Drink (46 page)

The cult of restaurant-going that Grimnod had encouraged gave rise to a new occupation—that of the
sommelier
. The word derives from Old French, where it served as the title of the individual in a noble household responsible for the management of pack animals and provisions. Over time, in the same manner as the English
butler
came to denote a domestic servant entrusted with the provision of drinks to the dinner table, the sommelier became charged with the care and presentation of wine. After the Revolution, many attached themselves to the restaurants opened by the chefs they used to work alongside, and with the appearance of
gourmandisme,
their role was elevated to a level of similar consequence. The sommelier’s tasks included the purchase of appropriate wines, their storage under suitable conditions, and the provision of advice to customers as to which wines matched which foods. Their prophet was André Jullien, author of the
Sommelier’s Manual
and the
Topography of All the Known Vineyards.

Once it was established that there was a genuine public interest in the critical appraisal of good food and drink, fresh publications on the subject expanded its scope, from the what, where, and when of gourmandizing to the why. The
Physiology of Taste
(1825), subtitled
Transcendental Gastronomy,
by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, was the first to attempt to codify its ethos. Brillat-Savarin believed that prejudice had grown against the art of discrimination, to the detriment of civilization: “I have looked through various dictionaries for the word
gourmandise
and have found no translation that suited me. It is described as a sort of confusion of gluttony and voracity. Whence I have concluded that lexicographers, though very pleasant people in other respects, are not the sort of men to eat a partridge wing gracefully from one hand, with a glass of Lafitte or Clos de Vougeot in the other.”

In order to remedy this sorry state of affairs, Brillat-Savarin, via a series of anecdotes (including one concerning a wild turkey hunt in Connecticut, where he spent several years in exile), and meditations on such ancillary aspects of gourmandise as dreams and obesity, aimed to create a philosophy that justified the pleasures of discrimination. When it came to drinking, the watchword was to do so slowly: “True [gourmands] sip their wine. Every mouthful thus gives them the sum total of pleasure which they would not have enjoyed had they swallowed it at once.” Furthermore, the aspiring sensualist should never tipple to the point of intoxication, and those who did so were “utterly ignorant of the true principles of eating and drinking.” While he ruled out drunkenness, Brillat-Savarin expected his disciples to have strong heads—any man in good health should be capable of drinking two bottles of wine every day, and those of exceptional constitutions considerably more. An example of this latter class was provided in the person of General Bisson, a French hero of the Napoleonic wars, “who drank eight bottles of wine at dinner every day, and who never appeared the worse for it. He had a glass larger than usual and emptied it oftener” but nonetheless “he could jest and give his orders as if he had only swallowed a thimbleful.” The concept of
savoir boir
—to know how to drink—was further illustrated by an anecdote from Brillat-Savarin’s years in the United States, where he and a pair of fellow French exiles had drunk a collection of American planters under the table, by controlling the speed at which they consumed and by lining their stomachs with appropriate foods prior to the contest.

The devotees of gourmandise, if they paid close attention to the philosophical and practical advice in the pages of the
Physiology of Taste,
might aspire one day to possessing the powers of the elect of the discipline, who could “tell the latitude in which any wine ripened as surely as one of Biot’s or Arago’s disciples can foretell an eclipse.” They were also taught how to steer clear of bad wines, such as the infamous
vin blanc
of Surenne. According to Brillat-Savarin, three things were needed to get rid of a single glass of this fluid: “A drinker, and two men to hold him down in case his courage fails.”

Both gourmands and the restaurants that nourished them continued to thrive as the nineteenth century progressed, whatever the political climate. They multiplied under the Bourbon and Orléans monarchies and survived the revolution of 1848, so that by the advent of the Second Republic Paris was recognized as the culinary capital of the world. This eminence was a matter of national pride, which itself was a sentiment that Napoléon III, who ruled France between 1852 and 1870, did his best to encourage in his subject-citizens. Louis Napoléon was a modernizer. Under his guidance, France was to have factories, steam trains, and businessmen. Gourmands were natural supporters of his program. The spreading railway network whisked delicacies from the provinces to the capital in so short a time that they could be served in its restaurants while still fresh. A gourmand need no longer take to the countryside in pursuit of exquisite, if highly perishable, game such as ortolans when they could be had without effort in Paris with their blood still warm.

In order to fix an affection for progress in those French who were not enthusiasts for it, Napoléon III decided to arrange a Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855, which would serve as a showcase for industrialmight and human ingenuity. It was to be modeled on “the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” that had been staged in London in 1851. The British example, while bristling with machinery, had had very little on show for the gourmand. There were no fine wines, for the temperance brigade had sought a bar on alcohol beverages. Their general absence from the exhibits was lamented in the press as being wrong in principle: “Regardless of their value in the arts, or as an article of food or medicine, they were not allowed to be exhibited, because they are sometimes turned to a bad purpose. For similar reasons, types might have been prevented, because bad books were sometimes printed.” The few examples of alcoholic drinks that managed to slip through the temperance net and into the Crystal Palace would have made a gourmand blanch: “Six bottles of champagne wine manufactured in England from rhubarb stalk.”

In Paris matters were to be different. The “Preparation and Conservation of Alimentary Substances” category of exhibits had “Fermented Drinks” as a subcategory. When invitations were sent out to every area of France, asking that regional officials consider what items of manufacture they could submit to the exhibition, both Burgundy and Champagne replied that they would send their wines. Bordeaux, in contrast, rummaged around for something suitably industrial and considered sending samples from its rope factories. However, when representatives from Burgundy got in touch with the idea of a joint display of fine wines, a notice was published in the local papers inviting Bordeaux’s vintners to a meeting to discuss the matter. These latter were enthusiastic about showing their products at the Exposition, and it was decided that a display dedicated to the wines of the region, of all qualities, should be prepared.

Once the decision had been taken to send wine instead of ropes to the Universal Exposition, a problem emerged that threatened to scupper the plan. For nearly a century the wines of Bordeaux had been subject to an informal classification based on the concept of
cru,
or growth. Wines belonging to the
premier cru
commanded higher prices than those of the second or third class; indeed the pricing for each year’s vintage was made with reference to the amount paid for the first growths. Winemakers were exceedingly jealous of their rankings, and it was feared that some might try to take advantage of the exposure they would receive in Paris to manipulate their position. The dilemma was summed up by the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce. While it believed that “this solemn occasion should not be missed to remind our compatriots, and especially foreigners, that in the production of wine, France, and the Gironde in particular, is one of the most favored regions in the world,” if “the proprietors of a particular region seek to profit from the Exposition to mount a fight among themselves with the aim of destroying a classification based on the experience of long years, we would not hesitate to declare that it would be better, in our view, that none of our wines appear at the Exposition.”

This informal “classification,” which was deemed more important than a Universal Exposition, was the result of the careful compilation of prices paid for the various wines of the region over the years by its wine merchants and brokers. Thomas Jefferson’s notes from his visit to Bordeaux in 1787 had reproduced it in part, and versions had been set down in the wine guidebooks that had become popular in the first half of the nineteenth century. The most complete of these was contained in the
Treatise on the Wines of the Médoc and the Other Red Wines from the Gironde Department
by William Franck, a wine merchant of Bordeaux, which, by its third edition in 1853, listed sixty-two
crus
divided into five classes. A number of variants on it appeared in other guidebooks, but all reflected a near consensus in the proper ranking, at least at the top of the
cru
pyramid. They were all agreed that there were only four first growths—Château Lafitte, Château Margaux, Latour, and Haut-Brion, and more or less ten second
crus
. Below the third tier, however, they often differed.

This, then, was the position of the classification of Bordeaux wines at the time of the Universal Exposition. It was a controversial matter: A superior ranking, even among its lowest echelons, meant belonging to a higher price bracket. Hence the trepidation of the Chamber of Commerce in Bordeaux about allowing any of its wines to be exhibited. The solution it settled upon was a single large display containing all the wines of the region, which were to be labeled with their place of origin and rank, but not the name of the producer. A giant map—a
Carte Vinicole
—was also to be prepared, whose key linked the bottles on show to the communes in which they had been produced. Thus, visitors would receive a striking visual impression of the variety and excellence of Bordeaux wines, and gourmands would be able to point out the plots of land where their favorites were produced and plan tours of the vineyards.

Producers were invited to submit their wines, and the Carte Vinicole was commissioned. Whereas the response to the request for samples was disappointing, the great map promised to be sensational. It showed road and rail links to Bordeaux and was decorated with engravings of three famous châteaux, surrounded by their vines. In order to furnish a key to the Carte Vinicole, the Chamber of Commerce wrote to its union of wine brokers, asking it to provide a “list of all the red classed growths in the department, as exact and complete as possible, specifying to which of the five classes each of them belongs and in which commune they are located.” A fortnight later the brokers responded with a six-page document listing fifty-seven red wines divided into five
crus,
and twenty-one whites separated into three classes. This was the now-legendary
classement
. At the time, it was considered a temporary expedient, which no doubt would be altered in the near future. The 1868 edition of
Cocks & Féret
, the most influential guidebook of the age, commented that “like all human institutions” it was “subject to the laws of time, and every so often it must certainly be revised, [and] brought up to the level of progress.” The same phrase appeared in subsequent editions of the guide for the following century, during which the classification remained intact. Indeed, it has only been altered once since it was written down by Georges Merman on April 18, 1855.
⁴⁶

The Universal Exposition was a runaway success. Five million visitors queued up to admire its working steam engines, take balloon flights, and buy machine-made souvenirs. The newly classified wines of Bordeaux won several prizes for excellence and the table wine of the region, exhibited in the Gallery of Domestic Economy, received a special award on account of its medicinal qualities. In the opinion of the prize jury, it was impossible not to place so excellent a fluid “among the most useful of nutrients for people in good health, and, more often, for invalids and convalescents.”

The scientific display of wine at the great exposition and the gourmand fashion for depicting it as an affair of the senses alone infuriated many educated French people. It was an insult to classical civilization, and to France, to suggest that the appreciation of wine was the province of nutritionists, fanatics, and invalids and that no one should ever drink for the sole and express purpose of becoming intoxicated. Wines might possess a universe of flavors, but that was not what they were for, and it was intellectual suicide to pretend that vintages were uncorked simply to reveal their bouquets. What was wrong with drinking in the style of Socrates, or Alexander, or General Bisson? Whoever heard of a sober poet?

Charles Baudelaire, decadent and immortal bard, led the charge against progress,
gourmandisme,
and sober drinking. He deployed his spleen in an essay,
On Wine and Hashish,
initially against Brillat-Savarin, who had presumed to define wine as “a liquor made from the fruit of the vine,” invented by Noah. What, inquired Baudelaire, would a visitor to planet Earth from the moon, or a more distant place, “who has vaguely heard of the delicious liquors with which the citizens of this globe procured for themselves as much courage and as much gaiety as they wanted” learn about wine from the author of
Transcendental Gastronomy
? Might they mistake it for a type of food?

To Baudelaire, the principal purpose of drinking was intoxication, or as he termed it, “sailing in the gutter.” He felt that the relationship between humanity and wine was an affair of the heart, not the head, and, through his writing, gave wine a voice to express its affection for its creator: “My beloved, I want to sing out to you, despite my prison of glass and my bolts of cork, a song of fraternity, a song full of joy, light and hope. . . . You gave me life and I will reward you. I will pay off my debt to the full.” Wine sang not only of its pleasure in refreshing humanity in general and the “sublime dance” it performed inside each drinker, but also drew attention to its powers of consolation. Through intoxication, it gave solace even to those employed in the meanest occupations. Baudelaire depicted this last power with the figure of a ragpicker, wandering through the Parisian night, sorting over refuse in the hope of finding something of modest value to sell, sustained in his wretchedness by wine. Under its benign influence, the ragpicker’s stick becomes an emperor’s scepter, and he imagines that he is riding through the city at the head of an army: “His heart swells with happiness. He listens with delight to the acclamations of an enthusiastic public. Any moment now he will be dictating a law code superior to all codes known hitherto. He swears solemnly that he will make his peoples happy.”