I'll Drink to That (22 page)

And so the tradition continues today. No one who has ever heard a Paul Bocuse, a Guy Savoy or a Pierre Gagnaire on the phone with his own mafia of kitchen confrères can have any doubt about that. And there’s a very salient characteristic that by definition accompanies these networks: you don’t forget help, and you pay back in kind. Over more than fifty years since that first helping hand in 1951, Georges Duboeuf never forgot Le Chapon Fin, regularly arranging his most important business lunches and catered group meals there long after Paul Blanc’s death, right up to the grand old barn’s closing in 2005.

Another manner of helping hand appeared in 1951, and it was a big one, too, even if no one recognized at the time the full extent of its importance to the Beaujolais. In March of that year the French administration finally got around to lifting the wartime timetable that governed the release dates of the country’s different wines, a spacing out of the supply chain that had been established strictly for the use of the army. Since twelve full years had passed since the start of the war and six since the German defeat, there was no justification for maintaining the timetable any longer, as the growers had been insisting ever since 1945. Administrations grind along slowly, but now at last a new, earlier release date was approved for Beaujolais: December 15 for wines of that same year.

That wasn’t good enough for many of the vignerons. Eager to return to the good old days of St. Martin, when they sold their young wines as of November 11, they loudly protested that history and nature were on their side, as proved by all those burping barrels riding the gentle Saône down to Lyon. It was indisputable, they reminded the administration, that the gamay grape possessed the miraculous capacity to produce a pleasant wine extraordinarily early. Low in the aggressively astringent tannins that caused other wines (notably Bordeaux) to be virtually undrinkable in their youth, Beaujolais was already singing of fruit and flowers a mere two months after pressing. The argument was compelling, and on November 13, the administration caved in and authorized the new wine, the one that the growers called
primeur,
to be sold as of zero hour on November 15. With that, the phenomenon known as Beaujolais Nouveau was given its official, statutory life.

Primeur
and Georges Duboeuf were destined to be dancing such an intimate tango together in future years that the wine came to be virtually identified with his name, but in the early fifties it was little more than an episodic curiosity, and Georges had nothing at all to do with it, occupied as he was with learning his infant business, doing his twenty-eight months of military service and courting his future wife Rolande Dudet, daughter of the Juliénas baker and the girl in charge of Victor Peyret’s
caveau
inside the old church. Luckily, the army stationed him nearby in the Nièvre
département
, where he landed a cushy assignment as his captain’s secretary, and he had plenty of leave time.

Georges was prescient; he was smart and he had ideas. Long before that awful word “marketing” existed, he was inventing his own instinctive version of it when he turned the big old basement kitchen of the family’s Chaintré house into premises for receiving customers. This was an entirely new idea at the time. A few of the
crus,
like Juliénas, had established municipal
caveaux
for presenting and selling their local wines, but at the start of the fifties the notion that individual vignerons could profitably do the same thing at their own properties was simply not a part of the culture. As their fathers and grandfathers always had done, Beaujolais vignerons limited themselves to growing the grapes and making the wine. But Georges had given the matter a bit of thought: with the private automobile coming into general use, why not try selling to passing motorists?

The old kitchen was just right, a spacious, heavy-beamed, high- ceilinged room with a picturesque open fireplace and antique cabinets. He installed tables, chairs, upright barrels and various odd bits of winemaking equipment for local color, creating an atmosphere that was informal, easygoing and not too blatantly mercantile. Down by the side of the road where the driveway left the property, he stuck a big sign that he had ordered from a friend of Roger’s whose business was making posters for movie houses: STOP—COME IN AND TASTE THE DUBOEUF WINES.

It was the first private
caveau de dégustation
in the Beaujolais. Georges named it Au Cul Sec (Bottoms Up) and painstakingly created a promotional flyer. It was a rather amateurish job, to be sure—commercial
art naïf
—but he had all the right ideas. One side, printed in bright, eye-catching tones of yellow and green, showed a carefully labeled map of the winding roads leading off the N. 6 main highway to Chaintré. On the right fold was a cutout of a huge bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé (vintage 1955), a barrel and a tempting glass of cool, golden-hued wine. On the back side was Georges’ painstaking black-and-white sketch of the interior of the
caveau.
“Pouilly-Fuissé Duboeuf Brothers, Winegrowers in Chaintré,” it was labeled. “Au Cul Sec, our tasting room, into which we invite you.”

Georges was only twenty-two then, but the example he set spread throughout the whole area. Today there are thousands of private
caveaux
in the Beaujolais, and every other house, it seems, has its present-day version of the “Stop, Come In and Taste” sign planted by the driveway. The blandishment is as alluring as it is clever, because every vigneron knows that it is hard to resist the temptation to sample wine for free, and that a glass or two of Beaujolais has the magic capacity of changing the world: cares evaporate, expansive optimism appears out of nowhere, wallets spring open. Twenty percent of Beaujolais stock now goes through direct retail sale by individual vignerons.

Georges was on to something, then, and it was only the start. He never forgot Paul Blanc’s admonition to go out and find some good red wines, an admonition insistently repeated by the other restaurateurs on his growing list of Pouilly-Fuissé clients. When he was freed of his army duty, he took the bicycle clip off his right ankle and splurged on the purchase of a motorbike. Mechanized now, he pushed his prospecting trips farther and deeper in expanding circles through the Beaujolais hills, tasting and spitting over and over again as he moved from barrel to barrel and vat to vat, methodically instructing himself on the style of each vigneron, the layout of his vines and the different quality of wine delivered by each different
parcelle
of vineyard. Served by a hypertrophied sensorial memory, one that only improved with repetition over his more than fifty years in the trade, he made himself into something like a living wine almanac. Today there is no one who knows every nook and cranny of the Beaujolais as intimately as Georges Duboeuf, and no one who can taste, judge and select its wines with his speed and precision.

“His talent as a wine taster is stupefying,” Papa Bréchard told me a few years before his death. “And he does it at a speed that is just incomparable. In tasting sessions he leaves everyone else behind. And he’s got the science of tasting early samples and knowing what the wine will become later on. It’s almost an art, his talent.”

Even more famous as a winegrower in his time than Papa Bréchard was the late Louis Savoye, admirable vinifier and collector of tasting prizes with his intense, spicy Morgon. He was already eighty-seven when I met him in his
caveau
in Villié-Morgon back in the early nineties, but he retained a vivid memory of his first encounter with the prospecting kid from Chaintré. “He looked terribly young the first time I laid eyes on him,” Savoye recalled, “but he made an extraordinary impression on me—on all of us. We saw that we had someone here who was faster and better than any of us. I’m not ashamed to say I learned a lot from Georges Duboeuf. We all did.”

The concentric circles of Georges’ marathon tastings widened through the years as his graduation from bike to motorbike to automobile allowed him to cover more ground faster, but the basic method never varied: ceaseless, obsessive tastings, barrel to barrel, vat to vat, choosing and eliminating. With thousands of vignerons to visit—each working in his own way to tend vineyard, plot within vineyard and
parcelle
within plot, then vinifying with whatever skill or dedication he possessed—there was a tremendous diversity of wine quality out there, ranging from superb to execrable, and Georges knew of no other way to get the good ones than to taste them all. As a result, he became a numbers man of Stakhanovite proportions.

What sort of numbers? There’s an old debate about how many wine samples a competent professional can intelligently judge in any given period of time. The debate has grown especially acute in America since the arrival on the oenological scene of the Marylander Robert Parker, whose sensorial and marketing skills have made him prophet and lord chancellor among wine critics. His eminence is not without its detractors. A while back, in a
New York Times
review of a Parker biography, the writer Tony Hendra called into doubt some famous Parker numbers, notably that he was endowed with the prodigious capacity of sampling between 50 and 125 wines a week, or even more in hurry-up, one-time tasting sessions. “Tasting 100 wines (especially at the rate of one a minute),” Hendra concluded, “and judging No. 100—or No. 50—as accurately as No. 1, is a physiological impossibility.”

Georges responded with a little half smile one evening when I told him about the article, shaking his head and raising an arm in a gesture of the futility of attempting to bring noninitiates to an understanding of his business. That day alone, he had sampled somewhat more than three hundred wines.

What he had been chasing that day was the same elusive trophy that he had gone after during his early forays into the hills for Paul Blanc and through all the years since:
le goût Duboeuf
—the Duboeuf taste—his idea of what a good Beaujolais should do for the nose, the palate and the soul. All the Beaujolais he bottles and sells is wine that he has tasted himself, and the wine he loves is a reflection of what the gamay grape gives best when it is handled by a skillful vigneron: a clearly defined rush of fruit reminiscent of fresh-picked red berries, jamlike in the richer
crus
, but still totally dry, marked with the refreshing nip of acidity that adds the necessary body to its soft tannins.

In the universal, eternal trilogy of wine—color, fruit and structure— Georges’ eye for one, nose for the other and palate for the last are so unvarying that a diligent Beaujolais drinker with a modicum of experience can almost infallibly identify his wines from year to year by the simple act of lifting a glass, examining its color and inhaling its bouquet. In effect, Georges’ early years prospecting for Paul Blanc were the postgraduate studies that earned him his oenological Ph.D. Step by step, from his first taste of the delicious, sweet, freshly pressed juice whose sugar is only beginning to turn to alcohol—the nicely named
paradis
—until the vinification was complete and the final product was ready for bottling, Georges observed, sniffed and tasted thousands of times, eliminating candidates until he had chosen exactly the batches he wanted.

The wine trade is riven by just as many factions and jealousies as any other, but everyone in the Beaujolais, even those who have spent their entire careers among his legion of competitors, acknowledges his uncanny ability to predict, from the earliest run-off juice of newly harvested grapes, what the finished wine of the future will be like. For this, tasting talent alone isn’t enough. Choosing from thousands of samples in hundreds of different
caveaux
and
chais,
ordinary mortals tend to get confused and forgetful but, like a top-level chess player, Georges was either born with or developed prodigious powers of memory. Garry Kasparov never forgets a position on the chessboard; Duboeuf never forgets a taste or an aroma.

“His nose!” cried Pierre Siraudin, whose velvety Saint-Amour Georges has been selling for some four decades now. “I wish I had a nose like that. If he hadn’t gone into the wine business he could have been a champion perfumer.”

I once asked Michel Brun, who worked for more than thirty years as Georges’ deputy in Romanèche-Thorins, whether his boss could identify the different Beaujolais growths in a blind tasting—make the pick, for instance, between the neighboring
crus
of Fleurie and Moulin-à-Vent. “Oh, come on,” he said impatiently. “That’s child’s play. I’ve seen him identify eleven different vineyards within the same
cru.
”

André Poitevin, now retired from working his four and a half hectares of Saint-Amour on a hilltop above the hamlet of Les Thévenins, met Georges at age sixteen, when he joined one of the long-range bike expeditions, and he was one of his friend’s earliest suppliers. “I had taken the vines over from my father in 1954, and Georges came to see me on his motorbike a year later,” Poitevin recalled. “He was just starting his business in Chaintré, and he was looking for supplies of good reds, so he started with his friends. He tasted and we had a long talk about who else in the area was making good stuff. His customers were still just restaurants then, but he was expanding his list of suppliers fast.

“His business was small, so he could only afford to buy a few barrels here and there, but everyone could already see he was a crack at tasting. And that memory of his! He would come and taste my different batches of wine and then, three or four months later, remind me which barrels in which rows were less good than the others. He’s incredible! He taught me everything I know about tasting, and he never slowed down. If I ever called him to say I had an especially good vat, I knew he would be there in an hour or two.

“In the beginning, he took my barrels to Chaintré for bottling. A few years later he came and did his bottling here with his portable equipment. I sold him wine for forty-seven years, but”—Poitevin’s grandfatherly features set into a Gallic moue of dissatisfaction—“he dropped us in 2001 and 2003—didn’t buy a drop. I was a little bit vexed when he didn’t buy, but we still tried to keep on saying nice things to each other. He came back to us in 2004, though.”