I'll Drink to That (19 page)

“Four rows!” recalled Claude Beroujon, an eighty-five-year-old retired vigneron from the village of Blacé, his eyes glowing with pleasure at the memory. “We were absolutely captivated. But they were expensive— 230,000 old francs. I bought one in 1951, and it lasted me ten years, until the motorized
enjambeuses
arrived.”

That was the logical progression. In the normal course of things, inventive manufacturers like Vermorel went on to develop autonomous, fully motorized
tracteurs enjambeurs
, and these skinny, lanky little specialized machines, standing high on their stiltlike legs, are now standard equipment in French vineyards. Apart from a few nostalgic holdouts and a limited number of stubborn devotees of uncompromisingly organic viticulture, the days of horses in the Beaujolais vines ended in the early sixties. This was also the period when classical standbys for treating vines—sulfur,
bouillie bordelaise
—began encountering competition from various synthesized compounds generated by modern chemical manufacturers for keeping mildew,
oïdium
and crawling and flying pests at bay. Over those years, the Beaujolais peasants, like their confrères throughout the French wine industry, slowly swung over from the hand and horse to new high-speed, high-tech ways.

That proved to be a mixed blessing. By the mid-sixties the most archaic tools of the trade—the pick, the hoe and the plow—appeared to be in danger of disappearing when the winemaking community discovered the chemical marvel of
désherbants
: weed killers. Generalized by the seventies, these compounds offered appreciable and immediately visible advantages. By killing adventitious grass and weeds, they cleaned up the vineyards, made it easier to work on the vines and eliminated competition for nutrients in the soil, to the advantage of the vines. Eliminating these low, ground-level growths also eliminated the humidity they captured, and by consequence the various forms of fungus that would spontaneously generate within it. The immaculate rows of lush, green vines marching in military order straight up and down the hills of the French wine country, the earth between them a perfect, tawny carpet, made a quite strikingly beautiful sight, but to many who viewed these picture-postcard landscapes, nature tamed to that extent just didn’t look quite right.

It didn’t sound right, either, as bees, ladybugs and birds massively deserted the vineyards and took their business elsewhere. At length it was clear that overuse of chemical agents was sterilizing the soil and killing off its microbial life. As a result, the next step, again perfectly logical, was to bring on yet more chemicals—fertilizers, this time. Compacted by heavy machinery and rarely aerated by plowing, the soil became more resistant to vine roots searching for nourishment in the depths, so they did what any self-respecting root would do: they turned around and grew
up
, toward the surface, to where the fertilizer was.

It was weird and distressing. Alarmed at this turn of events, the French winegrowing community finally began seriously reappraising its passion for chemical agents. No sooner had they begun cutting back on them than the bees, the ladybugs and crowds of other indigenous creatures returned to the vines, offering a lesson in just how quickly nature can restore balance if it is left a little bit in peace. Today,
production raisonnée
, a semi-organic approach to viticulture, is progressively reducing reliance on the synthesized wonder chemicals and replacing them with environmentally friendly compounds, and soothing bands of grass between the rows of vines are once more common currency in the Beaujolais. Moreover—as any local booster will insistently remind visitors— Beaujolais vignerons remain much closer to the traditional artisan ways of winemaking than those in most other wine regions, with mechanical harvesters still forbidden in Beaujolais-Villages, the ten
crus
and for the production of
primeur
. While heavy machinery lumbers through vineyards elsewhere, in the Beaujolais it is still largely handwork. Very few consumers, even in France, realize that Beaujolais, this popular wine situated at the economy end of the price scale, shares with Champagne and several of the snootiest, overpriced Bordeaux the requirement to handpick the grapes in order to ensure that they arrive in the vinification sheds virginal and undamaged. It’s not for purity of heart—the simple fact is that the gamay grape is delicate and can spoil fast—but it is an element of legitimate local pride nonetheless.

By the end of the fifties, the Beaujolais country might have seemed, in the eyes of that hypothetical casual visitor, to be at a point of stasis. The acreage under cultivation of the vine, about sixteen thousand hectares, was almost exactly the same figure as in 1830, and the density was still unusually high, averaging ten thousand individual vines per hectare. Such high density meant more work, but the figure was not an accident. There is always a tradeoff between too few plants sharing vineyard space (danger of grapes growing too big, and bloated with water) and too many (grapes stunted and puny for lack of nutrients). Over the centuries, peasant empiricism had settled on ten thousand plants as about the right figure. If, then, the postwar vignerons of the Beaujolais were working much as their ancestors had in the 1830s, they saw little reason for anything but satisfaction. As far as they were concerned, what it meant was that they were keeping faith with tradition and doing their job the right way.

But the standstill in which they seemed settled was only apparent. In reality, they were in the stasis of a rocket at the launching pad, venting chilly puffs of liquid oxygen that indicated something was about to happen. That something had been approaching, in fact, for nearly a decade, because in 1951 had occurred a couple of events that proved to be of weighty consequence. First, the French tax authorities rescinded the wartime rules governing release dates of certain types of wines, making it possible for some of them to be sold earlier in the year than had previously been allowed. With that, the phenomenon of
primeur,
or “new” Beaujolais, as the Lyonnais had been enjoying it for a couple of centuries, took its first tentative steps into the formal retail circuit, this time not just in barrels delivered to local bars but bottled, packaged and distributed nationwide.

The second event was considerably more modest: an eighteen-year-old kid from the village of Chaintré, just across the border of the Beaujolais into the Mâcon wine country, got fed up with the way local wholesalers were treating the wine that he and his brother had worked so hard to perfect. On a hunch, he stuck a couple of bottles of his Pouilly-Fuissé into his bike’s tote bag and pedaled to the village of Thoissey, over on the other side of the Saône, where the famous chef Paul Blanc had earned two Michelin stars for his admirable restaurant, Le Chapon Fin. Maybe Chef Blanc would be interested in buying a few bottles. The kid on the bike was named Georges Duboeuf.

VI

A BIKE AND TWO BOTTLES OF WINE

THE BIRTH OF A BUSINESS DYNASTY

The Duboeuf family wasn’t quite the same as the other vignerons of the Beaujolais. Strictly speaking, in fact, they weren’t even Beaujolais at all, but Mâconnais, and their home village, Chaintré, was white wine land planted with the chardonnay grape. Even so, Chaintré’s chalky ground lay so close to the invisible border at the northern limit of Beaujolais territory that it was an easy stroll of only a few minutes to pass over into to the much more extensive, granitic vineyards of gamay. Beaujolais-Villages vineyards lay just on the west side of the Duboeuf property, and Saint-Amour to the south. Naturally enough, local identities had always been intimately related to the local products. “I had lots of friends in the red wine,” Georges Duboeuf will say, today still, recalling his youth.

But the difference between the Duboeufs and the others was more than simply geography. For a start, this was very old native blood, and much of the history of France could be exemplified by the Duboeufs, or inferred from their family chronicle. Georges’ elder brother Roger, who died in 2006, traced the Duboeuf family name back to the ninth century and the Latin
bos, bovis
(bull or steer). Clearly some distant ancestor had been a herdsman, probably in the mountainous country to the east, but the family had been settled into farming and winemaking in the little villageof Chaintré (present population about five hundred) since at least A.D. 1500. The roots ran deep.

Largely unremarked over the following centuries within the anonymous multitude of peasantry that constituted the great majority of France’s population, the Duboeuf ancestors rose a notch in their station with the French Revolution. The operation that brought the family to a certain prominence was a process of musical chairs with real estate, one that was perhaps typical of those unsettled, fast-changing revolutionary times. Under the ancien régime, the big local landowner had been Pierre-Elisabeth Chesnard, baron of Vinzelles, a nobleman who had a sharecropper on his land named Claude Debeaune, Georges Duboeuf’s maternal great-great-grandfather. Vinzelles must have congratulated himself for a smart move when he snapped up the abbey of Saint Vincent de Mâcon, in the riverside village of Crêches-sur-Saône, after the anticlerical revolutionaries booted the monks out in 1791. Only a year later, though, Vinzelles had to skip town himself when his own noble head suddenly looked to be destined for the guillotine. When Claude Debeaune proved to the Mâcon adjudication court that Vinzelles had left a large outstanding debt to him (aptly enough, a transaction involving cattle), the big monastery building, the chapel in its courtyard and the three hectares of attached fields were transferred over to him. With that, the family came into possession of something very much like a manor house and its properties. Added to the farm in Chaintré, three kilometers away, and their total of fifteen hectares of vines, it made a good, substantial holding, well above the norm of local vignerons.

The Debeaune-Berthilier-Duboeuf family—in the lines of maternal succession names changed with each marriage—formed a serious little clan, marked by hard work and sobriety: certainly not wealthy but still of higher condition than most, rather like the kulaks of pre-revolutionary Russia, peasants who were looked upon as rich because they owned a horse or a few more patches of land than their neighbors. In the case of the Duboeufs there were even a couple of “employees,” half-fruit winegrowers working their acreage on
vigneronnage
contracts. Roger Duboeufwent so far as to qualify the family as “petite bourgeoisie,” people with a penchant for reading and a deep respect for education. Grandfather had been something of a rural intellectual, a
notable
, a man who exchanged philosophical letters with Raymond Poincaré,
président de la République
. He had also become friendly with the famous Lumière brothers, inventors of cinematography, after hitching up his oxen to pull their newfangled motor car out of the mud of the old National 6 highway, then inviting them into his house for lunch.

“We weren’t exactly dirt farmers,” said Roger matter-of-factly.

Farmers they were all the same, though, and in 1935 Georges and Roger received a harsh lesson on the realities of survival when their father, Jean-Claude Duboeuf, suddenly died of a stroke. Georges could hardly realize anything at all, because he was only two years old at the time, but for Roger it meant assuming the duties of the man of the house at age twelve. From that point on, little Georges was raised at home by his mother and his elder sister Simone, while Roger, still learning himself, became his mentor and instructor in agriculture and the craft of making wine. Uncle Louis Galud, married to their defunct father’s sister, came by to advise and help out when he could, but he had his own work and his own family, so for all intents and purposes it was the boys who took the farm and the vineyards onto their shoulders and, over the following years, held their properties together without losing a single hectare. The exceptional work ethic for which the Duboeuf brothers would become famous was in part simply a mirror of the hardscrabble habit of stubbornly plugging along through adversity that thousands of Beaujolais peasants, like Papa Bréchard, had known before them. But with these two boys there was the added motivation of an absolute determination to keep the family patrimony intact: the only thing that a peasant hates more than not getting a piece of land he covets is losing a piece that he already owns. The grave, methodical, almost puritanical manner that within a few years would be guiding the young Georges Duboeuf as he carved out an exemplary career in the wine business, one that was to become a celebrated template of success in French individualenterprise, was only a continuation of this same determination to do well for the family. The boy’s early maturity and the man’s ability to start work earlier than the others, then keep at it long after everyone else knocked off, clearly had their roots in the tragedy of losing a father he never knew.

There’s not much of the peasant farm boy that shows in Georges Duboeuf today. Rich, universally admired and courted by politicians, bankers and hustlers of every nature, he sits in his headquarters in the village of Romanèche-Thorins, almost smack on the border between the two great growths Moulin-à-Vent and Fleurie, at the center of a remarkable little empire of his own making, a private firm that he took from literally nothing to a turnover of well above $100 million a year, as, one by one, he crept up toward, caught up with and overhauled all the great established wine houses of the Beaujolais.

Piat, Mommessin, Thorins, Aujoux and the rest could only watch, dumbfounded, as this insignificant little upstart company called Les Vins Georges Duboeuf appeared from nowhere, steadily ate away at their lead and finally left them all in the dust. He is now far and away the area’s biggest and most important wine dealer, inevitably labeled Mr. Beaujolais wherever in the world wine is sold. That’s a lot of places, too, because no one ever managed to export the wine of the gamay grape like Georges Duboeuf.