I'll Drink to That (12 page)

Although its introduction was slow in coming, the horse was the first great labor-saving revolution to come to the Beaujolais, Papa Bréchard once explained to me. Eighty-nine years young when I met him in his village of Chamelet, Louis Bréchard had earned the sobriquet “Papa” by his evergreen longevity (he finally died at age ninety-three in 1997), his exemplary winemaking career and his political importance for the region. Progressing from simple vigneron in the beautiful yellow-stone country near Bois d’Oingt to mayor of his village, to leader of a winegrowers’ union and finally to deputy in the National Assembly in Paris, he had rubbed shoulders with the movers and shakers of the government of Charles de Gaulle, including
le Grand Charles
himself. Although at ease among the mighty of the land, he remained the constant, imperturbable icon of and spokesman for his rural constituency, a stocky, broad-shouldered, mustachioed peasant who rolled his R’s and delivered crushing handshakes with calloused palm. The great man was the memory of the Beaujolais.

“Most of the villagers were surprised to see that horses didn’t damage the vines,” he said. “The animals were light on their feet, and they actually seemed to understand the work they were doing. They were a lot smarter than people had given them credit for.”

The young Louis Bréchard was himself a perfect example of the need for modernization. He had become
chef de famille
and taken over the family’s nine-acre vineyard at age fourteen, when his father was killed in the trenches near the end of the war. In conversation with me and in the book of memoirs he composed with the Lyon journalist Jean-Pierre Richardot (
Papa Bréchard, Vigneron du Beaujolais
, Éditions Stock, 1977) he evoked the amazingly different world of his youth. Before the end of the First World War electricity was nonexistent in most Beaujolais villages, water entered the house in a bucket from the communal well, and it was economized as a precious rarity and utilized in a careful cascade—first wash your vegetables with it, then your hands, then throw it over plants. It was a time when peasants’ feet were still shod in sabots, the universal wooden shoes of rural France, hand-carved from walnut or birch blocks, and straw was used instead of socks; when the courtyard harbored pigs, chickens and rabbits (raw material for future feasts) in addition to the cow and the horse; and when the kitchen, the single great farmhouse room where the family lived around the fireplace, frequently had a floor of beaten earth and was lit by the fragrant flames of walnut oil lamps.

The casual visitor to an archetypal country scene like this one might well have concluded that the Beaujolais vigneron lived in the same timeless, unchanging routines as his forefathers and would go on that way through the generations, but the reality was quite different. Winegrowing families were often subject to sudden, dramatic change, and had to be quick on their feet to adapt. Papa Bréchard’s great-grandparents had grown hemp on the family property, stripping the plant’s fibers and weaving them into rough cloth that they whitened with successive washings in the acidic waters of the River Azergues and eventually sold for making sheets. But the next generation felt the heat of the Industrial Revolution,and factories using machines and chlorine bleach were already turning out sheets whiter and faster. His grandparents, then, slowly gave up hemp and moved into mixed agriculture and grapes. By the time his father took over, hemp was entirely gone and the family exploitation was half-farm, half-vines. Under the young Bréchard’s stewardship, it turned almost entirely to the making of wine. Then as today, the vigneron could never insulate himself from the forces of change or the need to readjust his life to them.

The switch to animal power and rectilinear planting meant that Beaujolais peasants were obliged to rapidly learn how to handle that useful but very difficult and demanding creature, the horse, and how to improve the quality of their wine to cover the extra expense that this implied. Then, barely more than twenty-five or thirty years later, the horse was out in favor of the tractor—different methods, more expense. Shifts of this sort underline the unusual, and unusually demanding, nature of the vigneron’s trade. It is a complicated business, one that requires him to master several different disciplines. For most of the year he is a simple peasant, husbanding his crop of grapes as close as he can to perfection, itself an undertaking that requires a great variety of instruments and seasonal skills. In the autumn and early winter he becomes a biotechnician, transforming the crop into the delicate, capricious artifact that is a well-made wine. Next, he goes into the storage and warehousing business, before entering the world of commerce and salesmanship when he puts his year’s production on the market. Not everyone is capable of handling all these steps with equal felicity or can afford to buy and maintain the modern equipment they require, and the typical vigneron often might have envied his cousin in the grain business who simply plowed, planted and harvested. It was this multifaceted complexity of the wine trade that early in the twentieth century was to give birth to a system of
caves coopératives
, the co-op wine cellars that today bring together thousands of small growers who are not willing or not equipped to perform this multitude of tasks by themselves. Today, co-op cellars vinify and store more than half of France’s wine.

The old Beaujolais of Papa Bréchard’s childhood was far from such up-to-date facilities. The vines planted
en foule
before the days of the horse were extraordinarily dense, with anywhere from twelve thousand to fifteen thousand and sometimes even twenty thousand separate plants per hectare.
²
That’s a huge number, and the vineyards often must have looked very much like jungles. When the horse and the tractor brought rectilinear order, the number of plants per hectare in the Beaujolais dropped and stabilized at around ten thousand, but even this was (and is) high for France, where most winegrowing areas average between four thousand and seventy-five hundred plants per hectare. This greater number of plants means more work, of course, especially the demanding handwork of pruning, removing buds and tying branches to stakes and wires. But work was always the essential identifying characteristic of the Beaujolais vigneron’s existence, and he had no choice but to stoically accept it as part of the inevitabilities of life.

“When I took over the farm,” Papa Bréchard told me, “my mother and I had to work nonstop, just plugging along from one day to the next, making ends meet. It wasn’t easy to get by in those days.” In his memoirs he gave descriptions longer in detail on just how hard that work could be. Probably the most trying and frustrating job was dealing with the erosion that constantly threatens the steeply sloped vineyards that are so commonplace in the Beaujolais.

“Erosion frequently caused gullying,” he wrote, “and that made the work really tough, because whenever a storm carried the soil away it had to be brought back up on your back. I did it myself. We had
hottes,
[wickerwork baskets] and we shoveled the earth that had been carried away into them and brought it back up to the top in order to have a layer of arable soil in place. It was like coolie work; the method wasn’t very much different. On each trip we brought 50 kilos [110 pounds] of earth up the hill—now, that’s a good load! We brought up as much as we had to, day after day. It was easier to walk when the ground was frozen, becausethen it didn’t give way under our feet. So we carried up earth to the point of exhaustion.”

The
hottes,
as he explained them, resembled hod carriers’ troughs, entirely made of wood in those days before the arrival of the plastic containers that have now become the common tool of vineyards all around the world. Supple willow branches that had been stripped and split during some earlier night’s
veillée
were woven together to form the basket itself, which was held in a solid wood framework and supported by a couple of stiltlike legs, which the field worker could grasp as he clambered uphill. He filled the basket, humped it up and shuffled forward, bent almost double on the slope in order to keep his center of gravity stable, planting the two legs on the ground for support when he stopped for a breather. In the steepest sections of the slope, he would sometimes be on all fours. The jolly winemaker of popular imagery was a beast of burden himself.

Then there was the work of pickax and mattock. The earth always had to be loosened up for the vine, and before the introduction of horsepower that meant human elbow grease. “A good pick man, a really strong one, if he could do 600 square meters a day, he was a master,” Papa wrote. “That’s really something, 600 meters. He needed almost two weeks to handle one hectare. And he had to have decent weather, too, because when it rained hard the soil firmed up like cement. A certain number of days would be lost, but still we had to keep at it, chopping, chopping, chopping. It was very hard work.”

A less exhausting but potentially dangerous chore occurred each year when the grapes were brought in for vinifyng. True to the stereotypical imagery, the old Beaujolais vigneron trampled his grapes after they had been dumped into the big tuns and were on their way to transformation into wine. The standard practice was to do the job “in the costume of Adam,” as Papa put it—emphasizing, however, that they washed up first, using a basin of water and sometimes even soap. But those same tuns, vast and deeper than a grown man, could become death traps if the trampler was ever unwise enough to work unaccompanied, because the undetectable carbon dioxide gas rising up from the purplish, fermenting fruit could coldcock a man as surely as a blackjack. The lone, naked vigneron who keeled over into the seething mass of grape skins and juice might be discovered only hours later, asphyxiated by his own crop. There were victims every year, said Papa.

The center of village life was always the café. Some vignerons went to mass on the Sabbath and some didn’t, but none ever missed the Sunday morning gatherings in the village café. These informal get-togethers were vital, much more important than mere social or recreational outings. For want of any other plausible venue, the café played the role of the local business and convention center. In a cloud of acrid black tobacco smoke from their pipes and the cigarettes they rolled themselves, seated around a few half-liter
pots
³
of Beaujolais, the men exchanged information about the incessant struggle for the health of their plants, the progress of ripening in different sectors, the prices their wines were fetching, any new regulations that might affect their livelihood, projected harvest dates, or any of the numerous other topics of daily concern to the wine trade. After lunch they might return to the café for a spirited game of
boules
, the Beaujolais equivalent of
pétanque
, but the Sunday morning meetings were all business.

Life was local and slow, lived at the pace of the seasons and the natural cycle of their plants. National news was distant and spotty, apprehended by newspaper and word of mouth, because radio was nonexistent and television not even imagined. When, once every few years, a vigneron was called for family reasons, pressing legal business or some truly extraordinary errand to make the twenty-five-mile trip to Lyon, the regional metropolis, few expected to get there by any other means than shank’s mare. There was the train at Mâcon, Belleville and Villefranche, to be sure, but it was expensive. Instead, the Beaujolais winegrower preferred to walk, and he did it with the same plodding peasant determination that ruled the rest of his life. “We would leave for Lyon at three in the morning,” Papa Bréchard remembered. “Quite often in wooden shoes. Leaving at three or four, a good walker expected to be back by that same night. He needed six or seven hours to get to Lyon, walking at a normal clip. He did his business and came back that evening, almost always carrying a load.”

The reason for departure in the middle of the night was, of course, to avoid missing a full day’s work upon his return. As it was with thrift, the work imperative was absolutely constant, graven into the vigneron’s psyche and never allowing him to breathe completely easy. Certainly peasant life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was beginning to edge into many of the conveniences of the industrialized world, but the typical Beaujolais attitude toward work, as described by Papa Bréchard, had hardly changed since a striking portrait in words sketched by an anonymous eighteenth-century observer that the Lyon historian Raymond Billiard cited in one of his books (
Trois Siècles de la Vie de Nos Ancêtres Beaujolais
, Éditions du Cuvier, Villefrenche, 1945):

More than his winemaking brethren almost anywhere else in France, the Beaujolais vigneron had always been hostage to unpredictable vagaries of weather. However well things were going, however healthy his vines or how good the prospects for the next harvest, there was always a distant dread lurking in a corner of his subconscious: what would the sky deliver next? Years of too much rain could wash away his soil, bring fungal attacks and make the juice of his grapes thin and watery; drought would certainly shrivel the grapes and lower his yields, perhaps dramatically. He could deal with those kinds of conditions, though; they were a normal part of his bargain with natural forces that were, on the whole, benevolent in the Beaujolais by comparison with other, less hospitable, parts of the world. But it was the unjust and unpredictable that spooked him—the aberrant moments when nature went mad, bringing destruction to him with capricious, irrational cruelty. Nothing, it appeared, could ever be entirely free for the Beaujolais vigneron. Where nature gave with one hand, it took away with the other.