I'll Drink to That (8 page)

Dr. Guyot’s rhetorical flight could scarcely be complete without rendering heartfelt homage to the nation most advanced in the art of winemaking: “I am profoundly convinced that the wines of France are the primary cause of the frankness, the generosity and the value of the French character, incontestably superior to that of all the nations.”

Wine = health was a stubbornly ineradicable mantra that for most of the French lasted well into the twentieth century, reinforced by popular maxims like “vegetables make
merde
, meat makes meat, wine makes blood.” But the old human tendency to conclude that where a good thing is concerned, more is better, sometimes wreaked havoc on the rationalism for which the French are famous. Professor Garrier points out that around 1870 a new “alcohol therapy” had become quite the rage among the upper bourgeoisie of Paris and that as late as 1930 a couple of professors in the Paris School of Pharmacy were recommending that the grapevine be classified as a medicinal plant. “In 1935,” he wrote in his
Histoire Sociale et Culturelle du Vin
, “Doctor Dougnac recommends ‘vinotherapy’ as an answer to alcoholism; he goes as far as counseling wine for children from the age of five, and maintains that according to a study carried out in the Gironde, students who regularly drink wine have a higher grade average than abstainers.”

Whatever their excesses of enthusiasm, the investigations of both Pasteur and Guyot made serious contributions to the art of winemaking, in the Beaujolais as elsewhere in France. Theirs was cutting-edge science for the day, Guyot for the care and growing of the vine and Pasteur for the microbiology of vinification. Nothing bedeviled vignerons more, then as now, than the trade’s single, essential fact of life: that Mother Nature intended grape juice to become not wine, but vinegar. Beaujolais peasants were poorly equipped to deal with this problem, and they lived in terror of their precious brew turning. As always, their great battle was with the element that is the most indispensable to us as air-breathing mammals: oxygen. When oxygen gets to iron, the result is immediately visible: rust. When it gets to wine, the result leaps out equally fast in an unmistakable sour pucker: oxidized wine means vinegar.

It is yeasts that are to blame. Naturally present in enormous numbers on grape skins (and today commonly cloned and raised in laboratories), yeasts are teeming, multifarious living organisms that are absolutely fundamental to winemaking. But they are tricky little brutes: if they are allowed to meet oxygen in the winemaking process, they create acetic acid—vinegar. If they are kept quarantined from oxygen, though, they combine with the natural sugar of fruit to produce the joy and wonder of anyone who has ever pressed a grape: alcohol.

Even today, when molecular science and biochemistry seemingly have an explanation for every possible twist and turn of nature’s ways, winemakers tread with infinite caution when facing enemy oxygen during the critical period of vinifying their grape juice into young wine and storing it afterward to ensure that it holds still. Two and three hundred years ago, when the natural processes were still largely mysterious, winemakers throughout France were guided by the empiricism of peasant folklore and superstition, keeping a keen eye on the winds and the phases of the moon, and praying to Vincent, the patron saint of vintners. If, in spite of all their precautions, their wine went bad anyway, they resorted to any number of folkloric nostrums and additives to try to bring it back: alum, ammonia salts, plaster, egg whites and wood chips are frequently mentioned.

The only thing worse than wine going bad was no wine at all. Nature being what it is, there were always times when flash frosts, hailstorms or any of a wide selection of diseases and creatures that feast on grapevines destroyed part or even all of a year’s crop. Unsurprisingly, in light of the sincere religious fervor that prevailed in the Beaujolais well into the twentieth century, the Church did what it could to allay these menaces. It was customary for priests around Beaujeu to bless candles at Candlemas (February 2), the Day of Purification of the Blessed Virgin. Having brought the holy candles home to village and farm, the faithful lit them at the approach of thunder and hail, while the village curé contributed his efforts by energetically ringing his church bells, on the theory that their pious clangor might ward off Satan’s meteorological assaults. When this manner of local prophylaxis went unheeded, mass processions and pilgrimages by vigneron families implored succor from the Almighty or, in the manner of the ancient Hebrews in Canaan, built chapels on high ground, like the ones still standing today above Fleurie or the bigger, more imposing one, Our Lady of the Grape, atop the summit of Mount Brouilly, high point of the Beaujolais wine region. Scholars have found records of ecclesiastical trials in which desperate clergy officially enjoined vine-feeding worms and caterpillars to depart, under threat of anathema and excommunication. Anything was worth a try.

When all avenues of resistance had been exhausted and a dearth of wine was upon the land, Beaujolais peasantry, like their fellow vignerons in other wine areas, turned to homemade substitutes. Various fruits and herbs—a multitude of agents like elderberries, blueberries, sassafras, juniper berries, hollyhocks, barley, nutmeg, dry raisins—could be infused in water, colored with yet other ingredients and given an alcoholic punch with a few bottles of eau-de-vie or straight grain alcohol. They were poor substitutes for the real thing, though, and they certainly did not possess the strength-giving and spiritual powers that folk wisdom ascribed to true wine.

Lending a helping hand to underpowered wines was an altogether different matter. Connoisseurs everywhere know that a maddeningly delicate sensorial balance comes into play where a wine’s alcohol content is concerned: too little alcohol, and a wine will probably be thin and acid; too much, and it is likely to be heavy and out of balance. There is no absolute rule—some wines may be at their best with only 8 percent alcohol content, others with 14 percent or higher—but generally speaking, 12 or 13 percent is today considered a happy medium. Since alcohol is produced by the interaction of yeasts with grapes’ natural sugar content, a riper grape will tend to yield more sugar, and therefore more alcohol. In very sunny southern climates grapes ripen easily and well, so alcohol content is rarely a problem—in fact, winemakers may even have to struggle with too much alcohol. But in most winemaking regions of France the sun cannot always be counted upon to deliver enough natural grape sugar for an optimum, balanced result in alcohol content. It was in regard to this fact of life that another famous scientist, this one a predecessor to Pasteur and Guyot, turned his attention away from investigating saltpeter (vital for gunpowder to use against the English), tar and various earth salts and had a look at the French wine industry.

Count Jean-Antoine Chaptal was a medical doctor and chemist of wide-ranging talents whom Napoléon Bonaparte named minister of the interior in 1801. In that same year, he published a book,
L’Art de Faire le Vin
(The Art of Winemaking), that proved to be little short of revolutionary. Revised, upgraded and expanded several times, the treatise most tellingly recommended a procedure he had devised, one that is still known by his name today.
Chaptalisation
consists of adding carefully calibrated quantities of sugar to the must, the newly pressed grape juice and mash that is beginning its fermentation toward wine. Faced with this bonus of sugar, the grapes’ yeasts boost the alcohol content of the finished wine a degree or two, filling out its bouquet, mellowing it into a rounder, more interesting and seductive drink—but
not
, contrary to a widely held misconception, making the wine sweeter. The sugar is there only to make alcohol, and it is entirely consumed in the process. In all but the most sun-drenched years,
chaptalisation
is critically important not only for Beaujolais but for the wines of Champagne, Alsace, the Loire Valley, Burgundy, Bordeaux, and elsewhere in France—and indeed, in temperate zones all around the world where the
terroirs
are fine but the sun deficient. In essence, Chaptal only refined and codified peasant empiricism. Off and on, depending on the place, the year and the availability of sugar-heavy products, winemakers had been adding honey or molasses to grape juice in their fermentation vats since antiquity. Today, there is hardly a French wine, even the most prestigious and expensive of Bordeaux or Burgundies, that does not benefit from
chaptalisation
.

As much as Beaujolais winemakers benefited from the painstaking laboratory work of some of the greatest names of French science, the microbiological caprices of winemaking represented only one chapter of the book of travails of the typical nineteenth-century vigneron. Long before the stage of treating grape juice could be reached, a frightening and bewildering combat often had to be delivered on the ground where their vines were growing—or, worse, were
not
growing—if there were to be any grapes at all.

Treasured provider of the pleasures of inebriation for humans, the grape vine does the same service for animals, too, if they happen to feed upon fermenting fruit at the right moment, and it seems to be a particularly attractive target all the way down the line, to the smallest of living creatures. In spite of the tough, gnarled appearance of its wood above ground,
Vitis vinifera
is in fact an extremely delicate plant that requires constant attention by those who make their living from it. Whichever way they turn, they are likely to find some natural predator poised to suck its roots, chomp its leaves, rot its fruit, invade its bark to make their parasitic dwellings or in one way or another threaten its health and make life miserable for the vigneron. My old copy of Alexis Lichine’s
Encyclopedia of Wines & Spirits
lists six viral, one bacterial and ten fungal diseases and at least nine ill-intentioned animal parasites that enjoy attacking vines, and there might well have been more added to the list since. In short, there is a discouragingly large waiting list of microscopic critters that want a piece of
Vitis vinifera.
It is a poignant fact of biological life that three of the worst of them originated in America, unintended gifts resulting from the back-and-forth shuttlings of transatlantic cargo ships on which hitchhiking plant predators rode. The malevolent trio was:
oïdium,
mildew and, most devastating of all, phylloxera.

Before their arrival, though, the Beaujolais lived its own endogenous disaster and painfully won triumph with the saga of the little beast popularly known as “the mischievous worm”:
pyrale
. Caterpillar and moth rather than a worm, the terrible
pyrale
had been known in France for centuries as a voracious devourer of vine leaves, but never had its depredations been as thorough as toward the end of the first and beginning of the second quarters of the nineteenth century. Proliferating in unheard of quantities, the little caterpillars munched their way through entire vineyards, leaving in their wake a desolation as total as if the vines had been swept by fire. The Beaujolais was not the only wine area under attack—
pyrale
was upon the land everywhere—but it was in the Beaujolais that the saving counterstroke was discovered.

It took a while. Exorcisms, banishments and demonstrations of piety such as pilgrimages to the chapel of Our Lady of the Worm at Avenas, near Beaujeu, which specialized in divine intervention against intestinal worms in children, gave no noticeable improvement. Direct action— sulfur fumigations, sending kids out at night with oil lamps to attract and kill moths piecemeal, squashing eggs attached to vine leaves, rubbing various unpleasant compounds on the stalks, scraping larvae off the bark with rough chain-mail gloves—was an exhausting task that proved equally bootless. In spite of all the effort, the results were heartbreakingly thin: mere mitigation, no cure. In the Beaujolais and Mâconnais, the harvests of 1830, 1831, 1836 and 1838 were three-quarters lost.

It was in this atmosphere of despair that Benoît Raclet settled in Romanèche-Thorins, a little village near Fleurie and Moulin-à-Vent. A minor court functionary from Roanne, Raclet had inherited a Beaujolais vineyard when he married a local girl named Marthe Chaumet. Of course his vines, like everyone else’s, suffered from the
pyrale
caterpillar, and it seemed unlikely in the extreme that this newly arrived pencil pusher could have any more success against the intruders than the local peasants, whose agricultural wisdom was almost genetic, dating as it did through generations of ancestors who had worked the same vines before them. But Raclet had a few special circumstances in his favor: his vines grew right up alongside his house; his kitchen plumbing was primitive; and by nature he was orderly, methodical and observant.

One day he put two and two together. Surveying the pathetic remnants of his vines, he could not help noticing that a single one of them continued to flourish, without the least trace of caterpillars or caterpillar damage. As it happened, this vine was planted hard by the drainpipe where hot water from his wife’s sink and cooking was unceremoniously dumped outside, for want of a proper septic system. Could water be the answer? And, more specifically, hot water?

Over the following years Raclet began experimenting, first with a simple coffeepot filled with hot water from the house, and then with more complicated systems of his own design for a boiler heated by charcoal fire. Trudging through his vines with his portable fire, his water tank and his coffeepot, he looked like a nineteenth-century Professor Gadget and was naturally dismissed as an eccentric at best and a lunatic at worst. Still Raclet persisted and eventually determined by trial and error that the secret was to douse the vines with scalding hot water in winter, killing the larvae that were hibernating under the bark. The spectacle he and his paraphernalia presented to the ultraconservative peasantry was so bizarre, even vaguely satanic, with its smoke and all, that he became the butt of constant hostile raillery. When he attempted to avoid his neighbors’ censorious gaze by continuing his experiments at night, he of course only worsened the situation. In 1828, therefore, when Raclet announced that he had found the way to beat the mischievous worm, he was greeted with only derisive shrugs.