I'll Drink to That (35 page)

“You know,” he said, wine red of leg and arm as he hopped nimbly down from his perch in the press and set to work reconnecting his labyrinth of hoses before clamping the press closed and hitting the switch to set it into action, “there’s always a bit of difficulty. Things never go exactly right, but it’s not work if things go right all the time, is it? I always want to have some difficulty.”

The man is maddening, because there is this about him: he really means it. Nothing, it seems, can defeat the good nature coded into his genes. Whether out harvesting with Choucroute, Zorro and the others, vinifying his grapes with his collection of archaic equipment or snatchinga half-consumed chicken leg from the plate of a skinny German youth of his harvesting crew (waste not, want not), his incorrigibly positive attitude exudes such an air of optimism and goodwill that spending a few hours in his presence is enough to make you think that winemaking is a cinch.

It isn’t. If a third of the region’s vignerons have given up and walked away from their vines since the glory days of the seventies and eighties, if thousands of hectoliters of unsold wine have passed ignominiously to the distillation plants, if reports of suicides are more and more frequent and if several hundred of the Beaujolais yeomanry have petitioned local authorities to go on the dole, it’s not because the wine trade is easy. And yet a trade it is, and it can support—even support well—those who are more enterprising and more energetic than the average. Georges Duboeuf built a world-straddling commercial empire without any studies beyond age sixteen, never darkening the door of the least business school; and Marcel Pariaud, who left school at fourteen to help his father in the vines and struck out on his own at sixteen (hired laborer, 8 francs a day, or slightly more than $1.50), rose to become mayor of his village, Lancié, at age twenty-seven, served for twenty-four years straight while tending his vines and making his wine at the same time and finally entered his sixth decade comfortably well off and looking forward to a moderately prosperous retirement. All things being equal, each man had succeeded similarly in his own niche, and it was for the same reason: both were governed by the same qualities of peasant good sense, unbending honesty and an extraordinary capacity for work.

For the public at large Marcel Pariaud is as obscure as Duboeuf is renowned, of course, but they are brothers in the sense that both are cut from the same vigneron cloth and represent the essence of what is the best in the Beaujolais. Fittingly, unsurprisingly, it was Duboeuf who had set me on the trail of Marcel in the first place—go see him, he’s a good man. Quality knows quality. Duboeuf has introduced me to dozens of other winemakers over the years, but none of them can stand better than Marcel, I think, as a model for his caste. So for want of space to introduce them all, let his story represent the thousands of smallholder vignerons who make the Beaujolais what it is today.

“We weren’t very well off,” he explained when I asked him about his childhood in the forties and fifties. “Times weren’t easy right after the war, and I can remember the days of bread rationing tickets. But we had a horse, which was more than a lot of other people who still had to do most of their work by hand. I began learning to plow at twelve. In 1958 I got my
certificat d’études,
my grade school diploma. I was fourteen when I came back from school and showed it to my father. With that, he took my book bag and put it away. ‘No more school now,’ he said. ‘Go out and hay the horse.’ From that time on, my life was in the vines.

“We had three cows, and in the worst years they were what kept us going. In 1951 and 1953 there were hailstorms, and in 1954 there was a drought. In 1955 the hail hit us again, and in 1957 worms ate most of the grapes. Things started to get better after 1960, but I can tell you we were happy to have the cows. I used to lead them out to graze by the roadside, because there were no real pastures—vines filled up all the available land. Sometimes my father hired himself out to plow with our horse in exchange for permission to graze the cows on other people’s land.

“I suppose you could call those hard times, but I don’t regret what we went through. Not at all. We had our pleasures, and the slightest little plus made us happy. When it rained, that meant we might find mushrooms, and that meant something like meat for the table. Same thing with the snails we gathered in the fields. Sundays, we took the horse to the Saône with a bottle of worms to fish for perch and catfish, or wheat grains to attract and net carp. Catching a carp was an event, a wonderful thing. It didn’t take much to make us happy, you see? We don’t have pleasures like that anymore. Today, we have everything too easy, and too much of it.”

To an outsider, the Pariauds of Marcel’s youth might have appeared as a curious family, but in many ways they were typical of rural France of the forties and fifties, scrambling to get by while mixing politics, economics and social relations with a degree of creative inconsistency that probablywould have astounded Anglo-Saxons unfamiliar with the historical and ideological wake trailing behind them. Heirs to the anticlerical passion of the French Revolution and the turbulent rhetoric of the Popular Front in the thirties, Marcel’s father and grandfather called themselves Communists, but nevertheless jealously guarded their prerogatives as landowners and private farmers. (Of course under real, Soviet-style communism they would have been expropriated without delay, sent to labor camps and shot if they protested, but in republican France they could safely indulge their political artistry.) Assuming their contradictions even further, the family went to mass every Sunday. The women insisted on that, and there was no gainsaying the women. Marcel’s father agreed with them, anyway—religion helped maintain some values, he said. The real tough nut of the family was Grandfather, whose political faith was adamantine. Whatever one’s political allegiance, though, the courtly, courteous manner that had always governed social intercourse in the Beaujolais clung on unchanged. Marcel recalled with enormous pleasure the anecdote about his grandfather and the village priest.

“Once the curé happened to pass my grandfather in the street when there were people around to hear the exchange. The curé said bonjour
.
‘I am obliged to greet you properly because I am a polite man,’ my grandfather said. ‘So bonjour
.
But since I am against the Church, please do not greet me anymore when we meet. That way, I won’t have to do it again.’ ”

From age sixteen to twenty, Marcel was on his own as a day laborer, living at home in Lancié with his four brothers and sisters, working half the day for his father on the little 2.75-hectare family plot and the other half for a neighboring vigneron. Whenever he had a day or just a few hours free, he picked up extra pocket money by taking on jobs as a mason and helping with harvests. Strong guy—at age seventeen he was already measuring himself against the big men of the village, hefting 250-pound wheat sacks. Even as he labored, though, the lure of travel was upon him, and he dreamed of passing the test for the license to become a truck driver. He carried the dream with him when he was drafted for his two years of military service, but it ended when his father died, just after his return to civilian life. Sometimes fate makes the right choices: just as the world lost one more sports trainer and gained a uniquely talented selector and propagator of wine when young Georges Duboeuf got fed up with the Paris rush hour mob scene, it got a top-notch winemaker in place of just another truck driver when Marcel’s father died.

As the oldest of the children, it was his duty to assume command of the farm and the vines and provide for the family. He was twenty-two and charged with energy and ambition when he took over the family plot. He contracted to tend a neighbor’s vines and took on some added acreage in
vigneronnage
rental terms, some in Lancié’s Beaujolais-Villages territory, some over in Morgon. All told, he was working twelve hectares, using the family horse and one other that he rented at 50 cents a day. It was an exceedingly heavy load, but Marcel was already something of a specialist in heavy loads. By any scale of cosmic justice he ought to have been handsomely rewarded for his courage and sweat, but when the west wind sweeps in from the Loire Valley laden with humidity picked up over the big river, hits the chill of the air high above the Beaujolais hills, then comes whistling down through the gaps, wildly unpredictable things can happen to the weather.

“May 4, 1966. Ascension Thursday,” Marcel remembered. “Hail shredded the vines. Then in September, hail again. Harvest was set for September 15, and the hail hit us on the thirteenth. We got the total treatment. On the fourteenth, I picked up from the ground what grapes had survived the May storm. After I pressed them, I got a yield of six hectoliters per hectare, and the wine tasted of earth. Next year it froze. Those two years didn’t make life easy for me. But I’m
combatif.
I’m a fighter.”

Six hectoliters of wine, and earthy wine at that, when the normal yield at the time was seventy or eighty hectoliters—this was pathetic, derisory. Standing in his destroyed vineyard, it would have been easy, even understandable, for a man less resolute than he to give in to despair, but Marcel carried on. Those were the days when he tested to the limit the strength that his genes had provided him, because what he had undertaken was in fact a triple workload. At the same time as he tended his own and his neighbor’s vines, he was building his
cuverie
, his vinifying and storage shed. He rose before first light, slipped his feet into his comfortable old birch wooden shoes, plowed, pruned, tied and treated his vines from 4 A.M. to 7, then did ten straight hours of masonry, putting the
cuverie
together block by block. After that, it was back to the vines, and finally to bed at about eleven, when there was no more light to work by.

“That’s all right,” he said with that ineradicably hearty earnestness of his. “I don’t regret it. It’s when you have difficulties that you make progress in life. I never was a big sleeper, anyway. Three or four hours were enough for me at that age. That allowed me to get a lot of work done. And it wasn’t all that hard, anyway. I could take my time. I had my lunch with me out in the vines, and my flask of wine. I had a little snooze after eating. The only problem was that the work took up all my time. I love nature, but I’ve never been able to stroll around and just enjoy it. No sport, either—too much to do. I would have liked to try doing something with music, but the closest I got to that was in the army, when they made me a bugler.”

Marcel is sleeping more these days. Now that he is in semi-retirement, he admits that he lies sluggishly abed until five in the morning. (There’s another parallel with Duboeuf here. Georges told me the other day that after passing his seventieth birthday he began slowing down, because he slept all the way to 4:30 A.M. instead of the 4:15 that for decades had been his normal wakeup time.)

Marcel got his first tractor in 1967—secondhand, of course, or perhaps thirdhand—but never felt entirely comfortable with its diesel clatter, the oil it leaked onto the ground or the suffocating smoke from the exhaust, as if somehow these signified that he was cheating on nature. “You’ve got to learn how to listen to nature, because she rewards those who love her,” he says, virtually apologizing for the chemical treatments he parsimoniously applies to his vines and the minimal doses of SO
₂
he injects into his wines to disinfect them and prevent them from clouding over, turning and becoming unsellable. An innate ethical sense—the rightful balance in all things—nags at him, and he cannot quite chase away the conviction that somehow it has to be better to do his plowing behind a horse, the way he used to do. And besides, he sincerely enjoys the partnership between man, beast and nature. So strong are that conviction and that enjoyment that he has not been able to entirely renounce the old ways. Which is why he keeps Hermine.

Hermine is Marcel’s mistress, his joy and passion. She has soft brown eyes, a comely shock of black bangs, a pleasant disposition, a white flare on her forehead and weighs approximately fifteen hundred pounds. She is a
comtoise,
a workhorse whose ancestors originated in the Jura Mountains, from crossings between local animals and German stock from across the border. Marcel reserves her efforts for the small family plot of Beaujolais-Villages vines next to the house, the old vines that give the finest wine. Marcel admires Hermine and loves her dearly, but the partnership has its command structure, and he is not duped by her capricious ways, for she is a real Marie Antoinette.

“She’s intelligent, but she’s lazy,” he said, laughing again and again as he told of their partnership. “She has a nice life out in the pasture I keep for her, you see, so she’d rather not work. The first time I hitched her up to the plow, she did very good work—very delicate, very careful— for a few rows. She understood exactly what she was supposed to do. Then, after a few more minutes, she decided that was enough, and she lay down. She lay down! Well, I made her get up and get going again. If you let them get away with something like that, it’s finished.

“I know these animals. I had another experience like that a long time ago, when I was working for our neighbor, Monsieur Besson. He had a big Percheron, and one day he ran away when he wasn’t hitched up. I had to go out after him on my motorbike. When I finally got to him, I swatted him good and hard. Marcel, that’s no way to get him to cooperate with you, someone said, but I said: just you watch. I gave the horse a piece of bread from my lunch, and I spoke to him about the situation.‘I’m the boss,’ I told him, ‘and that’s how it had to be.’ I love horses, but you have to show them who’s in charge. He understood. I was the only guy who could work with that Percheron.”

The spectacle of Marcel plowing with Hermine is now part of the local color around Lancié and Romanèche, rare enough and colorful enough to draw an occasional article and photo in the local press, but the exercise isn’t necessarily to everyone’s liking. For one, it prodigiously irritates Paulo Cinquin. Very interesting man, this Cinquin. He makes wonderfully good wine from his vines in Régnié (Duboeuf is one of his customers), and is a self-taught specialist of grafting who grows and sells young plants to the trade. He is so concerned to get his vinifying right that at harvest time every year he sleeps on a cot in his
cuverie
during the first week or so, keeping an hour-by-hour watch over the baby wine developing in his vats. Cinquin is a perfectionist, then, but a thoroughly modern perfectionist, a man who embraces all the up-to-date techniques that can help Beaujolais wines to compete in the increasingly tight world marketplace. Which is why seeing Marcel plowing with Hermine really gets to him.