I'll Drink to That (11 page)

The romance with Noah did nothing, however, for the great sweep of the beautiful Beaujolais vineyards. While the taste of
“pissat de renard”
could be tolerated by home drinkers, low-life bistros or field laborers of rustic palate, it would not do for the sophisticated urban buyers who demanded the high quality and the seductive mouthfuls of fruit that they had come to expect in a glass of Beaujolais. They wanted their gamay back.

It was at this juncture that the Beaujolais produced a second providential savior of the vines, in the person of Victor Pulliat, a man whose energy and determination came to be seen as something like the second coming of Benoît Raclet. Owner of a prosperous domain in Chiroubles, the most westerly and the highest of the Beaujolais
crus
, Pulliat was an original thinker and dedicated student of the vine who was not afraid to fly in the face of accepted wisdom. As the phylloxera calamity wiped out one vineyard after another, an intense anti-American sentiment became generalized within the French wine community. How could anyone trust a nation that had delivered mildew,
oïdium
, the phylloxera aphid and then, as a bonus, had apparently thrown in the new plague called black rot? All this was undeniably true, but Pulliat had an inspired thought: rather than carping on what was wrong with the American vines, it would be more constructive to put to use what was right with them. His plan was simple but breathtakingly (and literally) radical: to make the American vines the entire basis of the wine industry, not as hybrids or foxy
directes
, but as something altogether new that he had been experimenting with at his domain: a binary plant.
Vitis vinifera
, he proposed, should be physically grafted onto phylloxera-resistant American rootstock. The U.S. plant would be the foundation, gamay the structure above.

Like Raclet half a century earlier, Pulliat was greeted with hoots and catcalls, or even worse. Where Raclet had been dismissed mostly with amused tolerance as a lunatic, Pulliat was often denounced as a public danger bent on propagating the damned Yankee infestations. It was only common sense, after all, that the American roots were bound to deliver an altogether different, foxy character to the valiant French grapes struggling to assert their native personality up above. Pulliat rejected the argument. Deliberately ignoring the embargo on U.S. plants, he went on with his trials at Chiroubles. By 1879, even the most hidebound traditionalists had caved in when the entirety of the Beaujolais was officially declared
phylloxéré.
Finally recognized as pointless, the embargo was lifted, freeing the way for any and all experiments. Pulliat began offering vigneron families free grafting classes after Sunday mass in Chiroubles’s twelfth-century Church of Saint Germain.

Surprise: the wine from his binary vines didn’t taste foxy at all. It looked, smelled and tasted just like what it was—gamay. Pulliat’s intuition proved to be entirely correct. It was the grafted vine after all, and not the rootstock, that produced the character of the finished product. Beaujolais was saved—and a good deal more than Beaujolais, too, because there was no arguing with the success of
la méthode Pulliat
. Grafting was quickly and universally adopted. The denunciations of America ceased in measure with the vines that once again began flourishing throughout the land. Today, apart from a few small and isolated exceptions that may be called lucky freaks of nature, there are no more pure, native
Vitis vinifera
vines in France—or, indeed, anywhere else on the continent. The most modest and the most extravagantly expensive wines alike, from a simple
vin de table
to La Romanée-Conti and Château Pétrus, are pressed from grapes now growing on American roots, and they fear phylloxera no more. The grafting procedure has become so commonplace and so widely and skillfully organized that nurseries, cooperative agencies and individual growers distribute binary seedlings as efficiently and easily as pure stock ever was in the past. A handsome bust of Pulliat now stands opposite the church in Chiroubles, and, like Raclet’s
fête
in Romanèche-Thorins, the great man’s memory is honored with a solemn annual tasting on the last weekend of April to determine the year’s best batches of the ten prestigious Beaujolais
crus
.

The traumatic phylloxera episode had a wide-ranging and permanent effect on the wine industry. Since the nationwide annihilation of the vines had wiped the slate clean, the replanting with grafted vines finally brought a certain degree of modernization to an extraordinarily antiquated and toilsome enterprise. In our machine age, it is easy to forget just how punishing the work of the vine had been in the old days, right through to the end of the nineteenth century, when industrialization was in full swing in Great Britain, Germany and the United States. It is no exaggeration to say that the Beaujolais peasant had lived under a sentence of hard labor to produce that light, friendly drink so prized by city folk. Up before the crack of dawn to tend to the animals, he worked all day long in his vineyard at the endlessly repeated seasonal drudgery, sustained at lunchtime by a chunk of salted fatback, a loaf of dark, homemade bread and a little barrel-shaped container of
piquette
or
vin de repasse,
the thin, acid drink confected from a re-pressing of his grapes’ dregs infused in water, offering a slight alcoholic nudge of four or five degrees. (His true wine was far too valuable a commodity to be wasted on personal consumption.) Tramping back to the house at sundown, he took the same familiar peasant supper that his neighbors in the village would be eating: soup, bread and perhaps a chunk of homemade cheese, washed down with more
piquette
. Almost invariably
,
the soup was composed of whatever vegetables had been stored in the cellar or were in season. A frequent, economical version was made of boiled nettles, and when vegetables were scarce an alternative was a mush of oats or other grains, not unlike the
puls
that had been the common sustenance of the invading Roman armies of ancient times. It was only on Sundays that most farm families expected to have any meat on the table. Bread was the everyday staff of life, endowed with a near-mystical status that was fully equal to that of wine, and never a crumb was thrown away or intentionally wasted. To do so would have been shocking behavior, akin to blasphemy.

Until the great social and economic upheavals caused by World War I, the Beaujolais peasant housewife customarily ate her own supper standing in the kitchen after serving husband and family. Why did she not sit and join them? The answer isn’t clear. It was simply the custom, and customs changed slowly in the fiercely conservative atmosphere of the countryside. Perhaps the explanation lies in the reigning imperative of hard physical labor that governed their lives. She had no time for dawdling. There were more important things to do. Balancing this apparent gender indignity were the strict social observances that peasant children learned at a very young age. Women were honored with a simple, courtly grace that has largely disappeared from modern societies. Outside the immediate family cell no male, young or old, would ever think of remaining seated when a woman, or even a teenage girl, entered the room. If the encounter took place outside, he would be viewed as a shameful boor if he did not doff his cap in her presence.

Women were, as they remain today, absolutely indispensable for the smallholding Beaujolais vigneron, and their workdays were as long and exhausting as his. Although generally spared the hardest labor of pick, sledgehammer, mattock and maul, the housewife joined her husband in the fields for the fine work of removing buds and tying up vines, and cared for the farm’s animals with hardly any less devotion than she gave to her own children. When not out among the vines, she baked her bread, drew water from the well, cleaned house, cooked supper, sewed and mended, made and laid down preserves, and then joined her husband and any others present—the older children, often her parents-in-law, perhaps a
valet de ferme
, one of the hired workers who lived in the house as a virtual family member—to work until late at night by the fireplace repairing tools, preparing stakes, stripping and splitting willow branches for baskets, or any other of dozens of seasonal chores. It was at this evening gathering in the darting shadows of the waning fire—
la veillée—
that the web of intercourse that defines a region’s culture was woven and its society welded into a like-thinking unit. The intercourse was strictly local, and the language was Beaujolais patois rather than the French that they had learned in their few years of basic schooling. Gossip was exchanged, local history recounted by the elders, aphorisms, tips, and words of wisdom passed on, old tales repeated and embroidered, folk songs softly sung. Today, the
veillée
has been predictably shouldered aside by the television set on the kitchen table.

Up next morning with the chickens, the vigneron family carried on with the sempiternal routine. Ever since the earliest days of winemaking, all the multiple operations of tending the vine had been carried out by the force of human muscle power alone: preparing the ground with a heavy pick or mattock, planting, pruning, loosening up the soil in the months of growth, packing it around the plants to help them survive the winter, digging them free in the spring, carrying eroded soil back up to the top of the slopes from which it had washed down, delivering fertilizer, hoeing against adventitious weeds and grasses come to compete with the vines for water and nourishment, carrying out preventive sprayings and, of course, picking, pressing and vinifying the grapes. The family cow occasionally could be harnessed to pull the cart that moved manure or delivered barrels, but that was the limit of the vigneron’s surcease from hard handwork. It wasn’t that much of a surcease, though. Even for limited calls on their strength, cows are not really satisfactory beasts for work. Shambling, difficult to harness and virtually untrainable, they are not naturally suited for anything beyond grazing and giving milk, or their own selves for meat. Further, most Beaujolais cows were weak and stunted: with natural grazing land taken over by vines, they ate poorly, being reduced to foraging for the limited grass growing on roadsides. Hay being an expensive commodity, they rarely ate anything better than straw in the wintertime. The ox, if the peasant was prosperous enough to own one, was a fine worker, the bulldozer of the day, but limited to specialized chores. A slow but immensely strong puller, he was used exclusively for pure power jobs like ripping out vines, dragging logs or drawing heavily laden carts.

Phylloxera’s total destruction introduced a radical rethinking of the ancient ways. Now, for the first time, beasts of burden—or, rather, traction—entered the vineyards: mules, horses and, occasionally, for those who could afford nothing better, the cow, the poor man’s tractor. On the surface, it appears surprising that it was not until the very end of the nineteenth century that animal power was brought to the wine fields. It seems like such an obvious solution for making chores easier and faster—but it wasn’t, for the simple reason that since the Middle Ages Beaujolais vineyards had always been something of a chaotic hugger-mugger, planted
en foule
, “in throng.” The peasant reproduced and extended his vines by the ancient practice of marcottage, burying a living vine branch, still attached to the trunk, until it produced the roots that would become the foot of a new vine. Since vines were tended one by one, it made no difference how unevenly the plants were distributed. The vigneron moved from plant to plant, working each one by hand exactly as his father and his grandfather had done, and all their ancestors before them. No horse or mule, or even less a cow, could ever enter the vineyard without trampling vines and making a big mess of it.

When the peasantry was forced to start the wine fields all over again from scratch, they were able to benefit from the advances of the Industrial Revolution. The revolution had come late to France, but by the last quarter of the nineteenth century clever inventors and entrepreneurs like Vermorel were mass producing gear that for the first time could mechanize many of the ancestral gestures of the vine. Technology could replace—or at least supplement—technique. Animal power was the obvious solution for pulling the heavy equipment to plow the earth and spray the vines, but for animal power to be practicable, the vines had to be planted in dead-straight, geometrically perfect rows between which the horse or the mule could navigate under the vigneron’s gee and haw. (The ox was too slow, the cow too clumsy, to make a proper job of it.)

But the modernization didn’t happen without controversy and dissent. Conservative as ever, most peasants were initially suspicious of the idea of allowing great, heavy quadrupeds to come lumbering through their precious vines—sure as rain, they would trample more plants than they would help. Their opposition was only another sign of the relative poverty in which the vignerons had always lived. They were unfamiliar with horses because few of them had ever possessed any. And why should they have? Horses were expensive and skittish, and they ate twice as much forage as cows without giving any milk in return: a very poor investment. Peasant logic is always correct when it is based on experience, because it is the old ways that have allowed them to survive year to year, as their ancestors did. Where novelty and speculation for the future are concerned, though, their stubborn resistance to change can often settle them deep in error.

So it was at first with their opposition to the horse. Marcel Laplanche, seventy-five years old when I met him, was a retired vigneron who vividly remembered his parents speaking of their amazement and shock at their first sight of a horse in a neighbor’s vines in 1912. “He’s mad!” they had cried, certain that they were about to witness a disaster. But when they saw with what delicate intelligence a well-trained animal could pick its way through the vines, they could only accept that it was progress, after all. For most peasants, though, that acceptance came very slowly, as it had for Pulliat’s wild idea of grafting onto American roots. It was not until the end of World War I that the rectilinear vines tended by a man behind a horse became the rule in the Beaujolais. In a macabre kind of way, this modernization was spurred along by the fact that France had been bled white by the scarcely believable mass butchery of the Great War: manpower had become rare. It is a sobering experience to visit the
monument aux morts
of any little French village and contemplate the neatly chiseled row upon row of names of the local boys who at Verdun, the Vosges and the Somme had served as fodder for cannon and machine gun—the kill-power of war, too, had benefited from the Industrial Revolution. The Beaujolais needed all the help it could get.