I'll Drink to That (41 page)

Franck is noncommittal on the subject. But, gifted with a matinee idol’s good looks, polite, circumspect, meticulously well dressed, gazing appraisingly out at the world from behind his wall of restraint, he is clearly a chip off the old Duboeuf block. He reflects before speaking an opinion, chooses his words with care, and his articulation is every bit as hushed and susurrant as his father’s. (“We Duboeufs are very reserved,” he says, and it isn’t exactly a revelation.) He shrugs at the question of succession and cites Rostand, Dumas and Bach. There have been artistic dynasties, so why not something similar in the wine business? In any case Franck prefers to keep his thoughts to himself, but what people in the Beaujolais know about him is that he married rather late, he is devoted to his wife and kids, and he is determined to give himself more family time than his father was ever able to spare. As a consequence, he has deliberately shortened his workday compared to Georges’, arriving in the office as late as 7 A.M. and remaining there only until 8:30 at night.

While Franck takes it easy with his mere thirteen- to fourteen-hour workdays, Georges continues at his immutable marathon man schedule, and when he has a few free moments he spends them cogitating—there’s something going on behind that poker-faced visage all the time. In the early eighties, a couple of decades before his big vinification plant was even the shadow of an inkling of an idea, he put several moments of thought together and began sketching out a project of far-reaching amplitude and impact, one totally different from anything ever conceived in the Beaujolais—or anywhere else in the French wine country, for that matter. It cost him a small fortune that in all likelihood he will never recover, but it affords him an (understated) pride that by any measure he clearly deserves. Le Hameau du Vin, it is called, the Wine Hamlet. Georges wanted to show off the Beaujolais and his beloved gamay grape, and he did it by transforming the entire southeastern sector of Romanèche into a kind of exhibition park devoted to wine. The comparison to a miniature Disneyland immediately springs to mind, but this one is authentic, free of crass commercialism and as tasteful as the floral labels on his bottles. Beginning with the old Romanèche train station—he bought it outright from the state—and moving on to its adjacent storage sheds and workrooms, the visitor ambles through a series of tile-roofed, ochre- and beige-walled buildings housing here a collection of railroad memorabilia, there a terrific scale-model group of electric trains forever chugging through an idealized Beaujolais countryside; then the visitor moves farther on to an antique truck museum (his old Citröen Tube is there, as is his very first van and its primitive bottling equipment), then past an authentic, early twentieth-century iron horse with its coal-filled tender behind, pulled up on a siding by the parking lot.

Over on the other side of the road is the main attraction, the wine museum that Georges had been wanting to build for the Beaujolais ever since he was a teenager. He completely gutted the old buildings of Pierre Crozet’s former establishment and made them over according to the ideas that he had been refining for years. Fronted by a flagstone terrace, the main reception room is a replica of a Belle Époque
salle
des pas perdus
, the train station waiting room of a typical medium-sized French city, complete with Beaujolais country frescoes, ticket office, exhibition cases of period train equipment, the inevitable waiting room clock and the equally inevitable
buffet de gare
(station restaurant), offering a short menu of light meals, pâtés, salads and sandwiches. There are marble-topped bistro tables, a zinc bar and an unbeatable selection of Beaujolais and Mâconnais wines of every sort.

All that is only the start, though, for what lies beyond the waiting room on the other side of the ticket office turnstiles. Georges’ wine museum is of a size and class that are probably unsurpassed anywhere in the world. For years he had been scrounging, buying, borrowing and wheedling old winemaking tools and equipment around the Beaujolais, and he brought them all together, cleaned them up, classified them and had display cases made to exhibit them in this personal space, unsubsidized and free of government interference. In his
musée du vin,
pruning knives and shears, sulfur-spraying tanks, hoes, picks and all the other tools of a vigneron’s laborious existence are presented and lit with the same reverent care that museums elsewhere devote to Etruscan artifacts or Renaissance jewelry. The ingenious, often surprisingly delicate objects of quotidian winemaking are overwhelmed by the looming mass of two enormous eighteenth-century wooden wine presses, one activated by a vertical worm gear amazingly carved from a single tree trunk and the other by a pegged “squirrel cage” system whose motor power was delivered by the feet of men trudging grimly forward and upward on a handmade, all-wood treadmill that turned the axle that pulled the rope that moved the wheel that forced the great beam of the press down onto the grapes heaped below. From room to room the exhibits tell the story of wine in paintings, photographs, models, audiovisual presentations, dioramas, an art gallery, an animated puppet show, a 3-D movie, a wax-works of Beaujolais characters à la Madame Tussauds, and some nifty holographic tricks reproducing Noah, the Flood, the Ark and mankind’s first plantings of vines. The tour passes by way of a second bistro, or wine bar, this one big enough for renting out to special events, with a stage for performers and a big, air-powered fairground organ equipped with a xylophone that tinkles out melodies via wooden hammers striking wine bottles filled with more or less water for higher or lower notes. The museum offers plenty of instruction, and art and humor, too, because from the start Georges insisted that the visit should be
ludique
—an entertaining experience—but whether it was intentional or not, there is a single, more somber bass note that underlies all the carefully prepared detail. The leitmotif that dominates from one end of the museum to the other is the same one that has marked Georges throughout his life: work. In view of the region’s history, the poverty that had been its lot until recent times, and the life story of the man who brought it all together under the museum’s several roofs, this emphasis is hardly surprising, but it is a salutary reminder of the centuries of plodding, unremitting labor that lie behind those friendly little glasses of gamay so lightheartedly tossed off in bistro and bar.

“He had been thinking about the museum since he was fifteen,” Anne Duboeuf told me over a coffee in her bistro. (I say “her” bistro because as Franck’s wife she has been assigned the duty of running the Hameau—Les Vins Duboeuf is not a family enterprise for nothing.) “He knew exactly what he wanted, and where. The architect just followed him from room to room as he explained how everything had to be laid out.”

With that remark I was immediately reminded of a conversation several years earlier with Papa Bréchard. We had been talking about the Beaujolais in general, but whatever aspect of the country he touched on, the subject always swung back to Duboeuf, this extraordinary character unlike any others he had known. “You know,” the old man confided, “a lot of vignerons had their doubts about him because of his great success, but that disappeared when he opened the museum. They all believe in him now. They come and visit
en famille
, right along with the tourists. It gives them tremendous pride to see their region and their history explained so handsomely. They can see that he did it for the Beaujolais—all the Beaujolais—and not just for himself.”

When Anne revealed that there was one particular vigneron who had sent more clients to the museum than any other member of the brotherhood, I was naturally curious to know who it might be. When she told me his name, I could not have been more pleased, but upon reflection, I wasn’t really surprised. Who else could it have been but my friend Marcel Pariaud, the prodigiously industrious, perpetually optimistic former mayor of Lancié? Better yet, Anne added, Marcel often personally brought guests of his B and B down to Romanèche in his big old carriage, talking and clucking to Hermine along the way. While the visitors he delivered were making the museum tour, Marcel habitually passed the time by giving kids impromptu horse-and-buggy rides around Romanèche. (At Christmastime, Marcel and Hermine deliver
le Père Noël
—Santa Claus—by wagon to the Lancié kindergarten.)

That was typical of him—
sacré Marcel
, he’s always doing things like that. The day I watched him tromping on the grapes in his old press, without breaking stride he had waved me over to his workbench, where a thick sausage lay side by side with his pocketknife, a bottle of his Beaujolais-Villages, several of his tools and his wine-stained notebook filled with cabbalistic entries in reference to his vinification procedures. Munching my ration of sausage, I noticed several plastic buckets standing in a corner of the vinifying shed, all of them filled to the brim with
paradis
, the sweet, deep purple, partially fermented runoff. I could guess that some of them were for him and Nathalie, but I had no idea why there were so many others. It became clear moments later, when a dapper old man dressed in an immaculate Lacoste shirt—clearly this was a gent in retirement—arrived with a big plastic container of his own. His name was François Giroud; he had worked as the town’s butcher, and like many others who habitually dropped by Marcel’s place, he had come for some
paradis
and
gène
(pressed grape mash), in view of cooking one of the great seasonal specialties of the region:
saucisson au gène.

“I soak the sausage all night in the
gène
and the
paradis
,” Giroud explained, “then I cook them together for twenty minutes and serve it with steamed potatoes—that and a good Beaujolais, of course. The kind Marcel makes.” His eyes shone with pleasure at the prospect of his little feast.

“If you’re looking for good wine—real wine, good wine, no mixes, no cheating—this is where to come for it.” He gazed affectionately around him at Marcel’s heroically disordered collection of equipment. “This place is like
la maison du bon dieu,
the house of charity. You can find anything you want here.”

“
Mais non, mais non
,” Marcel protested, smiling bashfully at the compliments as he scooped a pitcher into the
paradis
bucket to fill Giroud’s container. Compared to Duboeuf’s shiny installation in Romanèche, Marcel’s anarchic jumble of mostly ancient winemaking gear was hopelessly behind the times, but in his hands it played like a Stradivarius, and the wine that came out of it was invariably as full and mellow as the best expression of the gamay grape should be. How he could manage such an exploit year after year was mysterious, but of course that was where the elusive quality known as talent found its definition. Marcel simply possessed it, as did a few thousand other winemakers around the world, and no amount of investment in space age technology or expert consultancy could replicate that.

“Education is the head,” he said, tapping his temple, “but intelligence is the eyes.”

The remark was as apt for his life story as it was for Georges Duboeuf’s. Both men had started at approximately the same level, each had succeeded according to the particular little genies that drove him, and each was equally worthy of admiration for it. Whatever the future for the wines of the Beaujolais—favorite wine of the twenty-first century, as Michel Rougier would have it, or just another appellation, retrenched in its original
terroirs
and fighting to survive in the globalized market—it was certain that the Duboeuf and Pariaud kind of intelligence would be crucial for leading the way toward a healthy resolution of the present-day crisis.

“Les plus courageux survivront,”
Marcel said by way of summing up his view of the coming years. The toughest ones will survive.

“Travail, rigueur, qualité”
was Duboeuf’s prescription. Work, rigor, quality. He did not speak these words in answer to Marcel’s prediction; the juxtaposition is mine. But those three words are a kind of mantra that he repeats frequently. In view of today’s expanding wine production worldwide—and look out, here comes China—attention to that mantra is probably as good as any other recipe for ensuring safe passage to the wines of the Beaujolais through the twenty-first century.

But that’s not the end of the story, or the whole story anyway. If, as appears more than likely, this century is to be characterized by a steadily increasing technicity and mechanization in winemaking, to the point of quasi-industrialization, I persist in believing that, however powerful the steamroller of globalization, the Beaujolais will remain just a bit different from the rest, still anchored to the old peasant smallholder traditions and mannerisms that Papa Bréchard used to talk about, and to which both Georges Duboeuf and Marcel Pariaud were born. I admit that this is arrant romanticism on my part, but the beauty of the countryside, the ineffable allure of its gorgeous villages and the rock-solid authenticity of the vigneron character forged by centuries of labor are so compelling that it is impossible to imagine this place becoming just one more reflection of the consumerist, assembly-line lifestyle that is so efficiently stalking the rest of the modern world.

I can’t honestly say that Lancié and Romanèche-Thorins deserve to be cited among the architectural treasures of the Beaujolais. The first is a pleasant, workaday kind of town—one grocery store, one church, one bar—the second a larger yet undistinguished sprawl behind Duboeuf’s installations; and neither one can withstand comparison to jewels like Chiroubles, Fleurie, Leynes, Bully, Oingt or Vaux-en-Beaujolais, the original Clochemerle itself. The list of rustic beauties could go on and on, but of course what makes these two otherwise ordinary towns exceptional is that in Romanèche there is Georges Duboeuf and in Lancié there is Marcel Pariaud.

“
Le vin est la mémoire du temps,
” says Duboeuf gravely. Wine is the memory of time, and he has literally set that memory into stone and brick. Marcel Pariaud’s contribution to that memory is bound to be more ephemeral—the joviality, the force of character and the downright humanity that rubbed off on those who came into contact with him.