I'll Drink To That Part 3

Even so, the winch was a significant harbinger of the modernization and mechanization that would soon be sweeping over not just the Beaujolais but the entire French winegrowing and winemaking trade. Immediately after the war, a limited number of standard agricultural tractors-primitive, underpowered little ponies, but tractors nonetheless-began arriving in the region, but most vignerons had little use for them beyond the usual farm ch.o.r.es. Too low and too wide, they were unsuited for working in the vineyard rows, where they would flatten the vines as they pa.s.sed through. But then, first in 1949 and in a steady stream in the succeeding years, came the enjambeuse enjambeuse: the "straddler." This narrow, high-legged rig on wheels, pulled behind the vigneron's horse, had enough ground clearance to pa.s.s right over the vines, straddling the rows without damaging them. Furnished with a central tank, a pump and spraying arms that reached out on both sides, the rig could spray four rows of vine at a single pa.s.s. That was a real revolution for the vigneron who had been accustomed to slogging through his vines with a copper tank on his back and a single spray hose in his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI.

A BIKE AND TWO BOTTLES OF WINE.

THE BIRTH OF A BUSINESS DYNASTY.

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

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

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

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

"We weren't exactly dirt farmers," said Roger matter-of-factly.

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

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

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

Installed in his modest ground-floor office-cluttered, deliberately unglamorous, overlooking a parking lot-he is surrounded by abundantly tangible evidence of wealth, power and influence: enormous, state-of-the-art bottling lines and storage sheds bearing the steer-head logo he designed as a young man; an ultra-modern vinification plant about the size of a couple of football fields; a university-level laboratory; an amazing wine museum that he conceived, stocked and laid out himself, probably the best and most complete of its sort in the world; an elegant retail shop; a cafe-restaurant for tourists; and even the high-gabled bulk of the nineteenth-century Romaneche-Thorins railroad station, which he bought from the state to house an extraordinary train exhibit, both full-sized and in spiffy little electric models, demonstrating how wine is transferred and s.h.i.+pped.

There's a disconcerting style to the man, though: he doesn't follow the customary promotional script of the self-made man. A few years ago, when he built his huge new vinification plant, by far the most modern of its kind in France and probably in all of Europe, a computerized behemoth of gla.s.s, tile and glistening stainless steel-this is a mega badge of importance if ever there was one-he invited the press to Romaneche for an inauguration ceremony, but it wasn't to get his picture taken posing by this multimillion-dollar investment. Rather, he wanted to show off Un Jardin en Beaujolais Un Jardin en Beaujolais, the botanical garden and demonstration vineyard that he had laid out on the sloping ground just to the east of it.

Duboeuf the CEO dresses his spare frame elegantly, slings cashmere sweaters casually around his neck and drives a high-powered, silver Audi equipped with enough b.u.t.tons, switches and automatic controls for a small s.p.a.ce station. Like Yves St. Laurent, Christian Dior and Coco Chanel, he has imposed his name as a brand of worldwide recognition in his own lifetime, something that no one else in the French wine business has managed to achieve. (In fact, until he became so famous that even the most distant and benighted member of the trade was aware of the basics of his biography, foreign retailers often a.s.sumed that Georges Duboeuf was a marketer's invented name, like Mr. Clean or Betty Crocker.) With all the worldly renown and prestige, though, it was only a few decades ago that he was the skinny kid in Chaintre clinging to a plow that was too big for him, yelling gee and haw (in French it's hue hue and and dia dia) at the family Percheron, and it doesn't take much for memories of those years of youthful anonymity to come flooding back, sharp and clear. Duboeuf's madeleine, the morning I saw him in Chiroubles, was the smell of burned horse's hoof.

"Yesterday I was talking with a grower when a blacksmith came into the room," he said in that characteristic whisper of a voice. "He still had his leather ap.r.o.n on, and suddenly the room was filled with that smell, that very particular acrid odor you only get when the smith hammers a hot new shoe onto a horse's hoof. Suddenly I was carried straight back to Chaintre, when I was a boy.

"We had one horse, two cows, two goats and a pig. There had been an earlier time when we had two horses, but I only knew the period when there was one. I milked the cows, but I wasn't allowed to touch the goats-that was Grandmother's job. I don't know why only women were allowed to milk the goats; that's just how it was.

"I was good for the cows and horses, though. Every year we village boys would take our family horses to the main square to show them to the vet, who came through to check on their health and estimate their value. On the morning of the presentation I worked on mine for hours and hours, cleaning him up, brus.h.i.+ng him, varnis.h.i.+ng his hooves, combing his tail, braiding his mane. We led our horses up to the vet one by one. The mayor was there, the president of this a.s.sociation and that group, four to six serious men with mustaches who came to judge our work. I stood there admiring my horse. I was so proud. It was extraordinary."

I had joined Georges in Chiroubles that morning for the Concours Victor Pulliat Concours Victor Pulliat, a formal, blind tasting to determine the year's best of the ten Beaujolais crus crus (when the prizes were announced a few days later " (when the prizes were announced a few days later "la selection Georges Duboeuf" dominated the list), and in spite of the fact that we were in a high-perched little French village that scarcely could be quainter-stone houses roofed with round Roman tiles, winding streets, geraniums on windowsills, the occasional wandering cat-the atmosphere was all efficiency, organization and dead-serious business. The cell phones, electronic gadgetry and high-tech vinification chatter were about the same as what you might expect to encounter at a conference in California or Australia. When Georges entered the crowded meeting room and took his seat at his a.s.signed tasting table, he may have been treated with a shade more respect than most, given his eminence and experience, but part of that respect was also for his white hair and the lines of fatigue on his face. He was already old, a man of another time: plenty of his fellow wine experts in the room were about half a century younger than he. Most of them could have no idea of the Beaujolais he had known as a boy, the prewar Beaujolais of Papa Brechard and his countrymen, who still had one wooden shoe planted in the nineteenth century. In fact, I rather doubt that many of those present in Chiroubles that morning even cared much at all about the old Beaujolais, concerned as they were with scrambling for their share of sales in the globalized wine marketplace. Georges, on the other hand, was stalked as always by the essential ambivalence that defines him: old and modern; nostalgia and ambition; aesthetics and profit; tradition and progress. Within that crowd of dealers, brokers and growers, he was the one who had done the most to bring new wealth and cutting edge technology to the Beaujolais, but he was also the one whose memory was suffused with the smell of burned horse's hoof. Duboeuf's feet straddled a few centuries, and a few contradictions, too.

Over the years, I've poked and prodded at Georges to tell me about the Beaujolais fifty, sixty and seventy years ago. Our conversations have always been on the fly, between meetings, phone calls and business trips, often in his car as he drove to tasting sessions, because this perfection-crazed workaholic almost never has any free time. If my insistence on the past amused him at first, he understood and accepted the fact that Duboeuf the businessman, however much he represented a model of entrepreneurs.h.i.+p for the French economy, interested me less at those moments than Duboeuf the descendant of and witness to a particular slice of rural France that has disappeared forever, one that few foreigners and not even so many of the French themselves could conceive of today-but one whose memory ought to be preserved, and maybe even cherished. Unsurprisingly enough, there was always plenty of nostalgia that accompanied these forays into his past, but the single leitmotif that recurred most frequently was work: the steady, obstinate, relentless work of the peasant who stakes his entire livelihood on what he grows, tends and raises, year in and year out.

"When you live in the environment of a wine family, you start very young," he explained. "You follow the work of the vine and vinificationthrough all the seasons, even if it's just at a child's level. I clearly remember turning the handle of the crusher while Roger fed the grapes in from the harvest. I was five or six then. Like all the other children, I lived the period of the harvest intensely every year, carrying the tubs of grapes, then helping with the vinification as I got older. By the time I was fifteen, I was strong enough to partic.i.p.ate in all the phases of the harvest at the same level as the adults. The harvest was only ten days or so, though, and once a year. For the rest of the time, it was all the usual work of spraying, pruning and tying up the vines. For me, that meant mostly work on weekends and Thursdays, when school was out.

"Our house in Chaintre was very simple by today's standards. For water we went to the pump at the well in the courtyard, and we used to chill bottles of wine in the well itself. Later we had running water installed in the house, but for a long time there was no hot water supply apart from the big woodstove in the kitchen, that had a built-in water tank. We took our weekly bath in the kitchen, using the hot water of the stove's reserve tank. For all intents and purposes, we lived in the kitchen, like all farm families. It was the warmest room in the house. The other rooms were heated just by fireplaces.

"We had ten hectares of Pouilly-Fuisse, three or four hectares of red wine and three or four of Noah. I used to plow between the vines, of course, but I didn't start at that before I was thirteen or fourteen, because you need a certain amount of strength and dexterity to handle a horse with the reins over your shoulders. Luckily, horses were accustomed to the work. They knew where they were supposed to go. Early in the fifties, we got rid of our Noah. That was handwork, too. We did it with a big wooden lever, almost two meters long, forked at the end. It ripped the vines right out by the roots."

Like most of their neighbors in those days, the Duboeufs were both farmers and vignerons. Wheat and hay were the two most common farm crops, and the harvesting was by a horse and the mechanical sickle bar it pulled. In the awkward spots too tight or too mounded for horse and machine, the handwork took over again: sickle and scythe.

"We ran behind the cutting machine and picked up the wheat to make sheaves, then carried them to the thres.h.i.+ng machine. It was driven by a leather belt from the power train of one of those huge Locomobile steam engines with the smokestack and the big flywheel. We put the wheat into a chute on top of the thres.h.i.+ng machine, and the straw came out on one side and the grain on the other.

"Once, I remember, when I was eight or nine I grabbed a big bunch of wheat, and there was a bees' nest inside it. I got stung all over my arms. My grandmother came over and said don't worry, it's nothing. She rubbed vinegar all over my arms. An hour later I was back at work.

"In July, there was the haying. That was hot work. You couldn't keep animals if you didn't have hay for them in the winter. After it was cut we had to shake it out and load it onto the cart. Since I was little, they put me up on top of the cart. My job was to take the hay as they pa.s.sed it up and lay it out. There was a whole art to handling hay. You had to take it into your arms and roll each bunch, then comb it out with your hands. When it was piled up high we tied a rope around the load and took it up to the barn in Chaintre. There were some railroad tracks to cross on the way to Chaintre. Once, when I was twelve or thirteen, I hadn't tied it down well enough, and the whole load fell out, right onto the tracks. I had to act fast to get it off before the next train came.

"When we got to Chaintre, we brought the hay up into the loft above the stables, through a little opening like a window. My job was to take the bunches they pitched up and carry them to the back of the loft. The smell of fresh hay-ah la la, I'll remember that all my life."

Down on the plain by the Saone in Creches stood the big old family house, the former abbey misguidedly acquired by the bargain-hunting Baron de Vinzelles. In Georges's childhood, it was inhabited by his grandparents Debeaune and Berthilier. The Domain of Arbigny, people called it, and there were two details, two aspects of its situation, that particularly intrigued the boy: the chapel and the flooding. The flooding occurred when the Saone rose and overflowed its banks, as it was wont to do when the late winter rains persisted and the snow melted in the mountains. First the domain became an island, and then, if the rains persisted, the house's ground-floor rooms went under water. Imperturbable, the family simply carried the furniture upstairs and moved into the second floor until the river receded back to its normal bed.

The chapel was a relic from the days of the monks of Saint Vincent de Macon, and it brought a touch of exotica that otherwise never would have come to this little corner of the French countryside: gypsies. "The chapel was part of the property, in the courtyard in front of the house," Georges explained. "There was a statue of Mary in front and Martha inside, along with Saint Lazarus and his two sisters. The saints had the reputation of curing la patte d'oie, la patte d'oie, a genetic disease that was prevalent among gypsies, especially those from Hungary, who used to come there on pilgrimage. Sometimes they left rosaries behind, and notes and testimonials for the saints." a genetic disease that was prevalent among gypsies, especially those from Hungary, who used to come there on pilgrimage. Sometimes they left rosaries behind, and notes and testimonials for the saints."

In those days saints still counted for the French, too, and the Duboeuf family's attendance at Sunday ma.s.s was unthinking and automatic, as much a part of the normal routine of life as tending the vines. Serious and conscientious, young Georges was inevitably drafted into altar boy duty, and he fulfilled his pious ch.o.r.es from age seven to sixteen. Dressed in the surplice, he prepared the altar, the wine and the host, carried cross and candle, rang the bell and murmured the responses along with the rest of the paris.h.i.+oners. The wine for the ma.s.s could only have been Beaujolais or Maconnais red-what else? So it was at home, too, for both children and adults.

"We drank our own wine, sometimes white, but mostly red. Like all the children, I drank mine mixed with water. We ate a lot of bread, and mostly products from the farm-vegetables, milk, cheese. Cheese was the meat of the peasantry. When we had 'real' meat, it was pieces we had salted ourselves. We killed the pig once a year, and of course I partic.i.p.ated in that. That was one of the normal rituals of farm life. Grandmother taught me how to kill rabbits with a blow behind the head, and then to skin them and tan the hides for making gloves. Same thing for killing and plucking chickens. When I was about fifteen, I raised ducks in a little shack near Grandmother's place. You could make a pretty good profit with ducks, because they were ready for sale in just three months. I took them live to the open-air market in Chatillon. Supermarkets didn't exist then, of course, so a lot of the merchants came to us. The baker and the butcher came by the house every day or two. They had horse-drawn wagons until the end of the war. Then, slowly, cars and trucks started taking over.

"There was a monsieur who came around with a little cart that he pulled from town to town, the Caiffa. Caiffa. ' 'Caiffa, Caiffa!' he shouted outside the gate, and we'd all come running out of the house to see him. He wore a splendid green uniform, boots and a postman's cap, and he was selling coffee and spices in little boxes. Then there was the patti patti, too, the junkman. 'A aux pattes!' he shouted. It was a question: any junk or rabbit skins for sale? He picked up anything imaginable, all the things you didn't want anymore and were ready to throw out. All these people were part of the rhythm of the seasons for us, each thing in its time. Christmas, Easter, haying time, harvest time, time for killing the pig, time to release the wine, time for the distiller to come for making eau-de-vie . . . Everything contributed to a familiar routine that hardly changed from year to year."

If anything, the ancient routines of country life became even more frozen into the tracks of tradition during the war and the German occupation. With no cars on the roads anymore and hardly any civilian trains, the norm for transportation was horse, foot or bicycle. Rationing prevailed throughout the country, but in any case there was hardly anything left in the shops to buy. The Beaujolais fell instinctively into its ancestral habits of farming for survival, and villages shuttered up and drew back into themselves, isolated little units waiting the war out, their populations virtually immobile, as if thrown back into the nineteenth century. Now the city dwellers in Lyon and Macon hungrily envied their country cousins, because they knew that whatever happened there would always be fresh food on the farms: milk, cheese, vegetables, eggs, and occasionally meat, too: chicken, rabbits, sometimes game and, most lusciously, fresh pork, blood sausage and andouillettes around pig-killing time. The entire year's production of wine was supposed to be reserved for the German military authorities, but everyone knew that the peasants held back as much of it as they could, and enough of the excellent 1941 and 1943 vintages found a way into commerce to offer solace during the long wait for liberation.

One year before the war erupted, five-year-old Georges had begun his education by trudging up the hill behind the house to the Chaintre elementary school, a single room in the town hall. He carried a basket containing the lunch his mother had prepared for him, and at noon Madame Delancelot, the schoolmistress, ushered him and five or six other urchins into her apartment above the schoolroom and heated their food on her stove. The other children took lunch at home in the village. After elementary school Georges graduated to the secondary ecole laique ecole laique, a secular all-boys school, pendant to the ecole de filles ecole de filles into which the girls were segregated. Public morality still largely separated the s.e.xes in those days, both in schooling and in civic responsibilities-French women, remember, were not trusted with the right to vote until Charles de Gaulle's provisional government gave it to them in 1944. into which the girls were segregated. Public morality still largely separated the s.e.xes in those days, both in schooling and in civic responsibilities-French women, remember, were not trusted with the right to vote until Charles de Gaulle's provisional government gave it to them in 1944.

With no cars, no movies, no comic books, no television and of course nothing even remotely resembling all the other transistorized amus.e.m.e.nts of young people today, Georges spent most of his early years like all the other sons and daughters of the vine: studying at school and working at home. The horizons opened up at war's end. Just entering his teens now, he swam and fished in the Saone, joined a little theater group rehearsing in a room above the bakery in Chaintre under the guidance of the village priest and tested his physical endurance by biking through the Beaujolais hills. Professional bicycle racers were his heroes. He covered the walls of his bedroom with his own caricatures of the top compet.i.tors and listened to reports of races on the little crystal set radio that he built himself at the cost of a few francs. (Based on a crystal of galena, a rock that vibrates to radio waves, this granddaddy of all receptors uses neither electricity nor batteries, but requires headphones to be heard.) By the time he was fifteen and sixteen, his own bike trips had become long-range expeditions with friends-up to two hundred kilometers a day, once to Switzerland and back, another time to Nice, and a round trip to Ma.r.s.eille, carrying their own tents and provisions. He discovered on those trips, without quite realizing it, that he was a leader-or, rather, that if someone had ideas, others would follow. Young Georges wanted to do things and go places.

"I never intended to stay in Chaintre as a vigneron," he told me one afternoon as we drove back from a visit with Roger in the old Duboeuf house at the edge of Chaintre, surrounded in every direction by a sea of vines. "I had this wonderful teacher in the ecole laique, ecole laique, Mademoiselle Jeanine Frontier, and I told her I wanted to go live in Canada. She found me a Canadian pen pal whom I corresponded with for a while, but then my mother sent me for three years to Catholic boarding school in Macon, and there I really got interested in sports. That's when I developed the ambition to make my life as a sports trainer." Mademoiselle Jeanine Frontier, and I told her I wanted to go live in Canada. She found me a Canadian pen pal whom I corresponded with for a while, but then my mother sent me for three years to Catholic boarding school in Macon, and there I really got interested in sports. That's when I developed the ambition to make my life as a sports trainer."

Normal schooling was finished at age sixteen. Georges read about a new discipline just then coming into the French educational network, the paramedical practice of ma.s.seur-kinesietherapeute, ma.s.seur-kinesietherapeute, similar to the American chiropractor. There were different options, but what interested him was the specific sports angle, which was taught at a specialized school in the Paris suburb of Maisons-Alfort. Georges studied for the entrance exam, easily pa.s.sed it and boarded the train to the capital, where a cousin who had an apartment in the Latin Quarter on the Boulevard St. Michel had offered to put him up. Everything seemed to be in place for the beginning of a career in a white blouse with a handful of liniment. similar to the American chiropractor. There were different options, but what interested him was the specific sports angle, which was taught at a specialized school in the Paris suburb of Maisons-Alfort. Georges studied for the entrance exam, easily pa.s.sed it and boarded the train to the capital, where a cousin who had an apartment in the Latin Quarter on the Boulevard St. Michel had offered to put him up. Everything seemed to be in place for the beginning of a career in a white blouse with a handful of liniment.

Georges's bright new ambition lasted exactly two months. The country boy hadn't been able to imagine the realities of student life and commuting in the big city. "I spent more than two hours a day on the bus and in the metro. After a while I realized it just wasn't possible, losing all that time going back and forth. It was stifling. The stress was too much. I finally said no. I couldn't live in Paris like that. So I came back to Chaintre, where my professors were my brother and my uncle, and my school was the apprentices.h.i.+p of winemaking."

In truth, there wasn't much about winemaking that he hadn't already learned over the years since his first turns of the grape crusher's crank, but he and Roger refined their methods and procedures with manic, perfectionist determination. "We turned away from a lot of the old local habits," said Georges. "A lot of growers used to use rusty old buckets or tubs to collect the grapes. Impurities like that could affect the wine, and sometimes give it a metallic taste, so we ordered special wicker baskets instead. We were the first ones to use them. For the harvest, Roger insisted that we had to clean the vinifying room and all the equipment a week early-hose down and scrub the floor, clean the filters, then hose down the press and the vats and wipe them with eau-de-vie. There were just the two of us, but we were very, very meticulous about the work, because we shared the same respect for wine and the same pa.s.sion for making it right."

For the Duboeuf brothers, the only right Pouilly-Fuisse was a perfect Pouilly-Fuisse: bright gold with glints of green, mellow, richly redolent of ripe fruit, grilled almonds and nuts, but at the same time balanced with enough of the citric touch of acidity to prevent it from turning soft and flabby. Severely tr.i.m.m.i.n.g back their vines and clipping their buds, the brothers deliberately lowered their yield per hectare, to ensure that their grapes developed harmoniously by drawing the optimum of nourishment from the soil.

As estimable as this policy was, though, it was confounded by the realities of the economic chain of command. Like all the other growers, Georges and Roger were victims of the syndrome of the little window in Villefranche: for selling their wine, they were a tributary to the dealers- le negoce le negoce-and the dealers set the price, take it or leave it. The price was the same for everyone, low yields or high, pa.s.sion for perfection or not. So what was the point of limiting the yield, when you could make a lot more money by the ancient dodge known as faire p.i.s.ser la vigne faire p.i.s.ser la vigne?

And that wasn't the end of it. Once the samples had been tested and the sale agreement signed, the dealers sent their tank trucks around, siphoned off the storage vats, carted the wine away, bottled it at their premises and sold it under their own labels. All the lovely Pouilly-Fuisse that Roger and Georges had worked so devotedly to bring to perfection disappeared into anonymous bulk batches. That hurt almost worse than the money they lost by limiting their yields. It was an insult to their pride as artisans, and it wasn't even smart, because the system only encouraged sloppy winemaking. Georges knew there had to be a better way. In 1951 he set off in search of it. He was in his eighteenth year when he stuck a couple of bottles of Pouilly-Fuisse into the saddlebag of his blue bike and set out in the direction of Thoissey.

The story of Georges Duboeuf's beginning in the wine business has been frequently written, but what is most significant is his prescience: he was the first to see what should have been glaringly obvious to everyone, and he was young enough-not settled into the stultifying ruts of routine-to go out and do something about it. His idea of selling restaurants exceptional wine in bottles, directly from selected producers, rather than relying on the traditional practice of selling whole barrels to bistros, was an inspired antic.i.p.ation of the changing trends of the modern world, and it had never been done before-not in the Beaujolais, in any event. The days when bistros and restaurants bought wine in bulk and bottled it by hand in their cellars (usually reached via a trapdoor in the floor by the bar, then a vertiginous ladder down into the black hole) were drawing to a close. Professionalism and specialization were entering the modern world; the old folklore was on the way out. And Georges Duboeuf, the kid solemnly leaning on the pedals that afternoon as he left Chaintre, was gifted with an extraordinary lucidity that in following years was to make him the author of a considerable pack of innovations that, put together, const.i.tuted something very much like a revolution in the wine trade.

The famous first bike ride to Thoissey was easy, a mere ten kilometers or so down the N. 6, then a hook left across the Saone and a pleasant promenade in the shade of a majestic canopy of towering roadside plane trees to Paul Blanc's famous restaurant, Le Chapon Fin. The great chef received the boy in the bar. The standard version of the story is that Blanc tasted on the spot, but I suspect that he took Georges' samples, put them in his cellar or the fridge to settle and cool off, then contacted him a day or so later. At any event the result was this: "Pet.i.t," he growled, "I'll take your white wine. And if you can find me some reds as good as this, I'll take them, too."

He found them, and then some. In coming years the spectacle of this black-haired youth with the soft voice and the inquiring brown eyes, as skinny as a Giacometti statue and hardly any more voluble, single- mindedly nosing through vineyards, cellars and caves cooperatives caves cooperatives in a quest to do as Chef Blanc had said, was to become one of the unfailing constants of Beaujolais life. Sooner or later, everyone who had anything to do with wine would have met or heard about Georges Duboeuf. For the moment, though, all that interested him in 1951 was to squirm free of the dealers' armlock and sell his own Pouilly-Fuisse, under his own label, as he and Roger made it. in a quest to do as Chef Blanc had said, was to become one of the unfailing constants of Beaujolais life. Sooner or later, everyone who had anything to do with wine would have met or heard about Georges Duboeuf. For the moment, though, all that interested him in 1951 was to squirm free of the dealers' armlock and sell his own Pouilly-Fuisse, under his own label, as he and Roger made it.

That took a little doing. For one thing, he had no proper bottling equipment-almost no individual vignerons did. Bottling in any appreciable quant.i.ty had always been the exclusive domain of the dealers; growers had only simple hand devices in their cellars, often no more sophisticated than funnels and a basic corking device, for their use at home or for filling the sample bottles they brought on their yearly treks to the little window in Villefranche. Georges went a notch up from that. Biking north to Macon, he picked up a secondhand pump, some piping, filters and a slightly more sophisticated corking device, and arranged with a printer for a supply of labels of his own design. It was still all hand-operated gear, but it was enough to put their own production into bottles.

"We were so confident of the quality of our wine that we dared to go knocking on some more doors after Paul Blanc encouraged us," Georges explained. "I wasn't really a born businessman, but I was proud of my product and I could personally guarantee its quality. I suppose I had more of a feeling for communication than Roger. He stayed in Chaintre watching over the wine and studying archaeology and genealogy, while I went out and did the selling. At the start, it was only our own Pouilly-Fuisse, and we were using the labels that we designed together. I used to sit up at night cutting them out of the printer's sheets, because I didn't have a machine for that.

"Paul Blanc helped us tremendously, because he liked what we were doing and the way we did it. He came and visited us in Chaintre, then talked to his fellow cooks about us. Next thing we knew, we got orders from some very prestigious places: the Hotel de Paris in Sens, the Grand Monarque in Chartres, the Aigle Noir in Fontainebleau, Chez Pauline in Paris, le Mouscardin in St. Tropez."

Still a teenager, Georges found himself with privileged entry to some of the heavy hitters of French gastronomy. It was a very considerable hand-up for his budding enterprise, but as unexpected as this may seem, it was also something like the norm within the cooking trade. Although frequently factious and disputatious in most normal pursuits, the French can demonstrate extraordinary depths of solidarity within certain professions whose roots lie in the world of medieval artisanry and the cooperative traditions of les Compagnons du Devoir les Compagnons du Devoir, the ancestors of today's Freemasons. Nowhere is this truer than in haute cuisine, where an improvised, s.h.i.+fting but constantly active tom-tom beat of phone calls, faxes and e-mails keeps top chefs apprised of what the others are doing, how they are doing and why-all the while pa.s.sing tips, contacts and warnings back and forth. Naturally there are tendencies, leanings, clans, cliques, divisions and schisms within the whole, but the information goes around nonetheless, and at lightning speed: if some farmer grows truly exceptional leeks, beets or turnips, he won't remain anonymous for long. Paul Blanc was only following the traditions he had learned during his own apprentices.h.i.+p when he pa.s.sed the word into his network of restaurateur friends that there was some unusually fine Pouilly-Fuisse to be had from the Duboeuf brothers in Chaintre.

And so the tradition continues today. No one who has ever heard a Paul Bocuse, a Guy Savoy or a Pierre Gagnaire on the phone with his own mafia of kitchen confreres can have any doubt about that. And there's a very salient characteristic that by definition accompanies these networks: you don't forget help, and you pay back in kind. Over more than fifty years since that first helping hand in 1951, Georges Duboeuf never forgot Le Chapon Fin, regularly arranging his most important business lunches and catered group meals there long after Paul Blanc's death, right up to the grand old barn's closing in 2005.

Another manner of helping hand appeared in 1951, and it was a big one, too, even if no one recognized at the time the full extent of its importance to the Beaujolais. In March of that year the French administration finally got around to lifting the wartime timetable that governed the release dates of the country's different wines, a s.p.a.cing out of the supply chain that had been established strictly for the use of the army. Since twelve full years had pa.s.sed since the start of the war and six since the German defeat, there was no justification for maintaining the timetable any longer, as the growers had been insisting ever since 1945. Administrations grind along slowly, but now at last a new, earlier release date was approved for Beaujolais: December 15 for wines of that same year.

That wasn't good enough for many of the vignerons. Eager to return to the good old days of St. Martin, when they sold their young wines as of November 11, they loudly protested that history and nature were on their side, as proved by all those burping barrels riding the gentle Saone down to Lyon. It was indisputable, they reminded the administration, that the gamay grape possessed the miraculous capacity to produce a pleasant wine extraordinarily early. Low in the aggressively astringent tannins that caused other wines (notably Bordeaux) to be virtually undrinkable in their youth, Beaujolais was already singing of fruit and flowers a mere two months after pressing. The argument was compelling, and on November 13, the administration caved in and authorized the new wine, the one that the growers called primeur, primeur, to be sold as of zero hour on November 15. With that, the phenomenon known as Beaujolais Nouveau was given its official, statutory life. to be sold as of zero hour on November 15. With that, the phenomenon known as Beaujolais Nouveau was given its official, statutory life.

Primeur and Georges Duboeuf were destined to be dancing such an intimate tango together in future years that the wine came to be virtually identified with his name, but in the early fifties it was little more than an episodic curiosity, and Georges had nothing at all to do with it, occupied as he was with learning his infant business, doing his twenty-eight months of military service and courting his future wife Rolande Dudet, daughter of the Julienas baker and the girl in charge of Victor Peyret's and Georges Duboeuf were destined to be dancing such an intimate tango together in future years that the wine came to be virtually identified with his name, but in the early fifties it was little more than an episodic curiosity, and Georges had nothing at all to do with it, occupied as he was with learning his infant business, doing his twenty-eight months of military service and courting his future wife Rolande Dudet, daughter of the Julienas baker and the girl in charge of Victor Peyret's caveau caveau inside the old church. Luckily, the army stationed him nearby in the Nievre inside the old church. Luckily, the army stationed him nearby in the Nievre departement departement, where he landed a cushy a.s.signment as his captain's secretary, and he had plenty of leave time.

Georges was prescient; he was smart and he had ideas. Long before that awful word "marketing" existed, he was inventing his own instinctive version of it when he turned the big old bas.e.m.e.nt kitchen of the family's Chaintre house into premises for receiving customers. This was an entirely new idea at the time. A few of the crus, crus, like Julienas, had established munic.i.p.al like Julienas, had established munic.i.p.al caveaux caveaux for presenting and selling their local wines, but at the start of the fifties the notion that individual vignerons could profitably do the same thing at their own properties was simply not a part of the culture. As their fathers and grandfathers always had done, Beaujolais vignerons limited themselves to growing the grapes and making the wine. But Georges had given the matter a bit of thought: with the private automobile coming into general use, why not try selling to pa.s.sing motorists? for presenting and selling their local wines, but at the start of the fifties the notion that individual vignerons could profitably do the same thing at their own properties was simply not a part of the culture. As their fathers and grandfathers always had done, Beaujolais vignerons limited themselves to growing the grapes and making the wine. But Georges had given the matter a bit of thought: with the private automobile coming into general use, why not try selling to pa.s.sing motorists?

The old kitchen was just right, a s.p.a.cious, heavy-beamed, high- ceilinged room with a picturesque open fireplace and antique cabinets. He installed tables, chairs, upright barrels and various odd bits of winemaking equipment for local color, creating an atmosphere that was informal, easygoing and not too blatantly mercantile. Down by the side of the road where the driveway left the property, he stuck a big sign that he had ordered from a friend of Roger's whose business was making posters for movie houses: STOP-COME IN AND TASTE THE DUBOEUF WINES.

It was the first private caveau de degustation caveau de degustation in the Beaujolais. Georges named it Au Cul Sec (Bottoms Up) and painstakingly created a promotional flyer. It was a rather amateurish job, to be sure-commercial in the Beaujolais. Georges named it Au Cul Sec (Bottoms Up) and painstakingly created a promotional flyer. It was a rather amateurish job, to be sure-commercial art naif art naif -but he had all the right ideas. One side, printed in bright, eye-catching tones of yellow and green, showed a carefully labeled map of the winding roads leading off the N. 6 main highway to Chaintre. On the right fold was a cutout of a huge bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse (vintage 1955), a barrel and a tempting gla.s.s of cool, golden-hued wine. On the back side was Georges' painstaking black-and-white sketch of the interior of the -but he had all the right ideas. One side, printed in bright, eye-catching tones of yellow and green, showed a carefully labeled map of the winding roads leading off the N. 6 main highway to Chaintre. On the right fold was a cutout of a huge bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse (vintage 1955), a barrel and a tempting gla.s.s of cool, golden-hued wine. On the back side was Georges' painstaking black-and-white sketch of the interior of the caveau. caveau. "Pouilly-Fuisse Duboeuf Brothers, Winegrowers in Chaintre," it was labeled. "Au Cul Sec, our tasting room, into which we invite you." "Pouilly-Fuisse Duboeuf Brothers, Winegrowers in Chaintre," it was labeled. "Au Cul Sec, our tasting room, into which we invite you."

Georges was only twenty-two then, but the example he set spread throughout the whole area. Today there are thousands of private caveaux caveaux in the Beaujolais, and every other house, it seems, has its present-day version of the "Stop, Come In and Taste" sign planted by the driveway. The blandishment is as alluring as it is clever, because every vigneron knows that it is hard to resist the temptation to sample wine for free, and that a gla.s.s or two of Beaujolais has the magic capacity of changing the world: cares evaporate, expansive optimism appears out of nowhere, wallets spring open. Twenty percent of Beaujolais stock now goes through direct retail sale by individual vignerons. in the Beaujolais, and every other house, it seems, has its present-day version of the "Stop, Come In and Taste" sign planted by the driveway. The blandishment is as alluring as it is clever, because every vigneron knows that it is hard to resist the temptation to sample wine for free, and that a gla.s.s or two of Beaujolais has the magic capacity of changing the world: cares evaporate, expansive optimism appears out of nowhere, wallets spring open. Twenty percent of Beaujolais stock now goes through direct retail sale by individual vignerons.

Georges was on to something, then, and it was only the start. He never forgot Paul Blanc's admonition to go out and find some good red wines, an admonition insistently repeated by the other restaurateurs on his growing list of Pouilly-Fuisse clients. When he was freed of his army duty, he took the bicycle clip off his right ankle and splurged on the purchase of a motorbike. Mechanized now, he pushed his prospecting trips farther and deeper in expanding circles through the Beaujolais hills, tasting and spitting over and over again as he moved from barrel to barrel and vat to vat, methodically instructing himself on the style of each vigneron, the layout of his vines and the different quality of wine delivered by each different parcelle parcelle of vineyard. Served by a hypertrophied sensorial memory, one that only improved with repet.i.tion over his more than fifty years in the trade, he made himself into something like a living wine almanac. Today there is no one who knows every nook and cranny of the Beaujolais as intimately as Georges Duboeuf, and no one who can taste, judge and select its wines with his speed and precision. of vineyard. Served by a hypertrophied sensorial memory, one that only improved with repet.i.tion over his more than fifty years in the trade, he made himself into something like a living wine almanac. Today there is no one who knows every nook and cranny of the Beaujolais as intimately as Georges Duboeuf, and no one who can taste, judge and select its wines with his speed and precision.

"His talent as a wine taster is stupefying," Papa Brechard told me a few years before his death. "And he does it at a speed that is just incomparable. In tasting sessions he leaves everyone else behind. And he's got the science of tasting early samples and knowing what the wine will become later on. It's almost an art, his talent."

Even more famous as a winegrower in his time than Papa Brechard was the late Louis Savoye, admirable vinifier and collector of tasting prizes with his intense, spicy Morgon. He was already eighty-seven when I met him in his caveau caveau in Villie-Morgon back in the early nineties, but he retained a vivid memory of his first encounter with the prospecting kid from Chaintre. "He looked terribly young the first time I laid eyes on him," Savoye recalled, "but he made an extraordinary impression on me-on all of us. We saw that we had someone here who was faster and better than any of us. I'm not ashamed to say I learned a lot from Georges Duboeuf. We all did." in Villie-Morgon back in the early nineties, but he retained a vivid memory of his first encounter with the prospecting kid from Chaintre. "He looked terribly young the first time I laid eyes on him," Savoye recalled, "but he made an extraordinary impression on me-on all of us. We saw that we had someone here who was faster and better than any of us. I'm not ashamed to say I learned a lot from Georges Duboeuf. We all did."

The concentric circles of Georges' marathon tastings widened through the years as his graduation from bike to motorbike to automobile allowed him to cover more ground faster, but the basic method never varied: ceaseless, obsessive tastings, barrel to barrel, vat to vat, choosing and eliminating. With thousands of vignerons to visit-each working in his own way to tend vineyard, plot within vineyard and parcelle parcelle within plot, then vinifying with whatever skill or dedication he possessed-there was a tremendous diversity of wine quality out there, ranging from superb to execrable, and Georges knew of no other way to get the good ones than to taste them all. As a result, he became a numbers man of Stakhanovite proportions. within plot, then vinifying with whatever skill or dedication he possessed-there was a tremendous diversity of wine quality out there, ranging from superb to execrable, and Georges knew of no other way to get the good ones than to taste them all. As a result, he became a numbers man of Stakhanovite proportions.

What sort of numbers? There's an old debate about how many wine samples a competent professional can intelligently judge in any given period of time. The debate has grown especially acute in America since the arrival on the oenological scene of the Marylander Robert Parker, whose sensorial and marketing skills have made him prophet and lord chancellor among wine critics. His eminence is not without its detractors. A while back, in a New York Times New York Times review of a Parker biography, the writer Tony Hendra called into doubt some famous Parker numbers, notably that he was endowed with the prodigious capacity of sampling between 50 and 125 wines a week, or even more in hurry-up, one-time tasting sessions. "Tasting 100 wines (especially at the rate of one a minute)," Hendra concluded, "and judging No. 100-or No. 50-as accurately as No. 1, is a physiological impossibility." review of a Parker biography, the writer Tony Hendra called into doubt some famous Parker numbers, notably that he was endowed with the prodigious capacity of sampling between 50 and 125 wines a week, or even more in hurry-up, one-time tasting sessions. "Tasting 100 wines (especially at the rate of one a minute)," Hendra concluded, "and judging No. 100-or No. 50-as accurately as No. 1, is a physiological impossibility."

Georges responded with a little half smile one evening when I told him about the article, shaking his head and raising an arm in a gesture of the futility of attempting to bring noninitiates to an understanding of his business. That day alone, he had sampled somewhat more than three hundred wines.

What he had been chasing that day was the same elusive trophy that he had gone after during his early forays into the hills for Paul Blanc and through all the years since: le gout Duboeuf le gout Duboeuf -the Duboeuf taste-his idea of what a good Beaujolais should do for the nose, the palate and the soul. All the Beaujolais he bottles and sells is wine that he has tasted himself, and the wine he loves is a reflection of what the gamay grape gives best when it is handled by a skillful vigneron: a clearly defined rush of fruit reminiscent of fresh-picked red berries, jamlike in the richer -the Duboeuf taste-his idea of what a good Beaujolais should do for the nose, the palate and the soul. All the Beaujolais he bottles and sells is wine that he has tasted himself, and the wine he loves is a reflection of what the gamay grape gives best when it is handled by a skillful vigneron: a clearly defined rush of fruit reminiscent of fresh-picked red berries, jamlike in the richer crus crus, but still totally dry, marked with the refres.h.i.+ng nip of acidity that adds the necessary body to its soft tannins.

In the universal, eternal trilogy of wine-color, fruit and structure- Georges' eye for one, nose for the other and palate for the last are so unvarying that a diligent Beaujolais drinker with a modic.u.m of experience can almost infallibly identify his wines from year to year by the simple act of lifting a gla.s.s, examining its color and inhaling its bouquet. In effect, Georges' early years prospecting for Paul Blanc were the postgraduate studies that earned him his oenological Ph.D. Step by step, from his first taste of the delicious, sweet, freshly pressed juice whose sugar is only beginning to turn to alcohol-the nicely named paradis paradis -until the vinification was complete and the final product was ready for bottling, Georges observed, sniffed and tasted thousands of times, eliminating candidates until he had chosen exactly the batches he wanted. -until the vinification was complete and the final product was ready for bottling, Georges observed, sniffed and tasted