I'll Drink to That (23 page)

Poitevin’s relief at renewing commercial ties with Les Vins Georges Duboeuf was visible and unconcealed, and time and time again over years of talking with vignerons I have encountered this same sense of triumph and/or trepidation in relation to the company in Romanèche-Thorins, because selling to Duboeuf is the gold standard of the Beaujolais, the signal that your wine has passed the test of a maddeningly difficult and demanding taster who can’t be fooled, knows exactly what he wants and recognizes it immediately when it comes into his glass. Being dropped is almost a mark of shame, like being demoted to the minor leagues. And if Duboeuf can drop a childhood friend like Poitevin, he can do it to anyone.

In the early years, the situation was not as portentous as all that, because it was Georges who was hustling and scraping by on a perilous shoestring budget, often obliged to improvise as he went along. One of the first important deals for his fledgling business, thanks to a recommendation from Paul Blanc, was a double order for Pouilly-Fuissé, from the Hôtel de Paris et de la Poste in the ancient cathedral town of Sens, at the northern edge of Burgundy, and Chez Pauline, a still-famous Parisian restaurant on rue Villedo near the Opera. The only problem with the transaction was that he had no way of delivering the wine. That was where a bit of Beaujolais folklore entered the picture.

“I hitched a ride with my plumber friend Constant Charbonnier,” Georges remembered. “He was a good friend, Constant, quite a guy— extraordinary guy, really, very clever. His father had been a
patti
who used to go around the countryside fixing and re-tinning pots and pans. He was from the Auvergne, like all of them. Starting from nothing, he worked his way up, became a plumber and roofer, and earned pretty good money. Constant had this old Renault Juva 4 delivery van. He helped me out in those days, and we did lots of deliveries together, all over the place. What a talker he was—he had this unbelievable spiel— he talked and talked and talked. Great guy. We got to know a lot of restaurants together, with our deliveries.”

They got to know a few girls, too. Georges’ austere features softened into a dreamy half smile as he recalled the theatrical skills of his plumber friend chatting up three girls in the Puy-de-Dôme, which is about as close to nowhere as you can get in France. Assuring them that in spite of their beat-up old delivery van, he and Georges were in fact young men of cosmic distinction and merit—destiny’s darlings—he persuaded them that they were worthy of the most tender affections right now. The spectacle of the motormouthed plumber and the grave, silent beanpole vigneron, both of them barely removed from their teens, must have lent a welcome breath of exotica to the young ladies’ dreary provincial circumstances, because Georges suggests that Constant’s rhetoric was not altogether without success.

Not long after this triumph of bucolic libertinage, a capital encounter occurred that was to shape the entire future of Georges’ career: in 1955, while he was at home on leave from the army, a buyer for Alexis Lichine appeared at Chaintré.

Today, many wine devotees may have forgotten the fundamental role that Lichine, a Russian-born American wine expert, entrepreneur and writer, played in introducing the culture of wine to his adopted country. “He taught Americans to drink wine,” wrote the eminent
New York Times
wine critic Frank Prial. A genuine and passionate connoisseur, Lichine was a speaker of many languages, a charmer, a romantic and a yarn-spinner with a fabulist’s gift for persuasion. Twenty years older than Georges and fairly glittering with polished urbanity, Lichine immediately won the starry-eyed admiration of his near-exact opposite, the quiet, diligent, meditative and monolingual son of the Beaujolais peasantry whose world travels had carried him no farther than Switzerland, Marseille and the Puy-de-Dôme.

“He fascinated me as a personage,” Georges told me. “This Slav, this Russian Jew, was someone completely out of the ordinary. He was an excellent taster, he was a fervent wine lover, and he had the gift of words—he could absolutely bewitch people with his eloquence. Everything about him was elegance and charm, and it was never vulgar— always first class. There was a certain noblesse there, a stature, a manner of speaking, a look in his eye, a bearing and a presence. He was a dominator, a
séducteur.
It was spellbinding. He was miles above me. His personality squashed me underfoot.”

Listening to Georges telling of the early days of his relationship with Lichine, a parallel springs inescapably to mind:
La Cigale et la Fourmi,
La Fontaine’s archetypal tale of the hedonistic, singing grasshopper and the industrious ant—and exactly as the moral of La Fontaine’s little poem suggests, it was Georges’ steady, unremitting industry that would eventually carry him to even greater heights in the business than his suave mentor. (In truth, there’s a good dose of the grasshopper in Duboeuf, too, but he keeps it carefully concealed most of the time.)

Glib and beguiling though he may have been, Lichine also had solid credentials. He had begun in the profession during the Great Depression, as national sales manager for the equally dashing and polyglot American wine merchant and writer Frank Schoonmaker. With Schoonmaker he was the moving force behind establishing the “varietals” system, the practice of identifying American wines by the name of the single variety of grapes from which they were made. The system was neat, handy and simple, a marketing tool that went over well with customers and was destined to spread through South America as well, and then on to Australia and New Zealand. Moreover, this manner of naming wines was perfectly logical, because it broke the bad old habit of identifying American wines analogously, by their resemblance to French counterparts, however vague that resemblance might have been. The jugs of California wines that had been called Burgundy, Chablis or Beaujolais were far more appropriately labeled Pinot, Chardonnay or Gamay. In today’s globalized marketplace, when New World wines are making serious inroads into France’s near-monopoly of the fine wine trade, the varietal system has proved to be an outstanding sales weapon in the head-to-head competition with INAO’s far more complex, often confusing AOC model. The average wine buyer, it turns out, prefers fast and easy to slow and complicated.

Lichine’s credentials were impeccable, then, but he was also possessed of an ego of proportionate size, and he and Schoonmaker split up, as inevitably they were doomed to. Opening his own competing import company, Lichine set up in France and found that the choice Château Prieuré in Bordeaux’s Margaux district was up for sale at a bargain price. He snapped it up, instantly renamed it Château Prieuré-Lichine and spent a small fortune beautifying grounds and dwelling, while totally making over the vineyard. He presided over his domain like a prince, breaking the routine of commerce by throwing gala parties for the press, local dignitaries and assorted Beautiful People. Soon he went on to half ownership of the even more prestigious Château Lascombes as well, all the while churning out books and articles that further burnished an already enviable international renown. The icing on the cake of his celebrity came in 1964, when he married the retired but still glamorous Hollywood actress Arlene Dahl. If there ever was one person who, in the fifties and sixties, could be labeled Mr. Wine USA, it was Alexis Lichine. The contrast with the peasant winemakers of the Beaujolais could not have been greater. No wonder young Georges Duboeuf was impressed.

On furlough from the army on that fateful afternoon in 1955, Georges was as yet unaware of all these trappings of glory when Lichine’s buyer paid a visit to Chaintré. His arrival there was by itself testimony to the efficiency of Paul Blanc’s pass-the-word information system: a friend in the restaurant trade had tipped him off about the excellent Pouilly-Fuissé of the brothers Duboeuf. At first, Georges—cagey, perhaps a bit suspicious, reluctant to part with his last remaining bit of stock—gave him the brush-off. Sorry, we’re all out, he said. But Roger had apparently intuited something about the buyer that Georges hadn’t, and he pointedly reminded his brother that they had stashed a couple of barrels in a cousin’s cellar in Crêches. With that, he had no choice but to sell, and the deal was on. He brought the barrels back, bottled the wine, and a few days later the buyer shipped it away. Had it not been for Roger’s timely intervention, Georges might have missed the first great defining stage of his career. The association with Lichine was to take him beyond France and introduce him to the world at large.

While that momentous professional step forward was still lying over the horizon, Georges made his first serious material acquisition, a boxy, gray, pig-snouted, old Citroën “Tube” delivery van with a sliding side door, four antiquated, roaring cylinders, a crash gearbox and natural air-conditioning via seams in the corrugated bodywork. The days of hitching rides with Constant Charbonnier were over.

It was this capacious, all-purpose sherpa of a truck that allowed Georges to break new ground once again when, in 1956, he became France’s first custom bottler. Like his idea of setting up his own wine-tasting
caveau,
this was something that no one had ever thought of before. His scouting trips had located dozens of vignerons making wonderful wine, much too good to disappear into the anonymity of the big
négociants
’ common vats, but they had neither the skills nor the equipment for bottling it. The eureka idea hit Georges at age twenty-three— why not come and do it for them, at their vineyards?

In the noble vineyards of the Côte d’Or, and especially in the rich, swanking world of the Bordeaux châteaux where Lichine was swimming like a fish in home waters, the winegrowers commonly bottled their own production because they could—they were wealthy enough to afford good professional equipment. Estate bottling, the operation was called. (The French phrase is
mise en bouteille au château.
) The vignerons of the Beaujolais, on the other hand, were neither noble nor rich, and definitely could
not
afford the equipment. And there were hardly any “estates” in the Beaujolais; mostly it was just peasant properties. When Georges went to the business registry office in Mâcon to get a commercial license for his new venture, he discovered that there was no category for him to sign up for. He didn’t even know what to call his new line of business. I guess we’ll say
façonnier embouteilleur
, then, if that’s all right with you, suggested the bureaucrat: “custom bottler.” Fine, said Georges with a shrug.

Georges was the first of this new category and, at the time, the only one in France. His roving status allowed him to break free of Chaintré and deliver his pumps, pipes, filters and bottles to where the wine awaited him. It proved to be a masterstroke. The vignerons whose wines he had already selected—men like Siraudin, Poitevin, Savoye and all the others—were flattered by the personal attention, allured by the prospect of a new sales outlet and proud to see their wines receiving individual care, then leaving the property under their own labels.

No matter how much mechanization and industrial technology may mark its creation elsewhere, wine cannot be just another product for men of this sort. Wine is special in France, weighted as it is with centuries of tradition and mystic symbolism that not even the aggressively secular Enlightenment could shake off. Nowhere is this truer than in the Beaujolais. No one who has spent any time with the best of its smallhold craftsmen can doubt the sincere, almost paternal pride that they invest in the artifact whose birth they spend their lives attending through the endlessly repeated yearly cycle of seasons, always the same and yet, with each vintage, always different.

The analogy to parenthood is axiomatic, but it is no less true, and you see it again and again. Take Paulo Cinquin, for instance. He is a sixtyish, tough-talking, illusionless reformed hippie, distinguished by a huge shock of graying black hair, piercing ice blue eyes and the impatient, no-nonsense manner of a CEO who would fire his own mother for the good of the company—but he insists on growing the seedlings himself for his vines in Régnié, and every year at harvest time he sleeps for ten to twelve nights in his cellar to keep constant watch over the baby wine bubbling away in his vats.

And then there was Saint Joseph. Joseph Boulon he was by the administrative records, but his intemperate, some might have said dissolute ways—he enjoyed a touch of the grape—had gained him the angelic sobriquet. His place of business was a remarkably unkempt farm-vineyard in Corcelles-en-Beaujolais, complete with the wooden shoes, the picture-postcard slothful cat and the imperialistic rooster strutting at liberty. In spite of or because of the disorder, Saint Joseph had the talent for producing, year in and year out, a perfect Beaujolais that caused envy kilometers around. When I first plunged into the penumbra of his
caveau,
I discovered a meager, gaunt little man in a sweaty undershirt with a Gauloise dangling from his lip, seated next to a gas-fed space heater whose orange glow was directed against the wall of a big storage vat containing an important part of his newly fermented wine.

“Il a la fièvre,”
Boulon said. He’s got a fever.

I never did get the news about how well or how quickly Baby 1978 recovered from its infant catarrh, but if anyone could have pulled that batch back to health, I am confident that it would have been Joseph Boulon. It was people like him who constituted the first basic address book—a few dozen names—that underpinned the young Duboeuf’s early steps in the business of buying and selling the wines of the Beaujolais. There would be a lot more of them in the future, along with a modicum of twists, turns and detours on the path to success, and it was not until he had reached the age of thirty-one that the company called Les Vins Georges Duboeuf came into official existence.

That did not mean, though, that he wasn’t keeping himself busy— au contraire, he never stopped. But he did slow down a bit in 1957, just long enough to persuade Rolande, the pretty, dynamic baker’s daughter in Juliénas, that she would be better off as his wife. Rolande knew plenty about wine because her mother’s family were vignerons who produced their own Juliénas. When her father wasn’t baking baguettes and croissants, he tended his own little vineyard, too. And there was something else, something unusual about her character: she was the only person in the world who was willing to work as hard and as long as Georges Duboeuf. Well, almost as hard and long.