I'll Drink to That (5 page)

Dressed in the black widow’s weeds that she has worn ever since Cortembert’s death, she went to Paris, strode into Michelin’s inner sanctum behind the Invalides and collared Bernard Naegellen, the guide’s all-powerful boss. I’m changing my cooking style, she said, in essence—no more complications, no more fancy silverware or china, no more truffles, no more lobster. From now on I’m doing my food— Beaujolais food—so knock me back down to one star in your guide. Bemused and amused, Naegellen shrugged, complied and congratulated her on preserving an endangered national patrimony. Far from losing her customers, Chantal’s turnabout made Le Cep even more famous, and it is now one of France’s most prosperous one-star restaurants, as acclaimed abroad as it is within the country. About half of Chantal’s customers are foreign gourmets who trek to Fleurie in search of the honest rural cooking that is fast disappearing from menus everywhere, in favor of the internationalist fusion style of the currently fashionable Mishmash Cuisine. Chantal pushes her gastronomic audacity to the point of serving coq au vin and even, upon occasion,
boeuf bourguignon
, if you can imagine anything as
démodé
as that, along with consecrated regional specialties like sautéed frogs’ legs, genuine Burgundy snails in the shell with butter, parsley and chopped (not crushed) garlic, roast squab,
gratin dauphinois
and Charolais steak with a potent red wine sauce whose punch she sweetens and attenuates by incorporating an unctuous puree of sweet onions. On the plate, it is about as close to perfection as our mortal condition allows.

Marguerite Chabert wasn’t one to chop garlic or cook onions. Her thing was just Fleurie—the red wine of Fleurie. In 1946 she became the first and only female ever elected president of a French
cave coopérative
, one of the winemakers’ co-ops that are particularly active in the Beaujolais, where eighteen of them produce some 30 percent of the region’s wine. A tall, flamboyant, tomboy bachelor lady who lived on the rue des Vendanges (Harvest Street) next to the church, Marguerite dominated the town with her extravagant hats and the overpowering personality of a born persuader. While her brother ran the family charcuterie where papa had invented the famous andouillette, it was she who took over the usually male roles of managing both Fleurie’s co-op and the twenty acres of vines that the Chaberts held in
vigneronnage.
Joshing, chivvying and backslapping every politician, administrator, journalist or potential buyer who could possibly do some good for the town and its vignerons, she reigned over a nearly continuous economic boom until her death in 1992.

But it was in 1960 that she had her finest hour. It had been a strange year for the Beaujolais. It rained and rained and rained, swelling the grapes to a size that did no one any good; the excess water made their juice diluted and weak, never a good start for any vinification campaign. Through harvesting, fermenting and pressing, the rains drummed relentlessly on, and as everyone had feared, the young wine proved to be of mediocre quality. But there was a great deal of it, more than any other year in memory—more, in fact, than the tanks and vats of the co-op could hold. Faced with an acute lack of storage space even as more grapes were coming in for vinifying, Marguerite took swift executive action by organizing a convoy of tanker trucks and commandeering Fleurie’s brand-new municipal cistern. Three hundred thousand liters of still-fermenting Beaujolais Nouveau flowed into the big concrete reservoir that September, and the harvest was saved. It would be nice to be able to report that Fleurie’s population brushed their teeth and washed their faces in red wine for a couple of weeks that year, but a sense of humor can be carried only so far: Marguerite instructed the co-op’s workers to shut down the main valve to the municipal water supply.

“Well, it wasn’t a very good year, anyway,” a philosophical André Bacot, ninety, told me with a little shrug, recalling the glory days when he was the co-op’s cellar master under Marguerite. “But her system worked just fine, you know. When the wine was sold, no one could tell that it had come from the water tower.”

Improvisation was the urgent watchword of that bizarre 1960 season. Another veteran of that maddeningly pluvious year, eighty-five-year-old Claude Beroujon, told of the deconsecrated chapel near Jullié that stood in as a warehouse, filled to the roof with barrels of Beaujolais. “We put wine everywhere we could,” he said. “It was only the growers’ talent for vinification that saved a terrible year and made it acceptable.” Unspoken: the vintage was not too watery, after all, by the time it was bottled. In the Beaujolais, the thought of a whole year’s wine being tainted with water was (and is) scandalous and abhorrent. Water is certainly acceptable for cattle and for cleaning floors and watering flower beds, but as a drink for human beings it is viewed with deep suspicion.

Even with an equal devotion to the sanctity and comfort of their wine, it is doubtful that anyone could recreate Marguerite Chabert’s stroke of genius today. That sort of thing isn’t done anymore. With the ever-growing authority of the European Union’s bureaucrats in Brussels, a stringent set of health and sanitary rules is slowly squeezing the folklore out of the Beaujolais, France and, indeed, Europe in general. Whole milk and unpasteurized cheeses are in mortal danger from statutory creep, as are a host of kitchen and winemaking practices that used to give a special character to the French table. (French cooking schools no longer teach the old way of making of the veal, chicken and fish stocks—
fonds de veau, fonds de volaille, fumets de poisson
—the fundamental building blocks of the great classic sauces that were until recent times the central glory of
la cuisine française.
Young graduates now often arrive in professional kitchens with can openers in their pockets, for serving up the ready-made pastes and powdered stocks, guaranteed sanitary, developed by the giants of the food industry.) Prodded by the nannies of the European Commission in Brussels, while binding themselves progressively tighter with the intricate web of domestic social legislation defining their welfare state, France is fast becoming a serious nation—serious, glum and humorless.

This is a pity, because the country that gave the world Rabelais, Molière, Jacques Tati, the Surrealists and the troubadour Georges Brassens has a wonderful native penchant for nonconformity, dissidence and humor, one that the political-intellectual establishment has been attempting for years to bury under a tsunami of analytical hot air, statistics and bafflingly complex legislation that hardly anyone understands much less bothers to obey. In these economically trying times, the Beaujolais is one of France’s last bastions of the ancient, honorable spirit of dissident laughter. Gabriel Chevallier knew all about that.

Chevallier (1895-1969) was a journalist and author from Lyon who knew and loved the Beaujolais for its wine and its people, and habitually spent his vacations in the picturesque hillside village of Vaux-en-Beaujolais. Taking his inspiration from the traditional French antagonisms between right and left, church and state, bourgeoisie and workers, loyalists and revolutionaries—and, yes, male and female—he composed his novel
Clochemerle
in 1934 as a kind of extended ode to the Beaujolais. The book was an instant and hugely profitable best seller, translated into twenty-seven languages, and it remains in publication to this day. In France, it is one of the great fictional revealers, those fun house mirrors before which populations can stop for a moment, contemplate their reflections and either grin or grimace at what they see. Say “Clochemerle” to any French man or women, and you will immediately be greeted with an ironic smile of recognition for the national characteristics, good and bad, that are revealed through the singular behavior of the citizens of the imaginary little Beaujolais village that Chevallier invented.

The book’s convoluted plot is kicked off by the political ambitions of Clochemerle’s mayor, Barthélémy Piechut, who conceives of a way to increase his popularity among the town’s voters and guarantee his re-election while at the same time infuriating his political opponents. His stroke of genius is to erect what he calls
un édifice
on a town square next to the church, under the windows of a censorious old maid who is, naturally, a religious fanatic. The
édifice
is a public
urinoir
, a convenience known in polite society as a Vespasienne (for the Roman emperor who invented pay toilets), but more commonly known in vulgar parlance as a
pissotière
, or
pissoir.
The series of events kicked off by Piechut’s inspiration follows the ripening of the grapes on the slopes around the village as they head toward what promises to be an exceptional year for wine. In the baroque turmoil that ensues, money is made and lost, social climbers rise and fall, husbands are famously cuckolded and political fortunes hang in the balance. Overseeing the village’s spiritual well-being is the Abbé Augustin Ponosse, who was sent by his bishop to Clochemerle as a young man, and rapidly adapted himself to the local mores. As village priest, he assuaged his weakness of the flesh with the help of his enthusiastically devoted housekeeper, Honorine, and his temporal thirst with at least two liters of Beaujolais a day, “anything less than which would cause him to suffer.”

“This system brought no soul back to God,” Chevallier wrote, “but Ponosse acquired a real competence in matters of wine, and by that he gained the esteem of the vignerons of Clochemerle, who said he was not haughty, not a sermonizer and was always disposed to empty his pot like an honest man. Over fifteen years Ponosse’s nose flowered magnificently, became a Beaujolais nose, enormous, with a color that hesitated between the violet of the canon and the purple of the cardinal. This nose inspired confidence in the region.”

The real village of Vaux-en-Beaujolais (population 850), where Chevallier used to vacation in the curiously named Hôtel des Eaux (a Hotel of the Waters smack in the middle of pure wine country is a flagrant contradiction in terms, but the people of the Beaujolais have never been afraid of jokes, and least of all in Vaux) served as the model for Clochemerle, and the present-day town council is so proud of the connection that it has based its entire tourism strategy around the book. A splendid Gabriel Chevallier Museum, complete with an interactive multilingual presentation and figurines of the principal characters of Clochemerle, stands next door to the village’s
caveau
, where the barmaid is cheery and Beaujolais by the glass is excellent and cheap; one level lower on the hillside, on a terrace shaded by enormous plane trees, old men scheme fiendishly to destroy one another in vicious games of
pétanque
at the
boulodrome.
But Vaux’s pride and joy, largely financed by the state, like everything else in this most centralized of European nations, and indicated by arrow-pointing signs lest tourists miss it, is the town’s cultural attraction, the municipal
pissotière.
It is entirely male-configured, as these things were in Piechut’s day, painted the regulation forest green, and further adorned with Clochemerlesque frescoes by Allain Renoux, Vaux’s artist in residence.

“We’re not the center of France,” the present-day mayor, Raymond Philibert, admitted over a glass of the local Beaujolais-Villages (2005 vintage) in the municipal
caveau
, “but this edifice is important to all French citizens and to those foreigners who have read the book. We owe it to them to give it the prestigious position it warrants.”

Tongue in cheek or not, Philibert’s heavy emphasis on tourism—the Chevallier Museum alone cost more than $1 million, a serious investment to put into a little burg like Vaux—is a reflection of some hard realities of twenty-first-century customs and economics: times are changing, and not necessarily for the better, for the Beaujolais. Philibert is no fool. He knows that if his gorgeous little village is to prosper enduringly in the coming decades, it behooves him to find some supplementary sources of income to fill out his tax base, just in case. Wine alone may no longer be enough.

“They’re worried now,” said Bernard Pivot by way of explanation. One of France’s most famous television personalities for his tremendously popular literary programs (he might be called the French Oprah Winfrey, were it not for the fact that he was reviewing books on the tube long before her), Pivot was born and raised in Quincié, deep in the Beaujolais-Villages and Brouilly area, and retains a profound affection for the place and its people. “The Beaujolais region has been propelled through three periods, very quickly. The place I knew as a kid was very much like Clochemerle, very rural and nonchalant. They loved their wine and they loved to laugh and joke with one another. I don’t think they worried too much about survival, and they didn’t ask too much of life. In general, you could say they were content.

“Then they went through a second phase, the period of triumph— Beaujolais Nouveau, the easy sales, the sudden euphoria of money that they had never known before. With that, they made some mistakes and maybe sold some bad wine. Now they’re paying the price. They’re learning that there are other wines out there, and that Beaujolais is not universal and obligatory. Their wine isn’t just automatically selling the way it used to. So they’re having to adapt to the new realities. The countryside is just as beautiful as it always was, the church bells still ring the Angelus, the people still play
boules,
and they still sit down to supper to eat the same soup—but now there’s a computer in the room, too. Life is changing. Fundamentally, I think the people of the Beaujolais are still as simple and straightforward as they always used to be, but they’re worried. As soon as you get them into their
caves
, though, they forget their worries and become themselves again.”

There can be no doubt that the return to one’s own wine cellar, to the faint, sour fragrance of a thousand past tastings, to the familiar heft of a half-filled wineglass and to the taste of one’s own wine, is a wonderful palliative for a wine grower’s woes, but that manner of pleasure and tranquilizing is not reserved for vignerons alone. It is equally present at the bars, bistros and cafés omnipresent in French urban architecture, and there is always a writer, a singer, a poet or a scientist to recommend a little bending of the elbow. The whole world went mad for red wine a few years ago after Professor Serge Renaud in Lyon announced that its judicious consumption was good for the heart, but long before him the great Louis Pasteur had already labeled wine as “the most hygienic of beverages.” Molière composed a wine-drinking song (“Let us drink, dear friends, let us drink, the flight of time urges us on, let us enjoy life to the fullest”), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau nicely philosophized that teetotalers were generally phonies, whereas “the taste for wine is not a crime, and it rarely causes any to be committed. For every passing quarrel it causes, it forms a hundred durable attachments. Drinkers are marked by cordiality and frankness: almost all of them are good, upright, decent and honest people.”