French Lessons (18 page)

Adding an exotic touch to this refined sylvan scene were
some of the more picturesque competitors: the seven dwarfs scuttled past (minus
Snow White, who was probably detained at a previous tasting), followed by a
bumblebee, and a bride with a long dress, sunglasses, and luxuriant mustache.
And there, pausing by the
dégustation
table, was a gentleman
dressed as—what, exactly?

On his head was an iridescent emerald
green shoulder-length wig. Slung around his neck was a harness in the shape of
two monumental corset pink breasts that bounced against his chest. An apron
covered the rest of the frontal scenery as far as the knee, but this token
gesture of modesty was rather spoiled when he turned around. On his naked back
had been painted an arrow that pointed to his equally naked bottom, which had
been attractively priced in bold numerals at 400 francs.

There he
stood, in these incomparably distinguished surroundings, enjoying a musical
interlude, sipping his glass of Lafite Rothschild, at peace with the world. He
had run twenty-five kilometers and looked set for another twenty, providing his
apron stayed put.

A few minutes later, we were getting another view of
Château Lafite, this time from five hundred feet up. I have mixed
feelings about flying in a helicopter. I’m not sure I like the idea of
being an aerial Peeping Tom, poking my nose into what is normally hidden behind
walls and hedges. It is undoubtedly an invasion of privacy, and therefore
something I tell myself I shouldn’t be doing. On the other hand,
it’s fascinating. And the view on this sunny morning was
extraordinary.

It was gardening on the epic scale. Mile after mile of
barbered symmetry, the châteaux with their turrets and slate roofs like
islands in a perfectly smooth green ocean of vines. Thousands of acres of tamed
nature. Is there anywhere else in the world where so much land has been so
meticulously and elegantly maintained?

The sandy roads cutting through
the vineyards were teeming with a long, long line of brightly colored
insects—the runners, by now stretched over several miles. From our seat
in the sky, they seemed barely to be moving. It was as though someone had
sprinkled confetti over the landscape.

With a final swoop across the
Gironde, the helicopter set us down behind the stand. It was now 1:30, four
hours after the start of the race, and a steady stream of runners was
sprinting, jogging, or tottering up the red carpet that led to the finish line,
the nirvana of the massage tables, and some restorative carbohydrates provided
by a team of caterers called the Joyeux Tartineurs.

We sat down for
lunch in the stand, and for once the distractions of the view took precedence
over the food. There was Yassir Arafat puffing up to the finish, closely
followed by a man wearing false buttocks and what looked like an orange tea
cosy. Cleopatra came next, his wig askew, then a man who miraculously still had
enough wind left in him to be talking on a cell phone.

The clock above
the finish line showed that four and a half hours had elapsed since the start
of the race, and still they came: Mickey Mouse; a team of devils in black
cloaks and wilted red horns waving tridents; five stout babies running hand in
hand; a trio of Scotsmen in tam-o’-shanters and vestigial kilts; a
gendarme handcuffed to his prisoner; doctors pushing a stretcher with a very
lively patient waving to the crowd; and, amid great cheers, a giant bottle of
wine with legs.
Vive le Médoc!

Behind the finish line,
we picked our way through a morass of bodies in various stages of recovery.
Some were flat out on the grass, others slumped on the pavement or draped
across trestle tables, expressions of bliss on their faces as their muscles
melted under massage. A little farther along the road, the cafés were
filled with nuns and cavemen and hirsute cherubs refueling.
Pommes
frites,
beer, baguettes, cheese, sausage—anything to feed the
postmarathon famine—were disappearing as fast as the waiters could bring
them out. And these were just snacks. Later, there would be another onslaught
of pasta for dinner.

Five hours since the start, and still they came: a
sprightly dog towing his owner up to the finish on the end of a leash; a
British policeman; Bacchus; a waiter in a top hat; Adam and Eve. We heard that
the champion of France had come in first, with a time of two hours and twenty
minutes, but this was very clearly not a race of winner and losers. It was a
celebration.

We had dinner that night with two of the runners, Pierre
and Gérard. One had come from Lyon, the other from Washington, D.C., and
they had competed in many marathons before. This one, they agreed, was special
in many ways. The organization had been faultless, from the prerace
carbohydrate binge to the postrace massage. The good humor, the tremendous
sense of comradeship and enjoyment during the race, the costumes, the weather,
the beauty of the course—they had all contributed to a rare and
remarkable day.

Gérard held up his glass, which was filled with
Château Lynch-Bages 1985.
“En plus,”
he said,
“the refreshments are particularly agreeable.”

Among Flying Corks
in Burgundy

“Whatever else you do,” I said to Sadler,
“remember to spit. Otherwise, we’ll never get through the
weekend.”

“I’ll watch you,” he said.
“We’ll spit together, like they do in synchronized
swimming.”

We were in Burgundy, with our wives to keep an eye on
us, to attend the greatest wine auction in the world, held each year in Beaune.
I had been once before, with another friend who was a
chevalier du taste
vin,
a knight of the grape, and the experience had taught me what had to
be done if you wanted to survive: spit. Spattered trousers and purple shoes are
a small price to pay for the continued health of your internal organs, your
ability to focus and to speak, and your reputation as a civilized man able to
hold his alcohol.

The sadness is, as I told Sadler, that you will often
be spitting when every taste bud in your palate is begging you to swallow,
because in Beaune, during this one long weekend, you will be offered dozens, if
not hundreds, of some of the finest wines in France. Those names that you gaze
at wistfully on restaurant wine lists—those three-hundred-dollar bottles
of Burgundian nectar—are uncorked and passed around with the generous
abandon normally associated with lemonade on a hot day. But spit you must.
There are three days of this to get through, and you’ll never be there at
the finish if you swallow everything that’s waved under your nose.

The tradition started, oddly enough, with a hospital. In 1443, Nicolas
Rolin, chancellor to Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, founded the Hospices de
Beaune and endowed the foundation with vineyards to provide it with income.
Other charitable Burgundians followed his example, and today, more than five
hundred years later, the hospital costs are still covered by revenue from the
wine. Every year, traditionally on the third Sunday in November, the wine is
sold at auction. And every year, on the days before and after the auction, the
local winegrowers arrange a few diversions of their own.

We were
invited to one of them on our first night in Burgundy, a
diner
dégustation
at the home of René Jacqueson, a grower in
Gevrey-Chambertin. It was to be a gentle introduction to the bottles that lay
ahead, and it began in Monsieur Jacqueson’s private
cave.

Down a steep flight of steps we went, inhaling the subterranean bouquet, a
wonderful musty mixture of oak, wine, ancient cobwebs, and chilled stone. The
cave
wasn’t large—by Burgundian standards at
least—but it had been beautifully furnished with several thousand gallons
of Gevrey-Chambertin, stored in barrels that lined walls furred and blackened
with cellar mold. On top of another barrel in the middle of the room were
glasses and half a dozen bottles, each identified by the wine maker’s
shorthand of chalk squiggles. But I saw nothing in the way of spitter’s
comforts.

“There’s no bucket,” I whispered to Sadler.
“I think it would be rude to spit on the floor. We’ll have to
swallow.”

He took the news bravely. “Just this once,”
he said.

There were two other couples with us, and we gathered around
Jacqueson as he uncorked the first bottle and started to take us through the
vintages. At most other tastings I’ve attended, this is as close to a
religious ceremony as you can get without actually going to church. The
wine’s age and pedigree are announced in the manner of a bishop murmuring
a benediction. The assembled congregation sniffs and gargles with furrowed
brow. Then it’s time for prayers, in the form of solemn, muted comments
about the wine’s quality: “Exceptionally self-assured.…
Marvelous finish.… Classically structured.… Amen.”

Jacqueson, however, was not at all of the reverent school of wine makers.
He was a man with a twinkle in his eye and a great sense of humor, particularly
when he started talking about the overblown language often used on these
occasions.

“This one, for instance,” he said, holding his
glass up to the light, “is what you and I might simply call ‘a
promising young wine.’”

We all sipped and gurgled. At this
early stage in its development, there was enough tannin in it to pucker the
liver, although it would probably be wonderful when it grew up.

Jacqueson grinned. “An expert has described it as ‘having the
impatience of youth,’ whatever that means.”

This led to
another old classic: “Isn’t this wine a little young to be up so
late?” And as more bottles were uncorked and poured, we compared
wine-tasting phrases that were unusual or grotesque enough to stick in the
mind. Some, like
le
goût
de
la
planche,
were logical and accurate. New wine in oak barrels will often
have the woody taste of a plank. Other terms were nothing more than desperately
far-fetched and unappetizing comparisons:
wet
leather,
wet
dogs,
weasels—
and, my favorite candidate
from the animal kingdom,
a
hare’s
belly.
I
have never come across anybody who has admitted to being on tasting terms with
a hare’s belly—or a weasel or a wet dog, for that matter—and
quite how these creatures have crept into the wine taster’s vocabulary is
something of a mystery. I suppose the problem is that normal descriptions,
those words like
fruity,
powerful,
well
made,
or
complex,
are too general. They apply to too many
wines. And so the weasels and the hare’s bellies are brought out in an
attempt to express the differences between one wine and another.

This
brought the conversation around to professional wine critics, those poor souls
who have to strain their imagination and syntax every day in the course of
their work, trying to describe what is often indescribable. The prize for the
most outlandish description of the evening went to this exchange, reportedly
true, between a critic and a grower.

Critic (having swilled, sluiced,
and spat): “Hmm. A distinct
goût de tapis.
”

Grower (outraged): “What do you mean, ‘a taste of
carpet’? How dare you!”

Critic (trying to make amends):
“But no ordinary carpet, my friend; a very old, very
distinguished
carpet.”

Our host was far too discreet to
name the critic. All he would say was, “We would prefer him to do his
drinking in Bordeaux.”

And with that, we went upstairs to
dinner.

It was a marvelous marathon of a meal, five courses prepared by
Madame Jacqueson, with a selection of Gevrey-Chambertins prepared by her
husband. And in the intermission between the duck and the cheese, there was a
music lesson.

It was absolutely necessary, Jacqueson informed us, that
we learn the ritual gestures and lyrics of the “Ban de Bourgogne.”
This was the Burgundian battle cry, a chant accompanied by rhythmic clapping
and arcane signals, a kind of drinker’s hand jive. We were told it would
be performed many times over the weekend, and if we wanted to be part of the
festivities, we had to know how to join in.

The lyrics of the chant
were no problem: “La la la la” just about covered them, sung or
shouted, according to choice, from beginning to end. The hand movements were
slightly more complicated. Starting position was with arms bent and the hands,
with fingers cupped, held up on either side of the head. With the first chorus,
the hands should swivel back and forth from the wrist, as if rotating some
circular object, such as the base of a wine bottle. For the middle chorus, the
hands should stop swiveling to clap nine times before returning to their
original positions for the third chorus. This was to be repeated a second time,
at top speed, before participants were allowed to recover with the help of a
glass of Gevrey-Chambertin.