real business end is at the front, where the grapes arrive to be inspected, weighed and tested for sugar content, after which they go onto conveyor belts for the journey toward the maceration vats, presses and storage tanks. People entering the building here pass through the fishbowl of a glassed-in laboratory where young technicians in white blouses man computers and manipulate the usual baffling array of beakers, test tubes, funnels and pipettes; then visitors continue into the main, cathedral-sized shell where a series of see-through stainless steel gratings stacked one above the other, like decks in some improbably vast cargo ship, give a direct view down to giant presses, pumps and soaring, silo-shaped towers for storing thousands of gallons of wine. More often than not the whole cavernous shebang, as spotless as a hospital, is shimmering from the latest hosing-down of Duboeuf’s permanent cleanliness campaign. There is nothing more up-to-date than this winery in the Beaujolais, and probably few to rival its technical finesse anywhere else in the world, but just to be sure that it always receives the right stuff to work with, Georges backs up the machinery with human supervision in the field. A team of eight inspectors armed with laptops and refractometers roams the vineyards of Beaujolais-Villages and the
crus
for him, keeping an eye on the quality and ripeness of the grapes and coordinating harvest dates with the winery. With design and planning of this caliber as a foundation for the rest, his original hunch proved to be exactly right: the plant was almost immediately booked solid through the year, and Georges now has to turn away growers who would prefer to sell him their grapes rather than to make their wines themselves.

Given the tough new realities of the wine market created by the ferocious competition from abroad, it would have been surprising if Georges had not found himself faced with something else to turn away: land. He is endlessly solicited with offers of vineyards for sale, but he already has more than enough work, so his refusal to expand into ownership has been pretty systematic, but with one exception: he could not resist when the Château des Capitans in Juliénas came up for sale. It isn’t really a showpiece, this domain, nothing to compare with eye stunners like Château de la Chaize or Château de Corcelles. Sited unobtrusively amid the vines, the main building is more like a
gentilhommière
(country gentleman’s manor house) than a palace—but for Georges a whole world of nostalgia was contained within its stone, wood and tile and the accompanying 6.8 hectares of vines. Capitans had been the property of Victor Peyret, writer, restaurateur, raconteur, bon vivant and all-around local character of the Beaujolais, the man who had transformed a deconsecrated church into a drinking place, but also a man who had taken the callow young Duboeuf lad under his wing, advised him, introduced him around, encouraged him in his new approach to the trade. It was in Juliénas that Georges had done his first job of estate bottling, and in Peyret’s church-
caveau
that he met Rolande, the baker’s daughter who became his wife. For that marriage, Peyret lent Georges what was in 1957 the supreme symbol of pomp and luxury:
une belle américaine
, a big, fat, soft-springed American car, with a chauffeur to motor the young couple away in fitting grandeur to the reception they had organized at the restaurant Le Coq in Juliénas.

It was, then, something like a sentimental journey when Georges bought Capitans in 2004, but there was an extra little twist to the story, a practical, bread-and-butter angle for the benefit of the Beaujolais that Georges had seen from the start. The essential fact was that he bought the domain not by himself but in partnership with his longtime American distributor, Bill Deutsch. A big, relaxed, bespectacled, stentorian-voiced bear of a man, Deutsch loves the idea of being a
châtelain
, and loves telling the story of how it happened.

“One afternoon I get this call from Georges. ‘Beel,’ he says, ‘there’s this fantastic château for sale, good price, winery, vines, everything. It’s just right for our grandchildren. Franck and Fabienne and Jean-Paul are already in. Why not bring the Deutsch family in, too?’ So I said yes, and that made it a milestone—now we have two families across the ocean, united by the common bond of this domain.”

A fine family holding it is, too—no doubt about that—but Georges also admits to a benign ulterior motive: to tie Deutsch (and his son, Peter,who will succeed him at the head of the business) sentimentally to the Beaujolais. Deutsch had built his business around the backbone of distributing Duboeuf wines, but later lucked into exclusive U.S. rights and co-ownership of Yellow Tail, the faintly sweet, phenomenally successful Australian wine that set sales records in America (dismaying wine purists in the process), far outstripped his sales of Beaujolais and made him a mountain of money. Georges knew that Capitans would always be sending Deutsch a message: no matter how rich you get, no matter how many bottles of that Aussie stuff you sell, don’t forget us.

By “us,” Georges meant Beaujolais wines in general, of course, but more specifically the family enterprise that is Les Vins Georges Duboeuf. Within that enterprise, there is never any doubt as to who is in final control and who selects and blends the wines that have acquainted so much of the bibulous world with
le goût Duboeuf
, the Duboeuf taste. The founder is so firmly fixed onto the rails of his toilsome daily routine that he literally suffers withdrawal symptoms if he has no work to occupy him, and his presence in and around the local
caveaux
and
caves coopératives
is as much a part of the Beaujolais scenery as the springtime flowering of the vines. This being said, he is not the only Stakhanovite in Romanèche. Entirely in charge of the office, the personnel and all the daily details of the company there is Rolande, as tireless as the Sisyphean vignerons of Papa Bréchard’s youth, endlessly lugging 110-pound loads of eroded soil up to the top of their vineyards. Tireless, and tough, too. She can (and does) say no to people asking for favors; Georges is famous for having trouble uttering the N-word. But especially for the longer term of things, as Georges approaches the age and status of most ancient and venerable sage, there is Franck, the one and only Duboeuf son, born in 1960 when his parents were still running the business almost all by themselves.

After the usual errand boy, delivery truck driver and general factotum duties traditionally assigned to bosses’ sons, Franck was installed in the Romanèche executive office in 1983 after a few years of business studies and a few more of learning the subtleties of wine tasting at Papa’s side. There’s no organization chart in the Duboeuf company, and no titles, but everyone knows who is in charge and who comes next. The closest that Franck will come to putting names on functions is to allow that his father might be called director-general and himself general manager. With more than enough work to occupy both of them, Franck specialized for several years in the technical side of things in Romanèche, designing and overseeing the construction of huge new warehouse facilities and then moving into the commercial, PR and marketing side, notably taking over Duboeuf’s never-ending export drive. Between the United States, Canada, Japan, China, Russia and India alone he has racked up enough frequent flyer miles to be able to circle the globe for free several times over, but airplanes no longer hold any charm for him, and he much prefers to be back home whenever he can, with his wife, Anne, and their kids, Antonia, Aurélien and Angèle. Georges has been quoted as saying that Franck is the better
dégustateur
(wine taster) of the two, but no one believes him, and of course everyone wonders where Franck will take the company in that vague, distant future when Georges is no longer there.