French Lessons (19 page)

We tried it. Sadler showed himself to be a
natural, with a wonderfully fluid wrist action and a fine profundo bawl. The
rest of us did as best we could, making the house sound as though it had been
invaded by a bunch of well-oiled soccer fans. More rehearsals had us bellowing
and swiveling our hands like native-born Burgundians, and by the time we left
the Jacquesons’ around one o’clock in the morning, we were judged
to be competent enough to perform in public.

As we walked back through
the narrow streets, Sadler and I compared spitting notes, and we had to agree
that the evening had been a pathetic failure. Number of wines tasted:
approximately twelve. Number of times wine ejected from mouth before
swallowing: nil.

“We have to do better tomorrow,” I said.
“Expectorate or perish.”

“The problem is,” he
said, “that we need something to do it in. A
crachoir.
Maybe we
should buy a bucket.”

The next morning found us
window-shopping for portable spittoons in Beaune, a handsome, dignified town
that has clearly enjoyed hundreds of years of prosperity. The buildings are
stone-built, thick-walled, often with steeply pitched roofs decorated with
polychrome tiles. There are cobbled streets and courtyards, ramparts and Gothic
architectural flourishes, and, wherever you look, evidence of what makes the
whole place tick: wine. Bottles of it, barrels of it,
caves
to taste
it in, thermometers to check its temperature, glasses of every shape and size,
corkscrews ranging from the standard waiter’s friend to elaborately
engineered gadgets for the mechanically minded, silver tasting cups, key rings
disguised as bunches of grapes, decanters, pipettes, and enough alcoholic
literature to start a boozer’s library. I imagine you could buy a box of
Kleenex somewhere in town, but the chances are it would have a vintage chart
printed on it. Local industry is keenly supported, with one notable exception:
An official Burgundian
crachoir
doesn’t seem to exist. I had
been hoping to equip myself with something functional yet elegant, perhaps
engraved with the Beaune coat of arms, or an encouraging motto, or the
mayor’s autograph, but all we could find were inducements to swallow
rather than spit. To his credit, Sadler bore this disappointment well.

Even the medical community in Beaune encourages something a little stronger
than aspirin and Alka-Seltzer to relieve what ails you. We stopped at a
pharmacy near the main square and looked in disbelief at the contents of the
window. Normally, French pharmacies go in for tasteful displays of truncated
plastic torsos wearing trusses, or photographs of perfectly formed young women
toying with anticellulite devices, but not here.

In the center of the
window was a life-size human skeleton, made from cardboard. A sign beside the
grinning mouth of the skull read
With Moderation,
but this was
emphatically contradicted (for medical reasons, I assumed) by the rest of the
display, which consisted entirely of bottles of wine captioned with their
amazing restorative properties. If the pharmacist—a man after my own
heart—was to be trusted, almost every common ailment could be cured by
the appropriate wine.

A twinge of arthritis? Drink rosé.
Gallstones? Wash them away with a bottle or two of Sancerre.
Moulin-à-Vent would take care of your bronchitis, Krug champagne would
ward off the flu, and anyone with tuberculosis would benefit enormously from a
bottle of Mercurey. Tension would vanish with Pouilly-Fuissé, and, for
weight-watchers, daily doses of Côte de Beaune would make “daily
slimming certain.” Other afflictions were mentioned, some of an intensely
personal nature, and for everything there was an alcoholic remedy. With one
exception: Due either to oversight or tact, there was no mention of cirrhosis
of the liver.

There was just enough time before the first tasting of
the day to see what was going on in the stands and bars around the place
Carnot. It was barely 10:30 a.m., but enthusiasts were already taking a
prelunch snack of oysters and chilled Aligoté. A group of Japanese, who
obviously never left home without their personal chopsticks, were having some
difficulties extracting their oysters, watched with interest by a young man
wearing a helium balloon attached to the zipper on his fly. And then, with
thunderous drumrolls and piercing whistles, a procession of stilt-walkers took
over the square. The sound was enough to cause a sharp pain in the temples, and
we were happy to escape to the peace and quiet of a tasting in the
caves
of Bouchard Ainé & Fils.

The Bouchard people
have been growing and selling wine since 1750, and as you tour their cellars,
you cannot help thinking that this may be the perfect spot to sit out a nuclear
war or a presidential election. A million bottles, stored in racks, and endless
avenues of barrels stretched out and disappeared into the gloom. Famous
vineyards, great vintages, the scent of wine dozing toward maturity—the
hand felt incomplete, indeed naked, without a glass.

Our host took pity
on us and led us upstairs to the tasting room, where bottles and glasses were
laid out next to plates of
gougères.
These are small, light,
delicious nuggets of cheese-flavored puff pastry that have the effect of
softening and thus improving the taste of young wine in the mouth. They are
also salty enough to encourage a healthy thirst. But this was to be an exercise
in connoisseurship, not an occasion for guzzling. We were shown the stone sinks
against the wall and reminded that spitting was recommended for anyone who,
like us, had plans to attend the auction that afternoon.

It was
interesting to see how a minor sartorial touch separated the practiced
connoisseurs from the rest of us. Veteran tasters wore bow ties, or tucked
their ties inside their shirts. The wisdom of this became apparent as the first
salvo of spitting took place over the sink and the dangling end of the silk tie
belonging to a natty gentleman spitting next to me received a direct hit from a
shower of Pinot Noir.

“Young wines to begin with,” our host
had said. “Fish before caviar.” And so we started in 1998 and
worked our way backward, fortified by
gougères
and, as far as I
was concerned, finding it increasingly unreasonable to spit. Young wines were
no problem. The test came when age had smoothed out the rough edges and the
wine filled the mouth with a soft glow. Others may have found it possible to
consign a big, round, luscious 1988 Fixin to the sink without a sense of loss,
but not me. To distract myself, I studied the techniques of other tasters, and
they put my simple sniffing and swilling to shame.

In contrast to the
informal tasting of the night before, this was a serious ritual, conducted with
immense deliberation. First, the wine is held up to the light—in this
case, one of the candles in the tasting room—to assess its color. It is
then swirled around the glass to open it up to the air and bring out the
bouquet. The nose is applied to the top of the glass for several rapt moments,
with the obligatory furrowed brow. A mouthful is taken, the eyes are raised to
heaven, and the sound effects begin. Air is sucked into the mouth to join the
wine, making much the same noise as a child eating soup. The wine is
distributed throughout the mouth, assisted by flexing of the cheeks and
exaggerated chewing motions. More gurgling. Finally, when a thorough oral
investigation has taken place—the teeth having been rinsed, and the
palate imbued with taste sensations—out comes the mouthful to splatter
against the stone sink, your shoes, and your trousers. You can imagine how this
routine, repeated twenty or thirty times with breaks for learned discussion
about the character of the wines, can easily take up an entire morning.

We left the cave, and had to dodge a second squad of stilt-walkers who were
tottering down the street. Cars had been banned from the center of town for the
weekend, but there was still a risk of being run over by some of the
pedestrians. Many of them were carrying silver
taste vins
and weaving
erratically through the crowd with the preoccupied air of people determined not
to miss a single tasting. There were several to choose from—a full
day’s work if you were up to it and didn’t have a busy afternoon
ahead.

Over lunch, we were given a briefing by a young and impressively
well-informed lady from the Beaune tourist office. This, she told us, was the
oldest charity auction in the world, now in its 140th year. The prices paid for
the Hospices’ wines would be a guide to the prices of Burgundy generally,
and historically they went up. And up. And up. In 1990, the average price of a
pièce,
or lot, was 350,000 francs. By 1999, it had risen to
456,000 francs ($65,000). Total sales in the same period had gone from 21
million francs to 31 million (more than $4 million). Add to that the cost to
the buyer of keeping the wine for several years, bottling, shipping, and a
reasonable profit, and it is easy to see why those three-digit prices appear
with such horrifying regularity on restaurant lists.

Even so, there was
no shortage of buyers, as we saw when we arrived at the auction. The long, high
room was filled with them—mostly professional
négoçiants
from America, Britain, France, Germany, Hong
Kong, Japan, and Switzerland—all bent diligently over their catalogs.
There was also a scattering of black-clad refugees from show business, one or
two glamorous women of a certain age who would not have looked out of place at
a fashion show as they crossed their legs and adjusted their sunglasses against
the glare of publicity, and an assortment of gentlemen from the media,
festooned with electronic appendages.

Bidding began just after 2:30
p.m., with bids being picked up by
rabatteurs,
the auctioneer’s
assistants who were stationed at various points around the floor. Their task
wasn’t easy. I looked in vain for any exuberant or even obvious signals
from the buyers—a hand upraised, a wave of the catalog, a recurring
cough—but there was nothing that demonstrative. It was clear that some
very low-key sign language was being used, perhaps no more than the twitch of a
pencil or the tap of a nose. It was equally clear that this was not the place
to make expansive gestures. One false twitch could cost you dearly, and I
noticed that even the French were keeping their hands uncharacteristically
still while they muttered among themselves.

As the bidding continued,
the smile grew on the auctioneer’s face. Once again, prices were up. We
learned later that the average increase had been 11 percent. A good day for
charity, a good day for Burgundy, and, of course, a good day for Beaune.
Walking back through town after the auction, we passed the pharmacy with the
skeleton, and the skull’s grin seemed to be even wider, as if reflecting
the general mood of satisfaction with another record year.

Our day was
far from over. Dinner that night—a gala dinner at the Hôtel
Dieu—promised to be the most formal event of the weekend.
Tenue de
soirée,
or evening dress, was to be worn. We were advised to take a
large spoonful of olive oil, neat, to line the stomach in preparation for the
downpour of wine. This was not to be an evening of spitting. Another essential,
so we were told, was a pair of thick socks to ward off the chill from the
flagstone floor—a tip that was wasted on our wives, who felt that socks
and evening dresses were somehow not what they wanted to be seen in.

We
arrived, as requested on the invitation, at nine o’clock, making our way
through a double line of white-coated waiters into a magnificent barrel-vaulted
room hung with tapestries. Candlelight flickered on the bottles and glasses and
silverware that had been laid out on thirty-one long, immaculately arranged,
and surprisingly empty tables. Where was everybody? There was not a sign of our
three hundred fellow revelers, and it was then I remembered that punctuality on
formal occasions in France is seldom rewarded by a welcoming glass. Politeness
dictates that you wait until the other guests have arrived. They, naturally,
would prefer to avoid having to endure a long, dry waiting period, and
therefore they make a point of always being fashionably late. So there we were,
surrounded by glorious but untouchable bottles. “Meursault, Meursault
everywhere,” as Sadler said, “and not a drop to drink.”

This would pass, we told each other, and picked up the menus in search of a
little encouragement. There was a long and heartfelt sigh from Sadler as he
reached the page listing the wines that were on offer that evening:
thirty-eight of them, the great whites and reds of Burgundy, donated by growers
and
négociants,
the Hospices de Beaune, and the mayor. Such a
list you would find nowhere else, filled with
grand cru
Chablis,
Puligny-Montrachet, Echezeaux, Clos Vougeot—the kind of wine Alexandre
Dumas said should be drunk kneeling, with the head bared.

It was half
an hour before the last empty seats and the first empty glasses were filled.
The great room was a picture of elegance: the bejeweled ladies in long dresses
(some of them so long I suspected them of concealing thick socks), the
gentlemen in their black and white, hair and mustaches sleek with pomade, cuff
links and shirt studs twinkling. It was a scene of refined formality. It was
destined not to last.

The crack in the social ice came with the
appearance, early on in the dinner, of the cabaret, a male vocal group
introduced as Les Joyeux Bourguignons. They were dressed in their best long
aprons, red and green pom-poms at their necks in place of ties, glasses and
bottles in their hands instead of musical instruments. They set the tone for
the rest of the evening with their first song, a perennial local hit entitled
“Boire un Petit Coup C’est Agréable” (rough
translation: “It’s Great to Drink”). This was followed by an
audience-participation session as we were led into the first of many renditions
of the Burgundy supporters’ club battle cry.
La La
’s were
bellowed and hands were waggled. Almost at once, formality disappeared, never
to return.