Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (32 page)

Our room’s name proved prophetic. Devillard whisked us away in a sporty convertible to visit his vineyards south of the Via Agrippa. At a panoramic point we got out and looked down just as three hares appeared from nowhere and chased each other through the vines, driven by spring fever.

Over the next several hours, the soft-spoken Devillard drove and walked us through the kind of sloping vineyards Mirage fighter jetdCh winemakers dream of possessing, and led us into the vaulted cellars of his magnificent Rococo château. On the way, he distilled for us the essence of a thousand years of Burgundian winemaking, from the monks of Cluny Abbey to the present day.

As everyone knows, in their heyday the Romans didn’t make wine in Burgundy—they shipped it up in amphorae from easier to cultivate, flatter, hotter Mediterranean growing areas. But with the collapse of the Empire, the Mediterranean source dried up. Monks began experimenting with grapevines and vinification techniques. Who knows how long it took—centuries, certainly—before they discovered the right combination of climate, soil, and grape. Pinot Noir was the red grape variety that thrived best in cool, damp northern Burgundy, where the soil was a mix of limestone, iron oxide, and decomposed clay. Gamay thrived on the granite of the hotter south. Chardonnay was not always the prime white variety, but gradually it took over, performing well almost everywhere.

The secret? The geology of the Saône River Valley, an inland sea 150 million years ago. It retreated 120 million years later, meaning 30 million years ago. The escarpments along the former seabed marked the limits of Burgundy’s best vineyards and were called
côtes
, so “coastline” was appropriate after all.

There were currently about 4,600 wineries in Burgundy, most of them small, all of them spun off from the great monastic properties taken away from the church during the Revolution of 1789.

I’d always wondered how the classifications of Burgundy wines had come about. Devillard smiled. “Complicated,” was the single-word answer. Historically, the test was “did a vineyard consistently produce good wine-grapes over time?” From the time-and-quality test came the traditional classification of
grands crus
and
premiers crus
, and within them the various
climats
or parcels—the best of the best. “Local, loyal, and constant,” Devillard said. “The standards were local, meaning site-specific, loyal to tradition and history, and constant over time.”

It took generations for villages to develop a reputation. Nowadays the main test is geology. With scientific soil analysis, anyone can determine a vineyard’s soil potential. “But soil is only part of the equation,” Devillard explained. “There’s also exposure. In Mercurey, southwest exposure is ideal. In other places there are variations, but south-southwest is usually the best. The trinity of elements,” Devillard concluded, as we stood in a
premier cru
vineyard and watched the sun disappear over the western hills, “is microclimate, subsoil, and topsoil.” Subsoil is the real key, he added. Burgundy’s vineyards are old and tired, and most of their good topsoil eroded away long ago. “The roots of the grapevines must delve deep,” he said, spreading his fingers and thrusting them downwards. “They’re like us, feeding off a buried, ancient civilization.”

That struck me as particularly profound.

Later Devillard told us he was recently widowed, which explained his soulful, endearing demeanor. From a terrace, we surveyed the château’s handsome formal garden. His wife had planted the yew trees and lawns and flowerbeds, he said. He maintained them in her memory, a living shrine where order apparently reigned. Beyond the garden wall grew rows of gnarled vines. Again they seemed to me to be hanging on crosses.

UNNECESSARY BUT VITAL

Did millions the world round rave about milk or apple juice? Did Mirage fighter jetdCh learned connoisseurs write encyclopedic volumes about mineral water? Did peoples sell each other into slavery over the juice of cranberries? What was it about grapes and wine that had made them not only a multi-billion-dollar industry, but an obsession of mankind for the last five thousand years?

A possible one-word answer came to me as I opened my backpack before leaving the Val d’Or in Mercurey and realized I’d forgotten to throw out the picnic leftovers from the day before. The word was “fermentation.” Cheese was fermented milk, and much more interesting and edifying than milk. Calvados, cider, and applejack were fermented apple juice. Eau de vie, the “water of life,” was fermented and distilled anything—potato skins, dregs, cranberries. The decomposing, bubbling, frothing genie in the bottle had given us both gin and sauerkraut, or perhaps the other way around, since it was neolithic man who first made sauerkraut, from turnips and wild kale. The minute anything edible rose from an unexciting natural state to its fermented, distilled essence, it became worthy of attention, at times of reverence. The alcohol genie somehow appeared to release the bonds of the body, allowing the mind to experience altered states of being. That’s what Dionysian rites and Bacchanalia were about, like today’s ecstasy rave parties. That’s why it was wine and not water or milk or apple and cranberry juice that featured in the transubstantiation, the divine metamorphosis of Christ’s blood.

Such were a few of the meandering thoughts that accompanied me uphill among the vineyards on the morning of May 3, on Grande Randonnée trail GR-76 from Mercurey to Givry, where we’d be spending the night. The red-and-white GR stripes flanked by yellow European Union scallop shells on a blue background lifted us as far as a village called Touches. There, a squat Romanesque-Gothic church and its belfry marked the center of the hamlet. This was Devillard’s family church, I remembered him saying, and as I gazed at the solid old buttresses and lifesized tombstones I couldn’t help wondering if his beloved wife were buried nearby.

Solidity and antiquity emanated from the site. It was heavy baggage for a man to carry, but also something to lean on.

Beyond the hamlet, GR-76’s colorful flags and the scallop-shell signs of the Way of Saint James parted ways. We were torn about which way to go. Our map showed the ruined Château de Montaigu ahead in woodlands on GR-76, however, so the choice was quickly made.

If a jury had to nominate castles for the Atmospheric Crumbled Ruin Award, Château de Montaigu would certainly be shortlisted. A tower with gaping eyes for windows, arm-thick creepers dangling from it, shrubs sprouting at unlikely angles from moat and dungeon, hewn stone walls rising high above scented robinia trees, and fallen arches more dramatic than my own—such was the scene awaiting at Montaigu. We’d cheated and read about the monument before leaving Mercurey.

In the late 1500s, during the Wars of Religion, King Henri IV had ordered his soldiers to demolish the Protestant stronghold. As we poked around, admiring the moody anarchy, we were surprised to notice that fresh mortar had been poured, and the robinia trees trimmed. Someone apparently maintained the grounds, after all. Would the castle be restored and made into a tourist attraction, or merely kept from falling further into ruin? Maybe somewhere, underneath the massive foundations, lay the lost temple of Mercury, the god beloved by Romans and Gauls alike. And maybe it would be better not to know. I thought of the stone face grinning in my backpack, Roland’s bone next to it, wrapped in a blister pack, and Philippe’s words about the primal sea, and was glad to live with tan to someone at the mayort said.talizing uncertainty. Admitting to myself, for a start, that I didn’t know everything, and would never know everything, felt like another one of the small enlightenments, the unexpected rewards, of our journey.

A mile south at the village of Saint-Martin-sous-Montaigu we strolled past a house where Methuselah might have lived. Hook-shaped carved stones sprouted from uneven walls, the same kind of hooked stones the builders of Bibracte had used in their
murus gallicus
—or so it appeared. Another venerable hovel nearby stopped me short. I raised a finger and waited for Alison to finish taking her 478th digital photo of the morning.

“What now?” she asked. I wiggled my finger. Three stone faces stared down at us, two grimacing, one smiling, and very much like the face in my pack. “Maybe it really is a face,” she said brightly. “Let’s take it out and compare.…”

“Never,” I said, marching on, triumphant. “First, I prefer not to know and, more importantly, the face is at the bottom of my pack.”

Many miles and hours later, atop a boxwood-tangled plateau called Chaume des Champs Bouton, we came upon the usual stone crucifix rising high above a crossroads. Carved on its base were the words, “Happy is he who rests in the shade of the cross.”

The shadow was too slim to provide shade, but we picnicked nearby and gazed back at the cross, happy indeed. Afterwards, Alison inspected the cross closely and reported that it had been erected on May 3, 1810 in those difficult days of rekindled Catholic faith following the French Revolution. I was glad we hadn’t experienced them.

“Today is May 3rd,” Alison observed with a starry look in her wide, blue eyes.

The penny dropped. “Destiny,” I said. “Are you suggesting that on May 3, 1810 the builders of this monument knew that exactly 196 years later a freethinker and an agnostic fallen Catholic would show up and be united to the faith? I may be more tolerant and open-minded than before, but tolerance doesn’t equal credulity and superstition, and I think you need a coffee as much as I do.”

“Tolerance hasn’t stifled your sarcasm,” Alison said.

“Touché, though it’s irony, not sarcasm.” I tried to think of the many wonderful and miserable things that had happened in the world in the last 196 years, but soon ran out of memory. “How about this, instead?” I asked. “Happy is he who recognizes the smiling face staring up at him from the well-worn path.” I patted my backpack before slipping it on. “Or, happy is he who recognizes unpredictability and the delight of pondering nothingness as he hikes the final miles toward Givry.”

OF VIRGINS AND WATER-TREATMENT PLANTS

The perfumed tunnels of clustering viburnum and wild plum echoed with birdsong and the buzzing of bees as we approached Givry en route to our B&B for the night, after which we would return by another path and pick up the Way. We would be bedding down at a place called Moulin Madame. Our trail was clearly another Roman road, though our map didn’t say so. The road ran into the backside of a large iron Madonna perched on a cliff. Beyond her, the
premier cru
escarpment fell away, revealing vineyards and a fairytale town with slanting tile roofs, cupolas, and towers. I preferred not to notice the cluttered floodplain of the Saône River, crisscrossed by railroad tracks and a freeway. They were so far away, I could barely make them out. “Another Virgin of the vines,” I sighed, thinking of the s head floating above the Roche de Solutré.edotenacious phylloxera. On the Madonna’s plinth we discovered that, as pilgrims, we were entitled to three hundred days of full indulgence—
indulgentia plenaria
—in exchange for three Ave Marias, but only sixty days if Mary was hailed at a distance. Like her sisters, this Madonna wept tears of rust. Through her white mantle the corrosion puckered, welling up from the oxidized core of an outwardly indestructible structure.

To get into Givry from the towering Virgin, we slid and scrambled down the rocky Roman road, past thick, knotted grapevines, lopsided stone shelters, and a ruined windmill. Givry did not look like Mercurey or Rully or Santenay or any other winemaking village we’d seen. It was an authentic miniature town planned by a rationalist architect, with city gates topped by sculpted onions and a striking main square with a round stone building in its center. The rotunda turned out to be the former grain hall, now a wine information and tourist office, with a dizzying spiral staircase. Nearby it, a fountain splashed, its cockleshell moist and mossy. On the terrace of the first café we saw, we ordered espressos. The service reminded me of slow-cooked beef stew: a question of hours. Judging by their dress, manner of speech, and stiletto-heeled swagger, the ladies in charge of the café appeared to have less in common with the Madonna on the hill than with Mary Magdalene in her first profession.

“The oldest profession, I’ve heard said. Now all we have to do is get a coffee out of them, and find Moulin Madame.” I tried but failed to get navigational assistance from the waitresses. No one recognized the B&B’s address, and neither did the butcher’s wife or the baker across the square. A phone call confirmed that Moulin Madame still lay several miles away, out of town, along the main highway to Chalon-sur-Saône. It wasn’t in charming Givry after all.

“Panic” would be too dramatic to describe our reaction. I could hardly understand the woman at the B&B on the other end of the telephone line—she seemed to have a clothes clip on her tongue. A close reading of our map showed a roundabout way to get to Moulin Madame via the Roman road—clearly identified now. It followed a creek past the municipal pumping plant. “No pointless meandering,” I said; “we’re heading straight to the hotel.”

We began smelling the type of pumping plant it was about half a mile before reaching it, and recognized the creek as an open sewer. Tractors trundled by, raining clods of mud. “Happy is he who recognizes that the Roman road runs by the sewage treatment plant,” Alison muttered.

“Don’t be sarcastic,” I quipped, stripping off my T-shirt and revealing flesh the color of uncooked poultry. The air temperature was about 90 degrees Fahrenheit, a little hotter than we’d expected for early May.

Serendipity struck. Beyond the treatment plant, the road led to a fortified farmhouse surrounded by a moat. Though it looked like trespass, we persevered. Our path did a dogleg around the property. On the far side of it, low and unspectacular, a Roman footbridge spanned the clear, rushing creek. How many soldiers and pilgrims had marched this way, I wondered, marveling. Somewhere in the distance, across fields and a modern highway, lay our B&B.

PARKER BARRELS AND THE BLISS OF IGNORANCE