I'll Drink to That (14 page)

Like Gnafron, Lyon’s food-loving, joke-loving population took to Beaujolais and adopted it as their very own wine, because it was good, plentiful and inexpensive. Beaujolais became as much a part of the city’s identity as the rich local argot and the peculiar drawl of the Lyon accent, as different from Paris chatter as Boston’s is from New York’s. The real-life Gnafrons who hung around bars and cafés with a finely tuned sense of what counted in life and what did not knew that November 11, Saint Martin’s day, was a pivotal moment in the year’s cycle of Beaujolais winemaking. Peasant empiricism, perhaps reinforced by a lingering belief in succor by divine intervention, had determined that each year’s new vintage, or at least a part of it, could be ready for drinking only two months or so after harvest. By common accord, the date they chose for this early release was heavily symbolic, the day of France’s patron saint. The good, charitable Martin, he who had given his cloak to a freezing pauper, could always be counted upon to bring success and comfort. In Lyon of the eighteenth century, when preserving wine was still a hit-or-miss matter of luck, the barrels in the drinking places were often oxidizing and turning sour by the end of summer, so the arrival of the new year’s fresh wine was an eagerly awaited event. Ritually, then, Lyonnais bar and bistro owners trekked north to Villefranche, Belleville and Beaujeu as of November 11 and fanned out through the countryside to taste, select, haggle and finally buy their barrels of new wine, or
primeur
, as they named it. Still fermenting its residual sugar, needles of CO
₂
burping, Champagne-style, through a straw stuck in the bung, the barrels were loaded aboard horse-drawn barges for the easy walk down to Lyon, coasting on a Saône so tranquil, as Julius Caesar himself had remarked in his
De Bellum Gallicum
nearly two millennia earlier, that you could hardly tell in which direction it was moving.

The closer to November 11 the
primeur
arrived in town, the better it was for the dedicated drinkers of Lyon, because there was this special quality about Beaujolais: it was good when it was young, even very young. Fully finished Beaujolais wines—especially the more complex
crus
—required six months or more of ageing, and by tradition were not released until they had “done their Easter,” but Lyonnais throats grew dry in November, and the rite of having a taste of the year’s wine in its juvenile state, still tingling on the tongue with CO
₂
, gradually became institutionalized as one of the city’s characteristic annual events.

For the best part of three centuries, while communication was slow and people tended to live out their lives in or near the areas of their birth, most outsiders were unaware of the Lyonnais’s November wine-drinkingeccentricity. Those who happened to come into contact with it probably gave the ritual no more thought than the indulgent smile reserved for local folklore. In modern times, though—that is, after World War II—everything accelerated, and the custom of drinking
primeur
in mid-November began spreading outward from Lyon to the rest of France and thence to the world at large. That proved to be both a blessing and a damnation for the peasant vignerons of the Beaujolais, because after enjoying the giddy pleasures of worldwide stardom they would soon be confronted with its hangover, in the form of a fundamental rule of the business: wine drinkers can be very fickle.

Niagaras of ink would be spilled, pro and con, on the subject of
primeur
in future years, but the essence of all the brouhaha was disconcertingly simple and innocent. It just so happened that the gamay variety of
Vitis vinifera
was happy on the Beaujolais hills, and its marriage with that particular
terroir
was such that its juice could be vinified extremely young into a pleasant, unpretentious little wine that was enjoyable to drink. This happy state of affairs, it appeared, was unique to the Beaujolais gamay. It didn’t work with the pinot of the great Burgundies, and even less with the multiple
cépages
of the noble Bordeaux. (The tannic attack of a new Bordeaux was “like having a porcupine in your mouth,” remarked Professor Garrier with a shudder, recalling a tasting experience he had lived in a moment of departure from his academic duties.) When, all the way back in the fifteenth century, the Burgundian Philip the Good (1396-1467, grandson of Philip the Bold) presciently warned that the wine of the gamay grape was dangerous because “it flatters foreigners” in its young state, he apparently had assumed that no genuine Frenchman could be taken in by a wine made by and fit for serfs. But the Lyonnais people, the most gastronomically inclined of all French citizens, knew better: the serfs were no dummies. So they stuck to their little ad hoc November
primeur
pleasure, grateful for the cheer it lent to the cold, dreary days leading up to Christmas. That little eccentricity was destined to have an astonishing surge in later years.

The French Revolution gave a serious boost to the special relationshipbetween Lyon and the wines of the Beaujolais. The newly installed republican government desperately needed money, and one of first steps it took to harvest ready cash was to sell off communal grounds, Church holdings, and the estates of landed gentry who had fled abroad to save their necks from the guillotine’s hungry bite. There was plenty to sell: depending on the region, 20 to 30 percent of France’s land had been owned by clergy and nobility. In principal, this big sell-off ought to have immediately endowed the French countryside with hundreds of thousands of new, individually owned farms of peasants released from serfdom. In reality, though, what happened was what always happens in such situations: most of the land fell into the hands of wealthy speculators. Rather more rare were the prosperous peasants who had laid aside enough money to pay for newly released acreage. Consequently, the greatest part of the confiscated lands fell into the hands of Lyonnais bourgeois—but they had neither the time, the strength nor the inclination to work it themselves, and any casual hands whom they might think of hiring were unlikely to possess winemaking expertise. They were, then, obliged to deal with the peasant winemakers who had been there all along. The result was a large expansion of the fifty-fifty “half-fruit”
vigneronnage
system, as Beaujolais peasants began making wine for absentee landowners sitting in Lyon townhouses rather than for locally resident nobility—but now half of the production became theirs. Squirreling away their petty savings year by year, often in the form of gold coins hidden in the proverbial straw mattresses, more and more of them managed to fulfill the peasants’ eternal dream of actually getting full title to their very own land. Patiently, hectare by hectare, year by year, they bought up vine space as the bourgeois shaved off sections of their big holdings, creating the patchwork of small family exploitations, most of them no more than five or six hectares, that still characterizes the Beaujolais today. Often this patchwork was split into odd shards—perhaps a bit of land in Villié-Morgon, a bit in Lancié or a bit in Chiroubles, as the
parcelles
became available. Beaujolais vineyards are not always handily and contiguously disposed around vignerons’ houses, and it is common for winegrowers to work several different fields in different
terroirs,
some owned, some rented.

By the twentieth century, the Lyonnais absentee landowners had disposed of most of their properties in the Beaujolais, keeping only the
résidences secondaires
they had built for summertime rustication with their families. The symbiosis between the city and the wine country had taken a new turn. From landowner to sharecropper, the social model changed to independent artisan interacting with the occasional visitor from the big city.

It was a curious relationship. The Lyonnais and the typical Beaujolais vigneron were fundamentally quite similar in character, and in fact many of the Lyonnais were descended from the pure Beaujolais stock of ancestors who had trekked down to the big city to make their fortunes. Both sides of the divide were marked by a wicked sense of humor and a penchant for pranks and shenanigans—a penchant unerringly encouraged by a procession of
canons
of Beaujolais—but the traditional rural-urban standoff was inevitably present nonetheless. The city guy wondered whether the crafty peasant was trying to pull the wool over his eyes one way or another, and the country guy was always a bit defensive lest the city guy display any sense of superiority, with his money and his urbane ways. The Lyonnais loved to visit the Beaujolais on weekends, all the more so if he owned a house there; the denizen of the Beaujolais enjoyed nothing more than inviting him into his
caveau
and getting him good and drunk.

But there was one aspect of life about which the two were in total agreement, even harmony: the planning, preparation and consumption of food. If Lyon had become the gastronomic center of France (and thereby the world, of course; no one ever had any doubt about that), it was at least partly due to its proximity to the wine country that it cherished. Because there was this that had to be said for the Beaujolais peasantry: they were poor, most of them, but when the time came to celebrate special occasions, they knew how to pull out all the stops and do it with style.

Madame Rolland, a leading
passionaria
of the French Revolution (who in 1793 paid with her head for being in the wrong political wing at the wrong time), remarked in one of her letters that in the Beaujolais “the least bourgeois house a bit above the common offers meals more delicious than the richest houses of Amiens and a great number of very wealthy ones in Paris. Ugly little house, delicate table.”

Pity she hadn’t gone all the way down the social order with her slumming and mingled with the peasantry, because there she would have learned about
really
serious eating, of the kind that Papa Bréchard remembered from his youth. It wasn’t exactly delicate. “The meals lasted twelve hours,” he recalled, “if not twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours was a little long, but twelve was the minimum.”

The marathon chowdown he was describing was not the most frequent, but it was the most important one—the village wedding. Naturally this had to be celebrated with the utmost vigor, but weddings were occasional events that happened at unpredictable times. More reliably fixed on the calendar were children’s First Communions, Christmas, Easter and the
fête des vendanges,
the blowout meal cooked up by vignerons’ wives for the grape pickers after the final baskets of the harvest had been brought in. During the long days of grape picking, the harvesters were fed well enough with good, traditional country fare—cabbage soup with fatback, potato and bean salads, omelets, noodles, pumpkin flan and the like—but when all the grapes were in, the poor peasants of the Beaujolais threw aside the frugality of their everyday lives and briefly entered the Lucullan world of Roman emperors. Professor Garrier posits that the magnificence of the harvest celebration had a triple significance: first, in an unwitting hangover from the magical invocations of their pagan ancestors of pre-Christian days, as a kind of propitiatory gesture to ensure that future harvests would be as plenteous as the meal being offered; and then two others which could not possibly be more practical and down to earth—to outshine the neighbors, and to make such an impression on the harvesters that they would be certain to return for more of the same the following year.

The typical post-harvest feast always centered around that rarest and most luxurious of comestibles: meat. Unlike the usual peasant paucity, here an orgy of meat was glutted to overdose proportions, prepared in the three classical manners. In the first course it was boiled: either chicken or beef in the form of a pot-au-feu, ritually preceded by a bowl of its own broth. Next was a meat dish slow-cooked in sauce (
boeuf bourguignon
was a perennial favorite)
,
and finally a big roast, usually veal. With each dish, the housewife presented her personal vegetable and starch creations, and a selection of tarts and pastries wound the meal up in proper splendor. Fired to enthusiasm by the profusion of wine, the guests sang and danced well into the night, for as long as their energy lasted. Anything less than a celebration of these proportions would have been considered vaguely shameful, a loss of face in the village.

If the
fête des vendanges
was a series of individual events celebrated separately at each vineyard, the weddings concerned the entire village. “There were hundreds of guests,” Papa Bréchard recalled. “It was a mobilization! We borrowed crockery and dishes in every house in the village. Everyone helped out. It was the local festival.”

As it still frequently is in all of France today, the typical Beaujolais wedding was a double affair, and by custom it took place in the morning, in order to leave the afternoon free for feasting. The first stop was the town hall for the official republican ceremony, pronounced by
Monsieur le Maire
who, resplendent in his tricolor sash, married the young couple before the state. The marriage before God came next, in the church, with
Monsieur le Curé
saying an impressively lengthy mass, blessing the union and enjoining the couple to raise their children as good Catholics. Then the feast began at the house of the bride’s parents.

“We sat down at 2:30 or 3:00,” Papa Bréchard wrote. “The wedding feast started rather late, in general, but it lasted at least until noon the next day. That was a minimum. These meals were truly Pantagruelian: abundant, varied, solid, with all the meats and all the fowl. To tell the truth, it was completely exaggerated. . . . We ate enormous amounts. Chickens, ducks, venison, huge chunks of meat of every origin, roasts that would be enough to scare people today. No one made a menu with less than six main courses without counting the desserts, also extremely abundant—six main courses, to which they added the indispensable vegetables. But the essential basis of it was fowl, rabbits and venison. Hares were abundant in the country then, and partridges, too. We ate a lot of them. Then there were also legs of lamb, and roast beef in industrial quantities. It was enough to knock you out.”