I'll Drink to That (28 page)

Over the next years Georges would go on to systematize his promotional literature into a regularly scheduled succession of annual publications of considerable expense and sophistication. Choosing a central theme, he hired professional photographers, writers and layout people to produce lavish representations of his wines and the beauties of the Beaujolais. The principal publication was and is always a large, magazine-sized brochure of thirty pages or so, a kind of Beaujolais yearbook on glossy paper, where a profusion of gorgeous color photographs of the region’s endlessly varied landscape is backed up with black-and-white historical snapshots and illustrations from centuries past. Four lesser booklets,
La Trinquée,
smaller in size but also heavily illustrated, go out in the mail to his regular customers winter, spring, summer and fall, discreetly accompanied by a price list and order sheet. Georges himself writes the critique of the
millésime,
the year’s vintage. He never tells a lie, but he has the wine dealer’s indispensable talent for presenting even a lousy year as one whose bottles any self-respecting oenophile needs to order for his cellar right now.

Georges is clearly proud of this literature, and he gives it his closest attention. Unquestionably, the man has an eye. Art director manqué, he spreads print and graphics over such fine-quality paper that one is reluctant to throw them away, in spite of their clear commercial nature. The closest I have ever seen Georges come to boasting was when he told me, with barely disguised satisfaction, that in certain circles his brochures have become collectors’ items. Few people would ever be tempted to collect used cardboard boxes, but the cartons in which he ships his wines from Romanèche are so prettily printed—luminous floral motifs on virginal white backgrounds, as classy and tasteful as a Dior wrapping—that the foot stomps them with regret and the hand hesitates to burn them. Duboeuf never leaves you quite alone.

That year 1970 proved to be pivotal in several ways for Georges and for the Beaujolais in general. The harvest had been healthy, and with a wine that was good, frank and straightforward, overall production rose to the nice round figure of a million hectoliters. More significant, though, was the fact that for the first time ever, fully one hundred thousand of these were vinified as
primeur.
Beaujolais Nouveau was taking off. Now it was a hit with Parisians, thanks to those refugee journalists who had spent besotted war years philosophizing in the back rooms of Lyon bars and
bouchons,
and demand was on the rise everywhere else. The progression was telling. In 1955, somewhat less than fifteen thousand hectoliters of
primeur
had left the Beaujolais in November, and most of that had made the traditional ride down the river to Lyon. By 1960 the early wine had become much better known, but even so only forty thousand hectoliters of wine had been sold as Beaujolais Nouveau. Now, with the new decade, the figure had reached a hundred thousand—10 percent of production!—and everyone was wondering if the phenomenon had peaked and might be heading downhill after that.

They needn’t have worried. Beaujolais Nouveau was only at the start of an explosive international career, and no one was to accompany that success around the world like Georges Duboeuf.

VIII

LE BEAUJOLAIS NOUVEAU EST ARRIVÉ

S
trange thing, fashion. Suddenly entire nations go berserk for a book, a plastic cube, a homely doll or a certain manner of dressing and grooming. Someone tries something a bit new or a bit different, another picks it up, word gets around, a few articles appear and maybe some TV, more hear about it, and the swell gathers. Before you quite know how or why, the famous tipping point arrives: the swell becomes a craze, and a new fashion is born. Say what you will about New York, London or Tokyo, but the hub and the nub of fashion—
la mode, la vogue, le style, le chic
— is and probably always will be Paris, because no one seems to sniff out trends the way the French do. It was in mid-November of 1970 that the trend for drinking Beaujolais, and more specifically the year’s new wine, the
primeur
, gained the status of a true fashion in France. The spark that officialized it was a mere slip of paper, a little yellow handbill, or banner, containing just five words:
Le Beaujolais Nouveau Est Arrivé.
The new Beaujolais has arrived.

Suddenly the plate glass windows of cafés all over Paris were plastered with yellow and red stickers, partially obstructing the view through to the bar, where the knots of smokers were arguing above the din of the inevitable pinball machine, that American invention that the French adopted with almost unseemly enthusiasm. In the more high-tone restaurants, small inserts, table tent cards or handwritten addenda appeared on the menus to announce the same happy event. No one knows exactly who coined that simple but oddly compelling little slogan (there are several versions of its paternity), but it was just right, and the Comité Interprofessionnel in Villefranche was happy to print up stickers by the thousands and provide them free with shipments of the new wine.

It was just right because it finally indicated a bit of good news for the cold, wet and disgruntled Parisians. Good news because in Paris everybody was fed up and bad-tempered by mid-November: the long summer vacation was a distant memory, the tans had disappeared, the weather was lousy—the damp, the chill, the slush—and the Christmas holiday was still six weeks away. In America, Thanksgiving can always be counted on to bust up the autumnal blues, but there was nothing like that in Paris, only more rain, more political quarrels and probably more strikes, too. The arrival of the year’s new wine on November 15 broke into the routine like a sunburst, offering a change, a diversion and an excuse to push the door of a bar and down a
ballon
of optimism juice. It wasn’t a profound wine—it was never meant to be—but it was pleasant, tasty, invigorating and fun, and it could be drunk without delay or afterthought. By the mid-seventies, tasting the new wine had become very much like a social ritual, and there was scarcely an early winter business lunch in Paris that was not washed down with a bottle of
primeur.

What the Parisians were discovering was what the Lyonnais had always known, of course, and they threw themselves at it with a joy of discovery that looked suspiciously proprietary: our thing. Wine-wise Lyonnais, seeing “their” tradition being kidnapped, grumped that this rapture of possession was excessive and typical of the imperialistic manner of the capital city. What the Lyonnais felt didn’t matter, though, because commerce and fashion had taken the game over, and there was an eternal rule in play: if Paris liked something today, the rest of France would like it tomorrow, Europe the day after tomorrow and the whole world right after that.

And that’s exactly what happened. Through the next decades, as the vogue for Beaujolais Nouveau rippled out in concentric circles from Paris and demand grew more insistent everywhere, production of the new wine followed an upward curve to satisfy that demand as naturally as day follows night. By 1975 production of
primeur
had risen to 139,000 hectoliters, by 1982 to 400,000 and 1985 to 516,000—more than half of the region’s entire output. By the mid-nineties, more than 60 percent of the entire annual output of the basic Beaujolais crop and half of Beaujolais-Villages was leaving the vinifying sheds as
primeur
. (The difference between normal, traditional Beaujolais and
primeur
is essentially a matter of the time the grapes spend macerating in fermentation vats before being pressed: about four to five days instead of seven to eight. The ten
crus
are not concerned one way or another; by common consent backed by INAO regulations, these bigger, more complex wines are never vinified as
primeur.
)

Over the years since that 1970 benchmark of one hundred thousand hectoliters, Beaujolais Nouveau has gone from the status of little-known but congenial regional curiosity to worldwide smash hit, one of France’s best performing export items since the invention of Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot. Faced with this totally unexpected triumph, the peasant vignerons who made the wine could only wonder at their good fortune, shake their heads and repeat the observation that one anonymous member of their caste had spoken with blunt clarity back in the late sixties: “
Le vin est bu, payé et pissé dans les vingt-quatre heures.
” The wine is drunk, paid for and pissed within twenty-four hours.

The period was unusually propitious for this gratifying situation. The three decades of
les trente glorieuses
were bringing what appeared to be a permanently growing rush of wealth to France and her partners of the European Union; the liberal democracies of the West—big alcohol consumers, all of them—were mostly at peace and eager for novelty; the nascent phenomenon now known as globalization was spreading goods, services and profits with unprecedented speed and ease in every direction; and entire populations were learning to enjoy the superfluous necessities that are the basis of The Good Life. And now they had the money to pay for them, too.

Things came together. In Paris, two smart young journalists named Henri Gault and Christian Millau, working for a now-defunct Parisian daily paper, made a hit with readers by writing lively, often funny and sometimes outrageous restaurant reviews that broke with the solemn, respectful style of traditional critics. They quit the paper, founded their own gastronomic magazine and put out a yearly restaurant guide bearing their own names. Hanging around bright young chefs like Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, Alain Chapel and the Troisgros brothers, they invented a slogan that proved to be a pure stroke of promotional genius: nouvelle cuisine, they called the cooking they liked.

What was nouvelle cuisine? No one quite knew, but it influenced— no, it didn’t just influence, it
evangelized
—a whole generation of chefs. Creativity was one of its tenets, of course (it always is), along with artistic presentation (huge plates, food arranged as precious little ornaments) and originality (unusual, frequently gimmicky combinations of ingredients), but above all nouvelle cuisine had to be fresh, done at the last minute and light. Light was the most important buzzword of all, because Gault and Millau personally tested as many restaurants as they could, and they were sated with the surfeit of delicacies that ambitious cooks hurled at them. So if nouvelle cuisine was light, it was also fun and it was new—just like the Beaujolais Nouveau that had appeared on the Parisian scene at almost exactly the same moment. They complemented each other perfectly—a match made in heaven. New cuisine and New Beaujolais held hands, liked each other, got gastronomically married and flew around the world in an idyllic commercial honeymoon.

The best part was that it was almost a free ride for the winemakers and distributors—no massive ad campaigns were needed, no expensive promotions and no endorsements from high-priced public figures. The Comité Interprofessionnel in Villefranche rarely faced investments weightier than printing up their red and yellow flyers and equipping the Compagnons du Beaujolais with a few train or plane tickets for ad hoc appearances, along with an adequate supply of bottles, which they got free from the dealers and
caves coopératives
in any case. Unlike Burgundy’s more famous, richer and infinitely more hoity-toity Chevaliers du Tastevin in Beaune, the foot soldiers of the Compagnons were mostly simple vignerons with real vineyard mud on their shoes, who took time off from their chores to promote Beaujolais by making quasi- ethnographic exhibits of themselves, dressed in their folklore suits: black jacket with wine red buttons, green cellar master’s apron, black porkpie hat with green ribbon, and a profusion of pins and logos. Peasant amateurs of street-level showbiz, they appeared singly or in groups at railroad stations, airports, department stores or any other venue guaranteed to attract plenty of passing people, sang their drinking songs, handed out free samples and generally created an atmosphere of country bonhomie that proved to be far more effective than the smooth, professionally smiling hostesses that PR agencies trotted out for most giveaway promotions. And the atmosphere wasn’t entirely make-believe, either. The vignerons really did enjoy visiting the big city, and their joviality was unfeigned after a matutinal nip or two of their own goods. Only the most intractably irascible of Parisians could have failed to be cheered by the amiable bucolic spectacle, the free drinks that the Compagnons provided, and the rich, chewy syllables and rolling peasant r’s of their pronunciation, deliberately exaggerated for the city slickers. When the vogue of
primeur
really got into gear and the demand spread from Europe to America, Japan and, later, China, a few of the luckier Compagnons got free rides to the faraway places that their forebears of only one generation earlier could never have dreamed of visiting. The tickets cost the Comité Interprofessionnel a few thousand francs or euros, but the outlay was peanuts compared to what a full-blown professional advertising and promotional campaign would have cost.

“People always think that Beaujolais has a huge budget for promotion,” said Michel Rougier. “But it’s not true. Of all the world’s great wines, we’re the ones who have done the least marketing for our product. We don’t have that kind of money. It was the press that made Beaujolais known throughout the world. We just accompanied the phenomenon. You know, it all comes down to that early release in November—it made a good story. Take away that early release, and there’s no Beaujolais Nouveau.”

Back in the late seventies, at the height of the
primeur
craze, I briefly met with the export director at Piat, still a bigger, more important dealer than Duboeuf at the time. His tone of bemusement bespoke the breadth of the historical bonanza that had befallen him and the wares he was charged with putting into the commercial circuit. “It just sort of sells automatically,” he said, the happy man.

It couldn’t go on that way forever, of course, but while the iron was hot it would have been foolish not to strike, and down in Romanèche Georges Duboeuf recognized the trend for the potential world-beater that it was. Now, once again, things came together just right: there was a perfect match between one man’s inclinations and the hoops that Mother Nature could be persuaded to jump through in the Beaujolais vineyards. Because that is what all agriculture is about, after all, whether it be soybeans, barley or grapes—hoops. Bending nature to jump the way you want her to go.