I'll Drink To That Part 1

I'll drink to that: Beaujolais and the French peasant who made it the world's most popular wine.

by Rudolph Chelminski.

Foreword.

When I began researching this book, I was struck by the remarkably consistent-I would even say uniform-reaction by friends and acquaintances upon hearing that its subject was to be the Beaujolais: first the smile, then the complicit burst of laughter and one of those you-lucky-guy remarks to signify that my undertaking was certain to be fun, but somehow not quite serious. A whole world of predigested a.s.sumptions underlay this reaction. With the subject of wine enjoying an unprecedented prominence and prestige (attended by its inevitable dance steps of protocol and sn.o.bbery), the general conclusion was that I had chosen to write a book about a Ford instead of a Ferrari. Everyone knows Beaujolais, or thinks he does, and everyone has an opinion, one that can usually be expressed within a few seconds. This opinion-giving is often wildly erroneous, but it is unfailing. After all, who has not tossed down a gla.s.s of Beaujolais at one time or another in his life, and who has not read an article about this or that aspect of its singular career? The saga of Beaujolais Nouveau alone erupts in such a yearly blaze of publicity that it can scarcely be avoided. For universal name recognition, the only wine that can rival Beaujolais is Champagne.

The name Champagne doesn't elicit smiles and laughter, though, and neither do Bordeaux or Bourgogne-that's serious serious stuff. For that matter, just about any wine you can think of, whether it be from Alsace, Languedoc, Midi-Pyrenees, California, Australia, Chile or anywhere else, will be a.s.sessed with similar poker-faced gravity. Only Beaujolais gets the smile and projects this aura of easy familiarity. stuff. For that matter, just about any wine you can think of, whether it be from Alsace, Languedoc, Midi-Pyrenees, California, Australia, Chile or anywhere else, will be a.s.sessed with similar poker-faced gravity. Only Beaujolais gets the smile and projects this aura of easy familiarity.

But familiarity breeds contempt, as we all know, and Beaujolais has suffered more than its share of obloquy. This, of course, is the ransom of its success, but it is really quite extraordinary that a success and a notoriety of this degree should have come to a wine that represents only slightly more than 2 percent of France's total production and .05 percent worldwide. How it reached this point of celebrity is a story of a few turns of history's wheel, of a certain amount of luck and a certain amount of marketing skill, but mostly of a long background of unremitting drudgery: centuries of hard work poorly rewarded. It is also to a great extent the story of one man, a young peasant winegrower named Georges Duboeuf who at age eighteen revolted against an unfair, illogical distribution system run for the benefit of a dealers' cartel, and did it so well and so thoroughly that he rose to become the biggest dealer of all-but one of an entirely new style.

Beaujolais, then, is a double success story, the wine and the man, but does that make either worthy of being treated in full book length? After all, there are thousands of capitalists wealthier and more influential than Georges Duboeuf, and any number of Ferrari wines of greater prestige than Beaujolais. Naturally I answer an emphatic yes yes to the above question, because beyond the predictable angle of the underdog winning against the odds, the history of the Beaujolais reflects and explains a good deal about the French themselves, "this quick, talented, nervous, occasionally maddening but altogether admirable people" (I'm quoting myself here), among whom I have lived for more than forty years now. As for Georges Duboeuf, capitalism would have an infinitely better reputation today if all the world's Enrons, Tycos and WorldComs had been run by the likes of this model entrepreneur. to the above question, because beyond the predictable angle of the underdog winning against the odds, the history of the Beaujolais reflects and explains a good deal about the French themselves, "this quick, talented, nervous, occasionally maddening but altogether admirable people" (I'm quoting myself here), among whom I have lived for more than forty years now. As for Georges Duboeuf, capitalism would have an infinitely better reputation today if all the world's Enrons, Tycos and WorldComs had been run by the likes of this model entrepreneur.

More than any other factor, the sudden worldwide prominence that came to the wines of the Beaujolais is owed to Duboeuf. He's a very interestingcase, one of those rare persons inhabited by a mysterious kind of driving force that sets certain individuals apart from the rest, causing them to achieve what others don't even think about venturing. We all come across a few of them in the course of a lifetime, and can never quite define what that force is or why it should be there, but it is always clear that it is is there: he or she is simply different. Georges Duboeuf's rise from modest station to wealth, repute and influence is like the plot of a Thomas Hardy novel, and it is no accident that this rise coincided exactly with the progress of the fortunes of the Beaujolais country and its wines. there: he or she is simply different. Georges Duboeuf's rise from modest station to wealth, repute and influence is like the plot of a Thomas Hardy novel, and it is no accident that this rise coincided exactly with the progress of the fortunes of the Beaujolais country and its wines.

For the sake of form, let me establish something right away, lest I be accused of partiality: I count Georges Duboeuf as a friend. I am partial. I am partial to Georges because of his admirable personal qualities-integrity, sincerity, constancy-and for having served as my initiator and guide to the Beaujolais. He generously shared with me his unparalleled knowledge of and love for the country, its people and, of course, its wines, allowing me to partake at least modestly of that knowledge. In his company I explored the back hills, the villages and hamlets and vineyards, and through him I had the luck to become acquainted with the extraordinary, colorful and always engaging human fauna that peoples this beautiful little slice of the French countryside.

Because my expeditions with Duboeuf were not mere tourism. Georges introduced me to an entire gallery of the dramatis personae of the Beaujolais. A short selection would have to begin with the vigneron (winemaker) Louis Brechard, known everywhere by the sobriquet "Papa," sage and folk historian of the Beaujolais, a man who carried his wisdom all the way to parliament in Paris when he was elected deputy in 1958. Count Louis Durieux de Lacarelle, owner of the biggest single estate in the Beaujolais, presides over his vines, his wine cellar and his lunch table with the melancholy bonhomie of the aristocrat who has seen just about all the world has to offer and, everything considered, prefers his little chateau in the Beaujolais-Villages country of Saint-etienne-des-Oullieres, where he can follow Voltaire's advice and cultivate his garden in peace. Gerard Canard and Michel Brun were and are pa.s.sionately devoted professionals of promotion who cheerfully spent their lives spreading the Beaujolais gospel around the globe. (Brun carries his regional loyalty to the point of awarding himself the e-mail address of Michelgamay, appropriating the name of the Beaujolais grape as his personal ident.i.ty.) Edward Steeves is a poetically inclined Yankee scholar from Boston, a rare and true gent who fell so deeply in love with the wine, the land and the people of the Beaujolais that he settled there, married, produced three Franco-American children and became boss of an important wine distribution house. He will learnedly expatiate at the drop of a hat, in French, English, Latin or Greek, on the relative virtues of Chiroubles, say, as compared to Saint-Amour, Regnie or Chenas, and he does it so well that he is in constant demand as a keynote speaker who politely and convincingly informs the natives about their own wines. Marcel Laplanche and Claude Beroujon, winemakers of the old school, can recite from memory the exact weather conditions of any year from about 1930 onward, how the wine tasted and what price it fetched. My friend Marcel Pariaud is so stricken with the peasant's reluctance to throw anything usable away that at last count he owned seven tractors, none less than forty years old. ("But they all work!" he protests when I josh him about it.) In spite of this rich collection of mechanical antiquity, though, he prefers to do his plowing behind Hermine, his indolent Comtoise workhorse. With her cooperation, Marcel wrings from the soil in and around the village of Lancie a Beaujolais and a Morgon so perfect that you immediately understand why the people of the region stay away from water. And of course there was everybody's favorite, Rene Besson, "Bobosse" the charcutier charcutier, sausage maker to kings, the joy and sorrow of the Beaujolais-First-Cla.s.s Drunkard, as he liked to qualify himself, the laughing, overwhelmingly generous lover of life and good companions.h.i.+p over a shared gla.s.s or two or ten, Falstaff to Duboeuf's Prince Hal. Bobosse refused to accept that our short mortal route was but a vale of tears, and he more or less drank himself to death by enjoying the ride too much. Naturally it is impossible to defend irresponsible behavior of this sort in a rational world, but it wasn't rationality that guided Bobosse's life. Where drinking was concerned, he was an artiste artiste, and his creativity in expressing his art was Platonic-at a low-flying level, to be sure, but Platonic all the same: divine madness. Everyone knows it must be banned from the city of the sensible, but, lord, how graciously he carried it off.

Denizens of the Beaujolais country like these bear little resemblance to the edgy, ill-tempered Parisians through whom tourists often form lasting opinions of the French national character. One taxi ride from Charles de Gaulle Airport to the center of the capital can be enough to set a negative impression into stone, and that's a shame, because the impressions would be utterly different if these same visitors ever took the time to pa.s.s by way of the Beaujolais country. There they would be able to appreciate how inaccurate the tired old stereotypes can be. Contrary to the popular (and largely Anglo-Saxon) legend of Latin hedonism, three-hour lunches and nonstop s.e.xual dalliance, the French are an extremely industrious and hardworking nation with a long tradition of perfectionism in artisan craftsmans.h.i.+p, and few crafts can represent this tradition-vibrant today still-better than that of the individual peasant winegrower.

Beaujolais is the smallholder wine country par excellence. Unlike their wealthy Burgundy and Bordeaux cousins who specialized in winemaking very early in their history, the peasants of the Beaujolais were until quite recent times primarily subsistence farmers who grew grain and tended animals to survive while making wine as an aleatory cash crop. Theirs was a punis.h.i.+ng, penurious existence, and most of them remained stuck in anonymous poverty until after the Second World War. That very poverty and relative humbleness of condition, though, made them solid representatives of la France profonde la France profonde, the obscure rural ma.s.ses at the country's heart, whose life experience and peasant wisdom formed much of the national character as it stands today.

The wine that these and other growers produced has been central to French civilization ever since the Romans backed off and the Gauls took their own history in hand. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that France came to be defined by wine, considering its deep religious symbolism, the stubborn belief in its strength-giving medicinal qualities and, of course, the unique conditions of soil and climate for turning out the enormous palette of wine varieties that made France the world reference in this ancient and still somewhat mysterious art.

Tasting wine, a.n.a.lyzing it and buying it for investment are now fas.h.i.+onable in most of the world's wealthier nations, but as a rule the movement is like a pastime or hobby and limited to the cultured bourgeoisie of the great urban centers. In France, wine is a daily routine that cuts across cla.s.ses like potato chips and beer in the States. Certainly consumption levels have dropped from the dizzying levels of previous years-the French are becoming reasonable-but wine is no less an everyday part of life, as much a ba.n.a.lity as watching the news on television. France would not be France without its wine, and the old traditions are pa.s.sed on as a matter of course. When a baby is born, Papa still dips his finger into his celebratory gla.s.s of Champagne and gives the little newcomer a taste. Does that initiate a lifetime habit? I don't know, but after enough years of living in the midst of this civilization I felt constrained to do it myself, even though both my kids are American, born of American parents in the American Hospital in Paris.

At the emba.s.sy, the staff calls this sort of behavior "going native," and I suppose they're right. There's an ever so slight sniff of disdain behind that expression, but for me it was impossible not to fall under the charm of the mult.i.tudinous aspects of the wine culture here, beginning with the inevitable epiphany of the first truly Big Bottle (for the record, a well-named Meursault-Charmes of the 1964 vintage). Finding a Meursault seductive is no triumph, of course (approximately equivalent to finding Catherine Deneuve or Juliette Binoche seductive), but it is an excellent way to instill a lifelong respect for the skill of the French vigneron community. Although Beaujolais is a "lesser" wine than the great Burgundies, the devotion that its best artisans bring to their craft is no less impressive. A nation that approaches its wines as knowledgeably as this one can be counted on to respect it and honor it at all levels and in all circ.u.mstances, and the mention of my first bottle of Meursault inescapably brings to mind the finest example I have ever heard of this vinous respect and honor. It was delivered by Pere Baroillot, who might be termed the unofficial and unbeatified patron saint of French gourmets.

Father Raymond Baroillot is long gone now, but in a single moment of inspired candor a few decades ago, he proved himself worthy of an immortal place in the hearts of wine lovers everywhere. It seems clear that a heavenly power had traced a mission for this wispy, soft-spoken Catholic priest to evangelize the world of wine and food. As a young cure before the war, he had been a.s.signed to take over the parish of Meursault, and he applied himself with such diligence that over the following years he acquired a quasi-professional nose and palate for appreciating the finest Burgundies. Transferred from this dream a.s.signment to the much larger and much less distinguished city of Roanne, he might have a.s.sumed his gourmet tour was finished, but as luck had it his sphere of responsibility in Roanne included the area around the railroad station-exactly opposite which sat Troisgros, one of the world's greatest restaurants, directed by Jean-Baptiste Troisgros, an uprooted Burgundian like himself. Father Baroillot watched in admiration as Jean-Baptiste's sons Jean and Pierre Troisgros cooked their way to three Michelin stars. He also ate in admiration because, as confessor, confidant and spiritual advisor to the famous cooking clan, he enjoyed a regular seat at the family dinner table. Before long, his knowledge of gastronomy equaled that of oenology. After Jean-Baptiste died, Jean and Pierre naturally called upon the priest to celebrate a private ma.s.s for the departed patriarch. The entire family was present when, at the moment of Consecration, cradling the holy chalice of wine in his hands, he caught himself, turned 180 degrees and ad-libbed a brief bit of professional information for the brothers: "It's a little aligote from Colin," he said, before giving it a swirl, a sniff and a taste, and then getting on with the rest of the proceedings.

The story would have been just right for my purposes if Father Baroillot had been using Beaujolais instead of aligote, but you can't always have everything exactly the way you want it. Even so, there's a real connection here to the subject of this book, an almost eerily fitting one, because half a century earlier a French author named Gabriel Chevallier had antic.i.p.ated Father Baroillot's life story with uncanny accuracy when he penned the satirical novel Clochemerle. Clochemerle. By inventing the Abbe Augustin Ponosse, saintly of demeanor and scarlet of nose, parish priest of a little village in the Beaujolais-Villages area, he proved conclusively that, in France, anyway, life is often called upon to imitate art. Read on. By inventing the Abbe Augustin Ponosse, saintly of demeanor and scarlet of nose, parish priest of a little village in the Beaujolais-Villages area, he proved conclusively that, in France, anyway, life is often called upon to imitate art. Read on.

I.

WHAT A GLa.s.s OF WINE REPRESENTS.

Beaming, voluble, robust as a workhorse, fairly erupting with energy and good cheer as he performed surgery on his supper with his pocket knife, Marcel sat at the head of a long rectangular plank table supported on sawhorses, presiding over an improbably diverse collection of youth, most of them girls barely out of their teens, med students from Brittany. A second table, same size and parallel to his but over against the other wall, was occupied entirely by men-older, bulkier and considerably noisier than the girls. Nearly forty strong, the harvesting crew filled the little room next to the kitchen with such an ear-shattering din that everyone had to shout to be heard, which of course made the clamor only worse. Never mind: there was some serious chowing down to be attended to, because there was nothing like a twelve-hour day in the vineyards to put an edge on the appet.i.te. After veloute de legumes veloute de legumes, peasant soup with vegetables from her own garden, Nathalie had delivered four enormous platters of her own poule au riz poule au riz, chicken and rice in cream sauce, cooked up that afternoon on her industrial-sized stove. Cheeses would come after that, and then a selection of Nathalie's tarts and fruit preserves. Pretty soon, once they'd sated their hunger and drunk enough of Marcel's wine, the men would be singing their bawdy songs again, led as usual by Choucroute the Alsatian and Zorro from Toulouse. That was how it always went in the evening.

Glancing down the table, Marcel spotted something amiss: L'ecrivain, the scholarly, ginger-haired young German from Leipzig who also spoke Russian and English and who was always lecturing the girls about Rostand, Proust and Balzac, hadn't finished his chicken leg. Marcel surged to his feet, made a lunge with his fork and spirited the spurned morsel back to his plate at the head of the table. Eyelids squinched down to a crack with epicurean pleasure behind his steel-rimmed gla.s.ses, he grasped it in viselike fists and finished it off as neatly as a cat.

Things were going very nicely, even better than he had expected. The harvest was nearly all in, the grapes were healthy and the rain that had been falling all over the country had miraculously spared the regions between Macon and Lyon. The new vintage was going to be fine. It was a good time for the Beaujolais.

It was for Marcel Pariaud, at any rate. Sixty-two years of age at the time of this harvest, looking a dozen less than that and charged with the vigor and optimism of a twenty-year-old, he was already in his fortieth consecutive year as an independent wine grower, or vigneron. He had reason for his good spirits, because he had prospered over those four decades-as, indeed, the whole of the Beaujolais had prospered. (And before we go any further, please note the "the" here. It underlines a point that many people do not realize: Beaujolais is a wine, to be sure, but more than that, it is this place place, an irregular little rectangle of land measuring roughly sixty by fifteen kilometers, framed to the south by Lyon, to the north by Macon, and named after the old regional capital of Beaujeu. In terms of geography, "Beaujolais" simply signifies the land lying around Beaujeu, a little ribbon of a town folded into a cleft between hills of chalky clay where grapes can thrive in the sunlight. During several prime daylight hours the abrupt slopes above Beaujeu block the sun from reaching all the way to the bottom of the cleft where the river Ardieres flows. The soil down there is no good for grapes anyway, so that's where they stuck the town. Logical: care for the wine always comes first in the Beaujolais.) I like to think of Marcel as the ideal model of the yeoman citizenry of this stunningly beautiful and still little known corner of France, because wine defines the Beaujolais country the way information technology defines Silicon Valley, and Marcel Pariaud makes it as responsibly and pa.s.sionately (and deliciously) as any man I know. I admire him because his ebullient good humor never fails him, because no matter how busy he is he will always take the time to educate the ignorant and explain the subtleties of the ever-s.h.i.+fting art of vinification by which the boring old caterpillar called grape juice is trans.m.u.ted into the gorgeous b.u.t.terfly called wine, and because in a modern world increasingly dominated by abstractions and virtuality-industries of service rather than creation, economic sleight of hand and "outsourcings," dehumanized manipulations that pluck vast amounts of money apparently from thin air via distant computer keystrokes-it is wonderfully refres.h.i.+ng to discover an embodiment of traditional old ways and virtues. Here is one honest man who built a modest but respectable prosperity for himself and his wife by the sweat of his brow and the calluses of his hands, a man who had truly earned every franc and euro that came to his pockets and who richly deserved the retirement he was beginning to contemplate on that September evening of 2006 as he chomped on his secondhand chicken leg. Reaching his present point of relative financial comfort had been anything but easy, but ease has never been Marcel's strong suit. We'll be seeing more about that, and about Marcel himself, in later pages.

I was about to write that it is difficult to imagine anyone who had worked as hard all his life as Marcel Pariaud, but that wouldn't have been quite right, because there was another one quite nearby, living just down the road hardly more than a mile away, in the neighboring village of Romaneche-Thorins. He was a longtime acquaintance of mine, a man who was quite unlike Marcel but essentially similar, the other side of the same coin. By the time Zorro and Choucroute had begun bellowing their postprandial ditties that evening, this other one had already downed a quick bite and returned to his office to face the mountain of papers on his desk. There were e-mails to answer, phone calls to make, texts to write, reports to read, doc.u.ments to sign: too much to do. It was past eleven when he finally went home, but next morning he would be up at four-thirty, just like the day before. Ah la la Ah la la he would be muttering, this is no way to live. But he had been living exactly that way for more than fifty years. he would be muttering, this is no way to live. But he had been living exactly that way for more than fifty years.

His name was Georges Duboeuf, and if on the surface everything about him and Marcel seemed different-ant.i.thetical, even-the two men had lot more in common than appearances suggested. Certainly the contrast of physical appearances was striking. Lean, reserved and ascetic where Marcel was hearty, muscular, loquacious and outgoing, Duboeuf chose his words with painstaking care, was given to periods of introspective silence and, poker-faced, spoke in a voice so softly modulated that it could barely nudge a decibel gauge beyond whisper level. Joyous and happy to share his joy, Marcel never stopped smiling and never shut up. The environment at Marcel's place in the little village of Lancie bespoke the true, hands-on, do-it-yourself rural artisan, a little one-man hodgepodge of old equipment and old ways that functioned smoothly only because he had the secret of how to keep it all going. By contrast, the workplace that Georges Duboeuf had built up over the years was enormous: a computerized, high-tech, multifaceted plant of glistening stainless steel and virginal white buildings, one that required 130 or so employees to keep it functioning properly. Marcel was the quintessential small-time winemaker. The vineyards he tended had never measured more than twelve hectares, or about thirty acres, the greater part of it on rented land, and by 2006 he had wound his operation down to his own land, a mere 4.5 hectares. Duboeuf was big-time, a major wine dealer, or negociant negociant-the negociant of the Beaujolais, far and away the biggest and most important of them all-a businessman of worldwide scope who year in and year out sold 30 million bottles or more under his label. In fact he was, by the count of bottles sold (more than 7 million a year), the number one exporter of French wines to the United States. of the Beaujolais, far and away the biggest and most important of them all-a businessman of worldwide scope who year in and year out sold 30 million bottles or more under his label. In fact he was, by the count of bottles sold (more than 7 million a year), the number one exporter of French wines to the United States.

The rich international star of commerce and the obscure peasant did not exactly frequent each other-their life contexts were different-but each knew and respected the other's work. If the yard behind Marcel's vinifying and storage sheds was littered with old equipment rusting in the gra.s.s, it only meant that the consumer society had not yet arrived at his doorstep. He was inhabited by the peasant's ancient horror of throwing away anything for which he might conceivably find a future use: he was thrifty. But his rows of vines were as clean and perfectly tended as human sweat could make them, and the wine he made in the old wooden vats inside the big vinifying shed that he had built with his own two hands was the perfect, honest expression of the genius of the gamay grape. If Duboeuf drove a fancy Audi, wore expensive shoes and slung a cashmere sweater over his bony shoulders, Marcel knew that he, too, had been born to the peasantry and had not forgotten it. Each man, within the orbit of his making, was equally estimable. It would be hard to find better incarnations than these two-the winemaker and the wine seller-of the soul and the spirit of the Beaujolais. They represent the forces that brought Beaujolais, against all odds and against the established wisdom of centuries of wine sn.o.bbery, to the enviable position it enjoys today as the world's best-known and most popular red wine. There can hardly be a language anywhere in which those three euphonious, easily p.r.o.nounced syllables "bo-jo-lay" do not trip lightly off the tongue, or a large city (at least in those parts of the world that do not criminalize a touch of the grape) where the wines of that same name do not enjoy the same kind of popularity as back home in France. Worldwide, there is nothing to rival Beaujolais for name recognition save Champagne.

The story of how Beaujolais reached its present prominence is worth a look because it encapsulates so much not only about the wine itself but also about France and the French themselves: this quick, talented, nervous, occasionally maddening but altogether admirable people.

We have to go back a while to get to the start of the story-say, 50 million years, give or take a few million here or there-to when something called the Great Alpine Folding occurred. Under the colossal pressures of this tectonic s.h.i.+fting, the Alps were born, and then the earth's crust gave a secondary shrug as a kind of afterthought, splitting the Ma.s.sifCentral, the high ground in the middle of present-day France, into a series of rocky wrinkles. The easternmost of these wrinkles ended at a plain where the River Saone ambles peaceably along today, leaving a soil heavily granitic in its northern stretches and mostly limestone and clay in the south. Drivers working their way toward Paris from the Mediterranean today can see the result, just a few miles north of Lyon, as clearly as if the process had been laid out on a demonstration board. After the autoroute autoroute tollgate at Villefranche, the terrain to the right lies flat all the way to the Saone and beyond, interspersed with woods and pastures, and given over to farming and light industry. To the left, though, a dramatically different view appears through the haze: a patchwork of steep, high hills marching off to the horizon in the west- tollgate at Villefranche, the terrain to the right lies flat all the way to the Saone and beyond, interspersed with woods and pastures, and given over to farming and light industry. To the left, though, a dramatically different view appears through the haze: a patchwork of steep, high hills marching off to the horizon in the west-monts is the very handy French word for them, for which there's no proper equivalent in English. It means something more serious than a hill, but not just yet a mountain. Until quite recently, this modest portion of upheaved land was just another obscure corner of France's richly varied countryside, little known and little valued beyond its immediate vicinity. is the very handy French word for them, for which there's no proper equivalent in English. It means something more serious than a hill, but not just yet a mountain. Until quite recently, this modest portion of upheaved land was just another obscure corner of France's richly varied countryside, little known and little valued beyond its immediate vicinity. Les monts du Beaujolais Les monts du Beaujolais the hills are called. the hills are called.

Geographically remote from the main centers of economic activity, the choppy hillsides of the Beaujolais could, until recent postwar times, have been compared to certain parts of Appalachia. Hunched together in their little villages of yellow stone roofed with rounded Roman tiles, the natives had always gazed down upon the plain of the Saone- today as yesterday France's princ.i.p.al north-south pa.s.sage-with conflicting emotions. A natural interest in the commerce and novelty that the highway might bring was overlaid with a certain wariness of outsiders, bred no doubt by atavistic memories of the many foreign invasions that their lush, beautiful country had suffered through history. Nor were all of their own fellow citizens to be entirely trusted, either, and least of all the rich or powerful among them, because these hill dwellers were poor themselves-always had been and, it seemed, always would be-and the rich and powerful had a disagreeable historical penchant for exploiting the poor.

I set foot in the region for the very first time in 1965. Strictly speaking, the place where I landed that afternoon was not actually in the Beaujolais, but merely adjacent to it. There is a definite connection, though-I will even say a significant one-between the story of Beaujolais and the town called Thoissey, where I stopped for lunch. This little community of not quite fifteen hundred inhabitants sits on the plain at the base of les monts du Beaujolais les monts du Beaujolais just east of the Saone and, as nearly as I can tell, has never had anything particular to distinguish it but one: the country inn called Le Chapon Fin. In its time, it was one of the most famous provincial restaurants in France, and its owner, Paul Blanc, enjoyed an esteem among his fellow chefs fully equal to that of media stars like Fernand Point in Vienne, Andre Pic in Valence and Alexandre Dumaine in Saulieu, the old holy trinity of French provincial gastronomy. Perhaps because of Blanc's bluff, straight-talking manner and his refusal to dandify his decor, Le Chapon Fin never rose above two stars in the Michelin Guide, but by general agreement its food was easily worth three. just east of the Saone and, as nearly as I can tell, has never had anything particular to distinguish it but one: the country inn called Le Chapon Fin. In its time, it was one of the most famous provincial restaurants in France, and its owner, Paul Blanc, enjoyed an esteem among his fellow chefs fully equal to that of media stars like Fernand Point in Vienne, Andre Pic in Valence and Alexandre Dumaine in Saulieu, the old holy trinity of French provincial gastronomy. Perhaps because of Blanc's bluff, straight-talking manner and his refusal to dandify his decor, Le Chapon Fin never rose above two stars in the Michelin Guide, but by general agreement its food was easily worth three.

Paul Blanc had inherited patriarchal ascendancy over a remarkable cooking clan that continues to dazzle gourmets today. He was the grandson of Elisa Blanc, who had taken over a village inn that her mother-in-law, Antoinette, had founded in 1872 in the nearby town of Vonnas, between Macon and Bourg-en-Bresse. Elisa continued Antoinette's style of cooking-perfect execution of simple country dishes prepared with all the best local ingredients-and did it so well that the restaurant, now baptized Auberge de la Mere Blanc, became a famous stopping point for hungry diners from Lyon and travelers en route to Switzerland. Elisa won her first Michelin star in 1929 and then a second in 1931, while somehow finding the time to raise two sons. Her first, Jean, became a wholesale wine and soft drinks dealer, while Paul trekked off to Thoissey, opened Le Chapon Fin and soon made it as famous as his mother's place.

I was totally ignorant of this glorious family tradition when I came to Thoissey in 1965. All I knew was that it was lunchtime, I was hungry, and I was on the N. 6 main road north of Lyon, en route to Paris. The Michelin Guide informed me that a nearby place called Le Chapon Fin had two stars, so I hung a right and headed expeditiously in direction of Thoissey.

My lunch there was a curious experience. Frankly, I wasn't entirely satisfied with the meal. The food was quite good, of course, but I had not expected the mob scene that I encountered when I got there. Every seat in the house was taken, and I managed to find a place only in a distant corner of the terrace. The service was slow, and I was irritated by the long wait. I was younger then, much less experienced in matters French and certainly less patient than I have since learned to be in the presence of serious cuisine. I had not taken into account what should have been obvious: it was August, France's great month for vacationing en ma.s.se; it was Sunday, the consecrated day for a proper lunch with the family; and everyone else on the road had also seen those two Michelin stars for Le Chapon Fin.

In the light of the heroic efforts that Paul Blanc and his brigade were expending in their overheated kitchen to get the mob fed, I can now see that my youthful irritation was both misplaced and self-indulgent, but it changed to something like beat.i.tude when my wine order was delivered to the table. Working on the trusty old precept that it is always a good idea to stick with the nearest local wines, I had ordered a simple pitcher of generic Beaujolais, the least expensive choice on the list. I was expecting nothing much as I poured myself the first gla.s.s, but when I tasted it my grumpy palate was suddenly greeted with an explosive burst of fruit and flowers.

What was that: raspberries, strawberries, currants? And violets, maybe? I couldn't quite tell, but I knew that I liked it a lot. I stuck my nose into the gla.s.s, took a long sniff, tasted again just to be sure. Everything from my first mouthful was still present and maybe even more, too, if only I had the skill to seek it all out. It was one of the finest moments of gastronomic surprise I had ever enjoyed, and a cheap one to boot. Getting up to leave after lunch, I made a point of approaching Juliette Blanc, the great chef's wife, who was naturally in charge of everything that happened at Le Chapon Fin outside of Paul's kitchen. Wherever, I asked her, did you find such a wonderful Beaujolais to serve in such a plain pitcher for so little money?

"Oh, that's Duboeuf," she replied, in the tone of one stating what ought to have been obvious to anyone but a hick. The name meant nothing to me.

Brute luck, it turned out, had brought me to the very place where, a decade and a half earlier, the eighteen-year-old peasant named Georges Duboeuf had made his first sale. I would be hearing a lot more about this extraordinary character in the following years. So would everyone else.

Five more years pa.s.sed before I ventured into that area again. Beaujolais had become progressively more popular by the early seventies, and the notoriety of Duboeuf was no longer limited to wine professionals and a limited number of insiders. Things were shaping up nicely as the Beaujolais cantered along with the rest of France into les trente glorieuses les trente glorieuses, the thirty years of economic boom that saw the country heave itself up from the shame and penury of defeat and the wartime German occupation to become a rich and powerful leader of Europe, showing the way to whatever bright future the Common Market might promise. In those happy days, France was still the uncontested center of the wine world, the the reference for anyone who knew anything about or cared about that miraculous procedure by which the hand of man persuades grape juice to forsake its natural route toward vinegar and detour over into an infinitely more desirable, drinkable alternative. More wine was being produced in France than anywhere else in the world; the natives drank more of it per head (about 120 liters a year, down from 150 in the thirsty fifties, with babies, kids, centenarians, cops, nuns and teetotalers all factored into that impressive figure) than any other population, and the export market, where demand still well exceeded supply, was riding a seemingly permanent upward curve. In the Beaujolais country, some five thousand peasant winemakers were tending individual vineyards, pitching in to the national average by producing a yearly average of a million hectoliters reference for anyone who knew anything about or cared about that miraculous procedure by which the hand of man persuades grape juice to forsake its natural route toward vinegar and detour over into an infinitely more desirable, drinkable alternative. More wine was being produced in France than anywhere else in the world; the natives drank more of it per head (about 120 liters a year, down from 150 in the thirsty fifties, with babies, kids, centenarians, cops, nuns and teetotalers all factored into that impressive figure) than any other population, and the export market, where demand still well exceeded supply, was riding a seemingly permanent upward curve. In the Beaujolais country, some five thousand peasant winemakers were tending individual vineyards, pitching in to the national average by producing a yearly average of a million hectoliters1 of the twelve different wines gathered under the Beaujolais label: generic Beaujolais; Beaujolais-Villages; and the ten rarer and more expensive of the twelve different wines gathered under the Beaujolais label: generic Beaujolais; Beaujolais-Villages; and the ten rarer and more expensive crus crus (growths) of Brouilly, Cote de Brouilly, Chenas, Chiroubles, Fleurie, Julienas, Morgon, Moulin-a-Vent, Regnie and Saint-Amour. Each one had its own character and its own clientele-the muscle of Morgon, the elegance of Fleurie, the depth of Moulin-a-Vent-but at the same time a very interesting new phenomenon was gaining strength from year to year: the wine called Beaujolais Nouveau was on the verge of becoming an international craze. (growths) of Brouilly, Cote de Brouilly, Chenas, Chiroubles, Fleurie, Julienas, Morgon, Moulin-a-Vent, Regnie and Saint-Amour. Each one had its own character and its own clientele-the muscle of Morgon, the elegance of Fleurie, the depth of Moulin-a-Vent-but at the same time a very interesting new phenomenon was gaining strength from year to year: the wine called Beaujolais Nouveau was on the verge of becoming an international craze.

Things were looking good for the Beaujolais. It was in this atmosphere of heady optimism that I came back for what was my real introduction to the region. Wine and I were good friends by then, and I was still in those fearless, pack-it-away days of youth when you think you can get away with anything, and occasionally do. In the event, I didn't get away with it, not this time. It was in the village called Julienas that I made the first of a long succession of overconfident missteps Beaujolais-style, ignorant as I was of the disconcerting fact that the natives enjoy nothing more than testing visitors with as much wine as they can get into them.

I could scarcely have chosen a better place for my initiation, because by itself Julienas encapsulated the entire sweep of Beaujolais history. The name harks straight back to Julius Caesar himself, conqueror of the Gauls. He wasn't really what you could call an endearing sort of chap: his brand of pacification was little short of genocidal, and he took pleasure in reporting back to Rome on how he had put entire populations to the sword, regardless of age, gender or s.e.xual orientation. Even so, his memory must still be honored in France today, because it was his legionnaires, retiring after hard years of service to imperialism, who taught the surviving natives how to make wine-infinitely preferable to cervoise, cervoise, the rough beer with which they had been quenching their thirst until then. Intermarriage with these Roman settlers and centuries of a.s.similation formed the Beaujolais character such as it is today: tough, stubbornly attached to the soil and the vine, a tad suspicious of outsiders at first view, but jolly and overwhelmingly welcoming once the ice has been broken. This little town's founders named their settlement after their boss Julius, planted their vines and never looked back from winemaking. the rough beer with which they had been quenching their thirst until then. Intermarriage with these Roman settlers and centuries of a.s.similation formed the Beaujolais character such as it is today: tough, stubbornly attached to the soil and the vine, a tad suspicious of outsiders at first view, but jolly and overwhelmingly welcoming once the ice has been broken. This little town's founders named their settlement after their boss Julius, planted their vines and never looked back from winemaking.

Returning northward on a long drive from Spain, my wife and I had veered off the main road into the Beaujolais country in company with our friend Pierre Boulat, one of France's top photographers and a man who knew his way around. There was a pretty good little restaurant in Julienas, said Pierre, and we rolled into town on a surprisingly balmy October evening. Suddenly the long drudgery of our drive morphed into a wine lover's dream, signaled by an auspicious set of road signs at the picture-postcard main square: Saint-Amour and Saint-Verand to the north of us, Jullie to the west, Chenas, Fleurie and Chiroubles to the south. Down to the left of the bakery near the marketplace, the spire of a sixteenth-century church soared, as it should in all picture-postcard situations, high over the town. Years later, when I had grown to know Julienas on more intimate terms, I learned that the regional diocese had deconsecrated the church 1868 and sold it to a local notable, a vigneron, of course, who had promptly put its cool stone embrace to practical use as a chai chai, a wine storage shed. Further progress came in 1954, when a wine dealer, restaurateur and local character named Victor Peyret transformed the church's elegant choir into a caveau caveau (wine-tasting cellar), complete with vineyard scenes on the stained gla.s.s windows and baccha.n.a.lian frescoes on the walls. The church is a drinking place today still, the town's official (wine-tasting cellar), complete with vineyard scenes on the stained gla.s.s windows and baccha.n.a.lian frescoes on the walls. The church is a drinking place today still, the town's official caveau caveau, signaled as such in books, posters and tourism leaflets. It is always just a bit disconcerting to pa.s.s under its portal and enter its stony interior only to discover a bar.

Presently we were seated in the dining room of a quirky little bistro called Chez La Rose, with a bottle of Julienas, cool and fresh from the cellar, standing before us and andouillettes grillees andouillettes grillees, bathed in a reduction of white wine and chopped shallots, ordered and on the way. On the way for me and Pierre, that is. My wife sighed, ordered a civilized roast chicken and muttered insults about savages capable of making a meal out of intestine sausage.

The table next to us was occupied by a curious pair of gents: a short, agitated little man who emitted a steady stream of wisecracking chatter and a ma.s.sive character, a head taller, with hands like grappling hooks, who bore a vague but still disquieting resemblance to Boris Karloff as Dr. Frankenstein's monster. The first wore coat and tie, the second blue workman's overalls.

Gradually, as the meal drew on, little sparks, little presages of dialogue, grew between the two tables. This was unusual, because the French, when dining, are usually sensible enough to concentrate on the appreciation of what they are eating, and courteous enough to leave s.p.a.ce between themselves and those around them. But on that evening a voice perhaps too loud, a comment or two overheard, an accent unmistakably not French-whatever it was-conspired to set off a mutual jos.h.i.+ng that was, if not aggressive, at least challenging in some unclear way. A few bottles of wine undoubtedly did their part, too. The upshot was that in the course of the dialogue they learned that Pierre and I were of the journalistic sort. The shorter man introduced himself as Pierre Martray, regisseur regisseur (manager) of Chateau de la Chaize; he and his cellar master were dining at Chez La Rose to celebrate the latter's birthday. By the time we were tucking into a cheese platter (some absolutely remarkable goat's milk creations), it somehow became established that we, the interloping outsiders, would be forever marked in history as the merest of churls and (manager) of Chateau de la Chaize; he and his cellar master were dining at Chez La Rose to celebrate the latter's birthday. By the time we were tucking into a cheese platter (some absolutely remarkable goat's milk creations), it somehow became established that we, the interloping outsiders, would be forever marked in history as the merest of churls and poules mouillees poules mouillees (wet hens) if we did not accompany them forthwith to the chateau to toast the birthday and gain an appreciation of different years and different batches of wine from different sections of its vineyard. (wet hens) if we did not accompany them forthwith to the chateau to toast the birthday and gain an appreciation of different years and different batches of wine from different sections of its vineyard.

Well, now. Chateau de la Chaize is a big, prestigious name, known around the world. It is one of the brightest stars of the Brouilly growth, and at nearly 250 acres its vineyard is one of the region's largest single holdings. Its enormous vaulted cellar, considerably greater in length than a football field, is the longest in the Beaujolais, and is officially cla.s.sified as a French historical monument. This was, in short, a serious reference, and Martray's proposition was a serious one that we would have been remiss to neglect.

We accepted. Midnight had come and gone by the time we left the restaurant, and the hostilities commenced without delay. At the wheel of his powerful German car, Pierre found to his dismay that he was hard put to keep up with Martray, who shot away from Julienas in nothing better than a boxy, battered old Renault van that looked like an automotive caricature of itself. But he knew by heart every curve and b.u.mp in the roads winding through the vineyards back to the Brouilly hills, and he negotiated them at breakneck speed. The stock-car race that ensued was pure foolishness, of course, but on we roared after him, up hill and down dale, Pierre manically intent on not losing sight of the shaky tail-lights disappearing around the next bend, and it was probably just as well that in the dark of night we were unable to see just how precipitous were the slopes on either side of us. We arrived at the chateau with an apocalyptic clamor of brakes, and Martray led us without delay down into his beautiful subterranean domain. Tasting gla.s.ses in hand, we were soon treading the cellar's central alleyway of dank clay, preceded at a shambling, languorous pace by our very own Frankenstein, a syringe-like gla.s.s pipette in hand. Twin rows of enormous wooden tuns on either side of us stretched away in perfect parallax to a dimly perceived conclusion somewhere at the far end of the ill-lit tunnel. Not even bothering with a ladder, the cellar master clambered skillfully up the supporting framework of one of the first tuns, removed the bung on top, inserted the pipette into the hole and drew forth a column of glistening, ruby red liquid. He nodded at us, and we held out our gla.s.ses. He lifted his thumb from the little orifice on top of the pipette, and atmospheric pressure did the rest: before you could say Jacques Robinson, a crimson stream shot out to fill our gla.s.ses.

I don't know how many of that endless array of tuns we drank from that night, but I do remember that there was a perfectly plausible oenological reason for every one of them-a different year, a younger or older set of vines, a different parcelle parcelle of the vineyard and so forth-that our hosts watched intently to be certain that we drank every drop, and that we ended the visit in Martray's office, where Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy smiled down on us from a large photo on the wall. Martray produced a bottle of Champagne, and we drank it in honor of the birthday boy, or of the Kennedys, or of andouillette sausages. (By then it could have been anything at all.) It was close to two-thirty in the morning when Martray finally released us, and Pierre crept away from Chateau de la Chaize at half speed-which did not prevent him, however, from motoring straight into a cow pasture at the road's first sharp turn to the left. of the vineyard and so forth-that our hosts watched intently to be certain that we drank every drop, and that we ended the visit in Martray's office, where Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy smiled down on us from a large photo on the wall. Martray produced a bottle of Champagne, and we drank it in honor of the birthday boy, or of the Kennedys, or of andouillette sausages. (By then it could have been anything at all.) It was close to two-thirty in the morning when Martray finally released us, and Pierre crept away from Chateau de la Chaize at half speed-which did not prevent him, however, from motoring straight into a cow pasture at the road's first sharp turn to the left.

Although today, nearly four decades after the fact, I can still imagine Martray laughing as he watched us stumble out to the car and inch away from Chateau de la Chaize, I bear him no retrospective ill will. We didn't have to go back there with him, and we didn't have to drink all that Brouilly and Champagne. We did it of our own free will, and truth be told, we enjoyed it, too, even if we suffered somewhat for our excesses the next day.

This sort of encounter is not, you may have imagined by now, an altogether infrequent occurrence in the Beaujolais. Let me underline, though, that this kind of challenge is not the sole explanation for their behavior. These people are proud of what they labor all year to produce, and sincerely want you to love it as much as they do themselves-but at the same time they also rather like to determine how well you can hold it. Wine is the social grease and catalyst of the Beaujolais, and the natives give it away with a liberality that would scandalize the purse holders of the more hoity-toity growths to the north and west of them, in Burgundy and Bordeaux. Stop at any Beaujolais vigneron's house, knock on the door, announce your presence and intentions; there will be a handshake, a few curt words-and then, inevitably, you will adjourn to his caveau. caveau. It is only when he is in his element, surrounded by his barrels and his bottles, when he has tapped a vat or pulled a cork to fill his gla.s.s and yours, that hospitality will have been served and custom respected. Comfortable now, he will open up and you can start to talk business. The practice is ancient, immutable and immensely agreeable, but carried to the extreme, it can be a test of the simple act of remaining vertical. It is only when he is in his element, surrounded by his barrels and his bottles, when he has tapped a vat or pulled a cork to fill his gla.s.s and yours, that hospitality will have been served and custom respected. Comfortable now, he will open up and you can start to talk business. The practice is ancient, immutable and immensely agreeable, but carried to the extreme, it can be a test of the simple act of remaining vertical.

Please do not mistake me: by no means do I intend this account to be anything like an apologia for drunkenness. It does happen from time to time, of course, but there are many different degrees of alcoholic euphoria, and they rarely reach downright debauch. Here, as in every vineyard region in the world, wine is a serious business, and the 150 million or so bottles that the Beaujolais produces every year, depending on the vagaries of weather and harvest, represent a serious investment in time, toil and expertise, one that returns a weighty contribution of tax revenues to the French treasury. On the consumer's side of matters, it is obvious that a reasoned investigation of the range and subtleties of wine, rather than just dumb chugalug boozing, is a thoroughly respectable and rewarding undertaking; few activities could be more civilized than the measured-you might almost say sober-consumption that such an investigation requires. Wine tasting, and indeed the whole spectrum of oenology, rife as it is with books, magazines, clubs, computer programs, games, compet.i.tions and who knows what other spinoffs, has become a social and business phenomenon of the first order: big money, big prestige, big opportunities.

So: wine is fas.h.i.+onable. No need to labor that point any further. But with that fas.h.i.+on, a curtain of tiresome solemnity often descends upon the subject, and we Anglo-Saxons are perhaps more guilty than most when it comes to vinous posturing and affectation. Wine today is ever so gravely cla.s.sified, pa.r.s.ed and a.n.a.lyzed to death with a vocabulary worthy of the cabala, and the high-end stuff gets bought and sold exactly like stock market shares or sowbelly futures (an excellent investment, I understand). I wish the a.n.a.lysts and speculators every bit of the success they deserve, but for all the times I have rubbed shoulders with the swells of the trade at chateau tastings in Bordeaux, for all the pomp, pageantry and bizarre costumes I have had occasion to admire at enthronement ceremonies of the Chevaliers du Tastevin, that superbly organized PR stunt of the Burgundy wine establishment, and for all the free Champagne I have swilled at press junkets in the chalky cellars of epernay and Reims, it is always to the Beaujolais hills that I return when I grow weary of the splendors of our globalized iPod Age and yearn for a less self-important, less technologically correct form of human intercourse. Am I the only one who feels a need to flee the artifice of it all and seek out an earlier, simpler time when my cell phone didn't communicate with my refrigerator, and where I could enjoy a gla.s.s of wine without being held to a doctoral discourse? Whatever the case, it is the land of the Beaujolais that const.i.tutes my best cure for the blues. You get your transcendence where you can find it.

Because there is so much more to Beaujolais than just the wine. To begin with, the country itself is soothingly, heart-stoppingly beautiful, far more so than Burgundy, Bordeaux or the Champagne area. All three of these regions make very fine wines, but their landscape and architecture are as boring as flat Perrier water for the most part. The Beaujolais is in glorious, gorgeous contrast to this. It is what a storybook ill.u.s.tration would look like if you sought to depict ideal wine country: a dramatic collection of steep hillsides springing up from the plain and shouldering against one another, forested when the Romans arrived but covered today in an undulant carpet of vines. At the high ground to the west in the direction of Roanne and the Loire is the "Green Beaujolais," a land of cow and sheep pastures, deeply carved escarpments, canyons and pine forests that suddenly give way to a vine-friendly, mineral-rich subsoil of granite, gneiss, clay and limestone, where the vines grow in perfect geometric formation, as neat as cabbages in a curate's garden. Little ribbons of roads-they keep them narrow, lest they eat up too much valuable vine-growing s.p.a.ce-wind around the hillsides like seams on a baseball, then dip down into the shaded vales where the villages sit, cl.u.s.tered around the inevitable church steeple.

The villages themselves are masterpieces of rural architecture. In jewels like Bully and Oingt in the southern Pierres Dorees (golden stone) area, the houses are positively aglow with an ochre effulgence, thanks to the iron oxide permeating the locally quarried limestone. Farther north, in the equally beautiful white wine country around Leynes, the building stone reflects the veined, pinkish hue of potter's clay. Between these two extremes, on the hills where the great s.h.i.+ftings of the Tertiary Period littered the ground with crushed granite, the wine is the best and the houses have a bluish tint-in the Beaujolais, you can read the composition of the soil from the facades of the buildings. Nothing is better than this architectural tagging to ill.u.s.trate the concept of the terroir, terroir, the localized pockets of rock, soil and minerals distributed throughout the countryside. People built with the materials they took from the ground where they had settled, and it is this ground, this the localized pockets of rock, soil and minerals distributed throughout the countryside. People built with the materials they took from the ground where they had settled, and it is this ground, this terroir terroir, that determines the character of the local wines. A Beaujolais-Villages is different from a simple Beaujolais, and a Morgon from a Saint-Amour for the same reason that a Puligny-Montrachet differs from a Batard-Montrachet up in Burgundy: the composition of the soil-the terroir- terroir-is different, and whatever tricks of vinification are used, it is always the terroir terroir that s.h.i.+nes through in the bouquet and the taste of the finished product. that s.h.i.+nes through in the bouquet and the taste of the finished product.

"The poorer the soil, the richer the wine," vignerons like to say, and it's not just a casual phrase. Burgundy's most divine white wines, the Montrachet family, come from a terroir terroir whose name means "a place where nothing grows." Wine grapes can't deliver the goods in the rich, creamy loam that grains love, but give them a pauper's bed of rocky, pebbly, flinty or even sandy soil, and their clever rootlets will insinuate themselves down through the tiniest cracks and fissures to suck mineral nourishment from the n.i.g.g.ardly stone and send it up to headquarters, where the grapes are basking in the sun. Another favorite maxim speaks the same truth: to make the best wine, the vine has to suffer. So does the winemaker: Beaujolais old-timers still remember the days when their fathers and grandfathers had recourse to blasting powder for loosening up the stony ground to plant vines where their picks couldn't penetrate. whose name means "a place where nothing grows." Wine grapes can't deliver the goods in the rich, creamy loam that grains love, but give them a pauper's bed of rocky, pebbly, flinty or even sandy soil, and their clever rootlets will insinuate themselves down through the tiniest cracks and fissures to suck mineral nourishment from the n.i.g.g.ardly stone and send it up to headquarters, where the grapes are basking in the sun. Another favorite maxim speaks the same truth: to make the best wine, the vine has to suffer. So does the winemaker: Beaujolais old-timers still remember the days when their fathers and grandfathers had recourse to blasting powder for loosening up the stony ground to plant vines where their picks couldn't penetrate.

It was with this kind of heads-down, single-minded labor that generation upon generation of peasants turned the angular hills of the Beaujolais into the beautifully tended garden that the area is today. Set yourself up on high ground anywhere in the region and you are greeted by the same ocean of green: terrestrial wave upon wave of vine-planted hillsides, many of them so steep that no tractor could possibly work there, and where a man can just barely stand erect to tend the plants by hand.

The best viewpoint, though, is from the crest of Mont Genas, towering above the blessed town of Fleurie. Twice blessed: first by the wonderfully subtle wine produced there, and then again by the Madonna whose statue stands benevolently over the chapel that the locals built at the summit of Mont Genas in 1857 to beg divine protection for their vines against the violent flash storms and hailstones that the physiognomy of the Beaujolais seems to encourage. Due east, yonder far past the Saone, an alert eye can make out Mont Blanc's white flank, but closer to hand, down in the village, some more mundane wonders of the Beaujolais await the interested visitor. There is the munic.i.p.al water tower that Marguerite Chabert filled with wine in 1960; there is the charcuterie (pork butcher's shop) founded by her father, Francois, who, upon returning from the trenches of World War I, invented the andouillette Beaujolaise andouillette Beaujolaise as we know it today, the very one that I wolfed down in Julienas on that memorable night in the early seventies when I got my comeuppance at Chateau de la Chaize; and there is Le Cep, for my book-that is to say right here, where I'm in control of things-one of the finest restaurants anyone could hope to discover, where Chantal Chagny (bless her, too, while we're at it) stubbornly continues to fly in the face of fas.h.i.+on by serving the marvelous cla.s.sics of French country cooking with nary a kiwi, a drop of coconut milk or a dash of wasabi. as we know it today, the very one that I wolfed down in Julienas on that memorable night in the early seventies when I got my comeuppance at Chateau de la Chaize; and there is Le Cep, for my book-that is to say right here, where I'm in control of things-one of the finest restaurants anyone could hope to discover, where Chantal Chagny (bless her, too, while we're at it) stubbornly continues to fly in the face of fas.h.i.+on by serving the marvelous cla.s.sics of French country cooking with nary a kiwi, a drop of coconut milk or a dash of wasabi.

The Beaujolais has a long tradition of breeding strong women, and both Marguerite and Chantal could be statufied right now as exemplars of that population's character: as strong-willed and uncompromising as they are singular. Marguerite would be somewhat stony up there on her pedestal, because she is long gone now, but her old friend, the (sixtyish) Chantal, is as present and redoubtable as ever in the Le Cep's dining room, at the cash desk and behind every cook, commis commis and and chef de partie chef de partie in her kitchen, making sure that the guys do it her way, and do it right. in her kitchen, making sure that the guys do it her way, and do it right.

Chantal it was who made history by becoming the first chef to voluntarily demote herself in the Michelin, the holy of holies among French restaurant guides. She had opened her little bistro in 1969, single-handedly cooking, serving and was.h.i.+ng the dishes for a ridiculously cheap menu (the equivalent of $2) that included appetizer, main course, cheese and dessert. She did it so well that in 1973 Michelin accorded her a star. After she brought i