La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (23 page)

Roland Barthes captured France’s proprietary, chauvinistic relationship to wine in “Wine and Milk,” an article written more than half a century ago. “Wine is felt by the French nation to be a possession which is its very own, just like its three hundred and sixty types of cheese and its culture,” he wrote. “It is a totem-drink, corresponding to the milk of the Dutch cow or the tea ceremonially taken by the British Royal Family.” This helps explain why French wine continues to be so appreciated and exalted, despite the expansion, industrialization, and rationalization of winemaking in far-off places like America and Australia.

Barthes considered wine to be so strong a determiner of Frenchness that the leader of France was expected to identify with it. When René Coty, a president of the Fourth Republic, was photographed at home at the beginning of his term with a bottle of beer on the table, “the whole nation was in a flutter,” Barthes wrote. “It was as tolerable as having a bachelor king. Wine is here a part of the reason of state.” Decades later, Jacques Chirac was forgiven his thirst for Mexican beer because he drank oceans of French wine as well. I’m convinced that one of the reasons Nicolas Sarkozy is not more loved is that he doesn’t drink alcohol—not even a flute of champagne when toasting another head of state or a glass of Bordeaux with a fine meal. The preservation of France’s wine heritage is a duty: the wine cellar of the president of the French Senate, for example, is supposed to reflect the regional output of France as a whole.

Universally, according to Barthes, wine has a practical social function: it enables the worker to do his task with ease and the intellectual to become the equal of the worker. The French do that and much more: “Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention.” A drink is felt as “the spinning out of a pleasure,” a “leisurely act.” Barthes called “knowing
how
to drink” a national trait that demonstrates the French man’s performance, control, and sociability.

Growing up in France, my two daughters were allowed to drink legally as teenagers. Champagne was served at their senior prom. They developed a healthy respect for moderation. Perhaps the biggest cultural shock they faced in college in the United States was binge drinking.

The integration of wine into daily life starts early. Schoolchildren learn wine-drinking songs like “Fanchon,” which is also sung by Boy and Girl Scouts, sports teams and military units, and people of all classes from all over France. Some of the lyrics:

Many high school students spend the tail end of at least one summer doing
les vendanges
—harvesting—at a vineyard. They handpick grapes in a sleepaway camp setting that often comes with a small salary, food, lodging, and a vast amount of local wine to drink. While American newlyweds might freeze a piece of their wedding cake for a year, a French couple is more likely to keep a case or two of wine from the wedding party. When a baby is born, parents sometimes invest in a fine wine produced that year; the expectation is that both child and wine will get better with age.

The language used to describe French wines relies heavily on gender. In its color, texture, and form, wine is a woman. “Wine has a dress, legs, thighs, tears, curves,” said Véronique Sanders, the manager of Château Haut-Bailly in Bordeaux. I told her that this sounded sexist. “The definitions were done by men,” she replied. “That’s why they seem a bit macho today.”

When the subject is the wine itself, the language can go either way. Wines with high tannin levels are masculine: robust, beefy, sturdy. Wines with soft tannins are feminine. “Wine can be pouty, voluptuous, flirtatious, charming, soft,” Sanders said. The gender issue gets even more complicated for the wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy. “Metaphorically speaking,” wrote the French food and wine historian Jean-Robert Pitte, they are “hermaphrodites.” He added, “Connoisseurs and poets characterize both as masculine and feminine.”

Wines can also mate. That’s what wine expert Enrico Bernardo told me. In 2004, after nine years of training to memorize the tastes of ten thousand wines, Bernardo underwent a grueling five-day competition that involved blind tastings and tested sensitivity to the minutiae of food, drink, and cigars. He won the title of “best sommelier of the world.” Enrico is Italian-born, but he works as a promoter, educator, and seller of great wine in France, a country with the right sensibility to appreciate his peculiar perspective—that wine, not food, is the point of departure for a meal. Clients at his Paris restaurant, Il Vino, choose a selection of wines and leave the chef to prepare surprise dishes to match each of them.

For Bernardo, everyone is a wine. He is a Barolo: rich, complex, powerful, a bit exotic, and, of course, Italian. When he discovered that his Alsatian-French girlfriend was a Riesling, he knew she would become his partner for life.

“A Riesling has a very pale dress and is very clear, crystalline, with an incredible transparency like water,” he said. “It has a nose that is very timid, reserved, fresh, floral, citrus, and has a very straight, very long spinal column in the mouth, very fair, honest, pure. The woman I fell in love with is timid upon first approach. She is very pure and honest. It took a long time before she revealed herself. I did not fall in love with a woman who is a fleshy, full-bodied Chardonnay or Marsanne, who is extroverted and more Latin. I fell in love with a Riesling.” In time, he added, she may even be a Riesling
grand millésime
, the best one of all, because of her persistence and dependability.

Like perfume, wine plays with memory, but in a different way, because it conjures up the sense of taste as well as smell. The journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann survived on a diet of memory as a hostage for three years in Lebanon in the 1980s. He kept his mind in shape by reciting daily the famous 1855 classification of the greatest wines of Bordeaux. He imagined their aromas and tastes from the dark and cramped dungeon where he was held chained and sometimes blindfolded. “I never forgot the taste of wine,” he wrote after the ordeal was over. “Sometimes in the deep dark well of reality, a miracle happened: The taste of cedar and blackcurrant from the Cabernet Sauvignon, the plummy aroma of the Merlot, returned to me.” Submerged in the past, Kauffmann was a free man, because, he said, “wine is synonymous with liberty.”

I knew I’d never be one of those people who could tell the difference between the Côte de Beaune and the Côte de Nuits or detect the taste of wild strawberries and the odor of fresh dirt combined with the faint aroma of eucalyptus and the lingering aftertaste of leather. But I am aware of wine’s seductive power, its capacity to draw a person in by revealing itself slowly, deliberately, over a long period of time. Walter Wells, the former executive editor of the
International Herald Tribune
, became a devoted student of French wine during his three decades living in France, and he told me that wine is not easily understood at first blush.

“If you know nothing about wines and go into a wine shop and ask questions, you’re probably going to leave even more confused,” he said. “It’s not something that can be intellectualized. You have to taste it, experience it, year after year. You can learn how much wines can change from one town or village to the next. You can know a lot about Saint-Émilion and not know anything about a Saint-Julien. It just takes a lot of drinking.”

Walter’s path would not work for me. I am a very light drinker; I’ll never be able to drink enough wine to know it even as a casual acquaintance. I did, however, come to appreciate that one can learn the basics even as an outsider. I once took a wine tour of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Gigondas with an American friend and four Britons. Our guide, François, was wearing a baseball cap and vest with his company’s insignia. “I hope this day will be unforgettable,” he told us in English. Then he pressed a button on the dashboard of his van to play Nat King Cole singing “Unforgettable.” The visit was well-organized and ritualized: we arrived at each château; the iron gates opened; we were greeted by a smiling host and a big dog that we were not supposed to fear.

Then François taught us how to drink. We held our glasses up to the light to examine the wine’s “dress”—its intensity, clarity, and color. We swirled the wine to release its aroma and watch whether “legs” of liquid curved slowly enough down the side of the glass. We sniffed twice, first in sharp, short bursts to get acquainted, and then in deep, long breaths for a more profound understanding. Only then did we taste. We held the wine in our mouths for several seconds so that it could reveal its secrets and extend our pleasure. We rolled the liquid around with our tongues. Only then did we swallow, as slowly as possible. Still the act was not over. We chewed the residue lining our mouths for several seconds. We moved our empty glasses up and down and swirled them yet again, still hungry for a final sniff of contentment.

This was not at all like the instant gratification that comes with chugging shots. It was a ritual designed to prolong the moment. It became an intimate experience of pleasure sharing. “The best way to appreciate wine is to enjoy it in harmony,” Sanders had said. Now I knew that she meant in harmony with oneself and with others.

On a hot, sunlit day in June, I met Guy Savoy’s mother. Unadorned, unprogrammed, and unspoiled, Marie Savoy is proof that the seductive power of French cuisine is alive. She is in her eighties; her hair is gray and cut short. A life of hard work is traced in the deep lines of her face, and her body is sturdy. She wore a blue floral print dress covered by an apron.

When I asked her why she had decided to cook for a living, she did not say it was to help support the family or to have her own career. She used the same word her son had chosen to explain what drives him: “pleasure.” It was the pleasure that came every day from sharing her creations with her clients and watching them enjoy.

My visit to the Savoys started when Guy Savoy met me at a train station not far from Lyon and led me to his white Saab convertible. He was wearing a gray linen shirt, faded blue slacks, and tennis shoes and was not recognized by anyone in the station.

As we drove along a winding road, he showed me the France that had shaped him. In the town of Ruy, he took me to a small, sad-looking restaurant set on a hillside amid two-hundred-year-old plane trees. We could see Formica tables and plastic chairs from outside, but the restaurant was closed. This place, he said, had once been his mother’s
buvette
—a tiny refreshment bar and restaurant—attached to their modest home. Savoy’s Swiss-born father, Louis, the town’s gardener, had grown the fruits and vegetables for the restaurant. He had such a good eye that he could spot a morel mushroom poking through the soil hundreds of feet away.

“There was a huge terrace, and there were tables and flowers everywhere,” Savoy said. “My parents grew everything they needed. The first morels, the first cherries, the first ripe tomatoes—these were big events every year. Here I cooked my first omelets, my first trout, my first escargots.”

The subject changed to anticipation, the anticipation of the andouille sausage that we would eat at lunch at his parents’ house. “You like it, andouille? With potatoes from the garden?” he asked.

Andouille? That fat sausage filled with smoked pig stomach and intestines that can smell like parts of the body where you don’t want to go? I had been exposed to cuisine with odd animal body parts as a child. I was ready.

“
Bien sûr!
” I said. “I love it!”

As we drove through rolling hills of grapevines and corn, Savoy was eager to show and tell and smell: the scent of the newly cut grass, the building stones made round from the glaciers, the stillness of the lake, the backdrop of the mountains.

His parents, long retired, now live in a nondescript house with an adequate but by no means grand garden in the town of Les Abrets. Louis Savoy gave me a tour of his domain: beds of lettuce, carrots, peas, string beans, turnips, potatoes, onions, shallots, bordered by dahlias and marigolds.

The kitchen was small, old-fashioned, and dark, with a four-burner electric stove, a small oven, mismatched plates, and only a few knives and wooden spoons. There was neither a microwave nor a Cuisinart here. But the space clearly belonged to Marie Savoy. “I don’t know how you can do it—you really have to have talent to cook on this stove,” Guy Savoy lectured his mother, his voice tinged with exasperation as he struggled to sauté green peas in butter. A guest here, he had no right to treat her as he would his kitchen staff. But he was cooking, after all, and therefore unable to cede control.

“But it’s not bad!” his mother said in protest.

Everything had to be cooked to the right doneness and served at the right heat, so Savoy, his mother, and his father engaged in a three-way conversation of hurriedness and joyful confusion. Savoy told his mother the potatoes were ready. “Cut them!” she told him. He said no—they wouldn’t stay hot. He found a small wooden cutting board for the shallots but not a good knife. “A knife that cuts well!” he shouted to no one in particular, hoping, I guess, that one would magically appear. It did. He picked up a jar of his mother’s homemade hazelnut oil, screwed off the lid, and ordered me to sniff hard, just the way he had with the truffle at breakfast. The pale yellow liquid smelled of concentrated nuts, sugar, and fat.