I'll Drink to That (6 page)

But it was two lesser writers, both of them honored devotees of this region, who most convincingly applied the sentiment to the land of Beaujolais. Louis Orizet was chief regional inspector of INAO (Institut National des Appellations d’Origine), France’s official registry of product names and quality watchdog, and he loved the Beaujolais and its wines like his own family. His little book
À Travers le Cristal
(Through the Crystal) isn’t often seen in shops anymore, but its most famous lines are endlessly reprinted wherever and whenever anyone needs a little persuading about the benefits of a glass of wine. What does a glass of wine represent? Orizet could say it very precisely.

“It is a message of friendship transmitted from year to year by more than a hundred generations of vignerons. It is the prospecting of thousands of rootlets to deliver up the secret of the rocks. It is the sublimation of a summer’s heat. It is the fruit of a year’s labor. It is the laughter of the harvest hand, the efforts of the vinifier, the love of the cellar master, his vigilance and his skill in perfecting the masterpiece. Everything that is good in mankind is transmitted to the wine: courage, gaiety, strength, perseverance, love, optimism. Everything that is beautiful in nature appears in wine: warmth, strength, light, color, mystery. Wine is matter becoming mind, and all of this can be seen through the crystal.”

“You’ve got to hand it to this place,” Gabriel Chevallier wrote after the enormous success of
Clochemerle
. “The people there are never mean drinkers, because Beaujolais is the kind of wine that never does anyone any harm. The more you drink, the more you find your wife pleasant, your friends faithful, the future encouraging and humanity bearable. All the misfortune of the world comes from one single fact: that on this planet there is only one Beaujolais region. This is where you’ll always find people with honest, open faces, in good cheer, all of them with their hearts in their hand—the hand that holds the glass, of course.”

I’ll drink to that.

II

VILE AND NOXIOUS, DOWNTRODDEN AND DESPISED

GAMAY’S LONG STRUGGLE FOR RESPECT

A
s his name suggests, Philip the Bold was not a man for halfway measures. Youngest son of King John II, he was barred by primogeniture—inheritance to the firstborn—from taking the throne of France, but as duke of Burgundy he wielded quasi-royal authority from his seat of power in Dijon, and his domains extended all the way north, deep into present-day Belgium. A statue for the personal necropolis he built to assure his posthumous glory, carved by the Dutch sculptor Claus Sluter around 1390, displays a strong, boorish face with a fleshy nose, a grim, thin-lipped mouth and a prominent, very determined chin, vaguely reminiscent of Mussolini. Big man, big ambitions, big power. He had a generous helping of problems on his plate—with his brothers he ran the affairs of France during some of the most trying days of the spread of the plague and the Hundred Years War—but in addition to playing the great game of war and international politics, he was also a collector and patron of the arts who did not hesitate to dip into everyday matters of local taste and lifestyle. On July 31, 1395, he issued an edict that, today still, many wine growers of the Beaujolais can cite for you by heart.

The thrust of his edict was as simple as it was uncompromisingly severe: his subjects were summoned to rip out and never again put into the ground “the vile and noxious gamay plant, from which plant comes a very great abundance of wine . . . which wine is of such nature that it is most injurious to the human creature . . . for it is full of a very great and horrible bitterness.”

Those who drink it, he warned darkly, have been “infested with grave maladies.” Then, soaring on his own rhetoric, he triply underlined the urgency of ridding his duchy of the offending root. It had to be “extirpated, destroyed and reduced to nothing,” under penalty of stiff fines. Similarly penalized, he added, would be those who “brought animal droppings (
fiens)
and waste to the vines where good plants were located.”

As always with French wines, this edict concerned a matter of
terroir.
Burgundy had the good fortune to possess in its native flora a certain wild grape that had proved, under cultivation, to be exceptionally well adapted to the making of fine wine. It was called by several different names, but the one that predominated is the one still in use today: pinot noir. Over centuries of trial-and-error observation, most notably by the various ecclesiastical orders scattered throughout the duchy, whose peasant monks were often first-rate agronomists, Burgundians had raised the care and husbandry of the pinot vine to a fine art. Wine was an absolute, doctrinal necessity for every Christian mass, however humble, and the brothers in their monasteries reverently partook of it in their daily dietary regimen. And, although the popular imagery of jolly, rotund monks quaffing heroic quantities of wine or beer is certainly exaggerated, there is no doubt that the daily ingestion of the production of the Lord’s vineyards would have led many of them to divine inspiration, and hence great expertise in the matter.

The most famous of the monastic vineyards in Burgundy was Clos Vougeot, but green-thumbed monks had, by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, helped pinpoint a whole array of other superb wine
terroirs
with admirable accuracy: Gevrey, Meursault, Volnay, Pommard, Santenay, Marsannay. There was a downside to this happy story, though: the pinot has always been a finicky, delicate-stalked variety of vine, one that requires constant attention and care, against which it yields a relatively modest harvest of grapes. Hardly surprising, then, that Philip’s subjects should have sought to increase yields by spreading the only fertilizer easily available in those times: excrement—and not necessarily just farm animal excrement.

In normal times of peace, the pinot’s flighty nature could be dealt with, but the fourteenth century in general was an exceptional, somber and frightening period for France. The conjoined assaults of the black plague and the endless war with England were sapping the very structure of society: the population was thinning out dangerously; villages were emptying of their inhabitants; bandits and groups of apocalyptic religious fanatics roamed the land, rivaling gangs of freebooting soldiers in their depredations; money was tight, taxes extortionate, and manpower dramatically short. Those who could work the vines were often sickly and weak. Some choice vineyards were even being abandoned.

A threat to wine production was a real danger for Philip’s duchy. The loss of revenue from the various taxes imposed on the wine trade was bad enough, but in Burgundy as elsewhere, wine represented far more than money. At a time when sanitation and public health were poorly understood at best, wells and streams were frequently polluted, water supplies muddy, brackish and very possibly disease-infested, especially terrifying in periods of epidemic. The wondrous transformation of pure, delicious grape juice into wine, on the other hand, was viewed as a gift of God, one that possessed near-mystical powers. It was considered medicinal and health-giving, a buttress for strength and an uplift for the spirit. It was of capital significance in those deeply religious days that Jesus had drunk it at His last supper and that it ritually accompanied the Eucharist at mass. Commoners who could not afford wine found a second-best alternative in cutting their drinking water with vinegar—turned wine—to disinfect it and disguise the taste of mud and other impurities.

Faced with the need to keep wine production going in these parlous times, Burgundian peasants began turning to a solution that, on the surface at any rate, offered miraculous promise: another variety of vine, one that grew easily in great proliferation on good, strong wood and had a long lifespan, at least equal to that of a human being. It was more robust and easier to work than the pinot noir, tended to ripen earlier, and yielded a much greater bulk of grapes—hence, more wine for less work. And so, logical as ever when faced with the life-or-death choices implied in their treatment of their year’s crops, many of Philip’s subjects gave up on the capricious pinot noir altogether and massively planted the new vine. This marvel was called the gamay.

But the peasants’ logic was not the same as Philip’s. Where they saw more wine for less work, he saw this overproductive intruder as a mortal danger to Burgundy’s most prestigious product—and, it must be conceded, he was right. Centuries of practice had already shown that the pinot noir vine and the Burgundy
terroir
were perfectly suited to each other. The gamay certainly did fulfill its promise by delivering large quantities of juice, but its wedding with the soil and climate of Burgundy was not a happy one: the quality simply was not there. Bitter, acid and thin when compared to the great depth and character of the best pinots, the wines descended from this interloper were hardly any better than those of the vineyards of Paris and Île-de-France up north. If allowed to continue, the gamay grape could destroy Burgundy’s reputation for producing the finest wine in Christendom. Philip acted with the swift dispatch of the true medieval despot, and simply ordered the gamay to disappear. Reluctantly, dragging their feet, the Burgundian wine growers obeyed; in due course, Philip’s duchy became virtually gamay-free all the way down to Mâcon.

The land around Mâcon and south, the present Beaujolais, was, then as today, included within the administrative boundaries of Burgundy, but the humiliating truth was this: apparently it was just of no consequence as far as Philip was concerned. Its population was no more than a set of primitive, hill-dwelling peasants, and the wine production there was only occasional, limited to a few fields around a few rural townships. Let them have their gamay. But Philip’s eradication program had a strong and lasting effect for the descendants of these hill dwellers. Like a skillfully orchestrated press campaign, his diatribe launched a persistent and grossly inaccurate canard that continues to have life today still: the assertion that the clear-juiced gamay grape can make only second-rate wines. What the duke could not know was that there was a
terroir
quite nearby that was just awaiting marriage with the gamay to prove him wrong: the clay, crushed granite and limestone in and around
les monts du Beaujolais.

There was no official certificate, no opening ceremony; the wedding just sort of happened. The Romans had been planting gamay vines as early as the third century A.D. on the hills around Lyon, and the practice moved gradually northward by simple emulation, slowed down by the usual vicissitudes of wars, invasions, backslidings and bungles. As a result, Professor Gilbert Garrier of the University of Lyon, the most knowledgeable and prolific historical expert on matters of Beaujolais wines, dates the true beginning of the region’s wine commerce as a separate entity to much more recent times than the Languedoc, Bordeaux or Burgundian wine fields: the early seventeenth century. By then, he writes, the general pattern of Beaujolais peasant life had begun shifting from cattle and subsistence farming to the new hybrid units of self-sufficient family farms with attached vineyards. The gamay grape—the black-skinned, clear-juiced gamay, to be specific—had finally found the
terroir
where it performed best. From that time onward, right up to the present, there has never been any other red wine grape for the Beaujolais.

Beaujolais is gamay, and it can be said with some justice that gamay is Beaujolais, because this is its true home. Certainly there are gamay vineyards elsewhere in France, notably in the Ardèche region south of Lyon and in the Loire Valley, and some plantings abroad (Switzerland, Italy, Australia, South Africa), but of the eighty thousand or so acres of gamay growing worldwide, fifty-five thousand are located within this little vinous rectangle lying between Lyon and Mâcon, and nowhere else does the little black grape express itself so completely and cheerily as in the Beaujolais.

There’s always a certain amount of luck and serendipity in matching a
terroir
with exactly the right grape to produce the finest wine possible. Year to year, vintners in the Bordeaux vineyards are constantly fiddling with the blends of the five grapes (cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot, malbec and petit verdot) from which their vast palette of red wines is assembled, but if this juggling strikes anyone as complicated, it is as nothing compared to what it was in the old days: toward the end of the eighteenth century, their ancestors were dealing with no less than twenty-seven varieties of red wine grapes. Today’s very popular Côtes-du-Rhône red wines are composed from a bouquet of thirteen different varieties, or
cépages
, as they are called in French. There’s no lack of choice, because the number of varieties of
Vitis vinifera
, the European winemaking grapevine, is enormous; more than six thousand of them have been named and classified.

Considering the dizzying number of possible permutations between
cépages
and
terroirs
, it is an extraordinary testimony to human ingenuity, perseverance and powers of observation that the Beaujolais and the gamay grape should have come into union, because this particular varietal is extraordinarily sensitive to
terroir
and generally performs poorly in soil other than the granite, limestone and clay in and around the
monts du Beaujolais.
It had to be found in the first place, then brought there, planted, pressed, vinified and given a long trial run before anyone could tell whether it was worth the trouble. It was long thought that the gamay had originated as a vine growing wild in the coastal area of Dalmatia (present-day Croatia), across the Adriatic Sea from Italy of Caesar’s day, and that the Romans, as curious and enterprising as they were imperialistic, had brought it with them in their baggage to Gaul and planted it in order to make wine near their garrisons. But recent American DNA research has shown that three of France’s (and the world’s) most extraordinarily useful
cépages
—gamay, chardonnay and pinot noir—are descended from two parents: a prototype pinot and a grape called gouais blanc. The hamlet of Gamay, adjacent to the very noble Burgundy town of Puligny-Montrachet, may have taken its name from the hybrid that originated there, either by some accident of nature or the experiment of some unknown horticultural genius. One thing is sure, though: it is the Romans who first used the gamay vine to make wine.