I'll Drink to That (33 page)

The occasional cynic—the breed isn’t lacking in the wine business— might have impugned Duboeuf’s sincerity by dismissing these events and recompenses as exercises in public relations and/or paternalism, but the truth of the matter was simpler: they all harked straight back to the little window in Villefranche and the humiliations that the peasant vignerons of the Beaujolais had endured at the hands of the entrenched
négociant
cartel. Georges knew the story all too well, and the very considerable expenses he picked up for these festivities were the best reminder that he had been there himself. The ironies of life had decided that the young vigneron who had begun his career in revolt against
négociants
had become the most powerful
négociant
of all, but he was deadly determined not to abuse that position. The best way he could show that determination was by giving something back.

“
Compliments
,” Georges ritually repeated up on stage at the
Fête du Départ
each time he awarded one of his suppliers a prize, and he meant it, too. When he handed the prize over and shook hands, the essence of the gesture was as much vigneron to vigneron as it was dealer to grower.

IX

THE BEAUJOLAIS NOUVEAU RUN

NOW LET US PRAISE DRUNKEN BRITS

I
n 1970, Georges’ first
Fête du Départ
happened to be snubbed by two worthy Englishmen who had preferred to organize their own dinner with the dignity befitting their status at a private table in the nearby Hotel Maritonnes, where the food was excellent, the ambiance was calm and the Beaujolais was by Duboeuf.

On the menu that evening for Joseph Berkmann and Clement Freud was coq au vin, a rooster stewed, unsurprisingly enough, in Beaujolais. Owner of eight London restaurants at the time, Berkmann also ran his own wine distribution company, was Duboeuf’s agent for the UK and wrote a weekly wine column for the London
Sunday Times.
His gallusophagous companion Freud was both a friend and a rival, a man of many talents who at one time or another had been a writer, broadcaster, chef, director of the London Playboy Club and even a respectable member of Parliament. In this instance, he was in Romanèche in his capacity as wine correspondent for the London
Sun.
What neither man could know, as they tied their napkins around their necks that evening and set to destroying the bird that had been sacrificed in their honor, was that they were about to make history.

With all of Duboeuf’s energy and marketing talents, neither he nor any highly paid PR genius could have planned or predicted the media event that Berkmann and Freud invented at that meal, helped along as they were with three bottles of Beaujolais wine: one of Beaujolais-Villages, one of Fleurie and one of Moulin-à-Vent, each one more delicious and thirst-inducing than the last. It went on to become the greatest public relations stunt that ever happened to the Beaujolais, one that catapulted its three lilting syllables around the world effortlessly and free of charge. Sometimes things just fall into your lap. It was called the Beaujolais Nouveau Run.

Only the Brits, that admirably odd people, could have given birth to the monument, the
cathedral
of nonsense that these two gents constructed from a tiny spark of an idea, or carried it off with such surrealistic virtuosity. It is such a fetching little chapter of the story of Beaujolais that it would be a pity not to relate a bit of it here.

The best part of the joke is that neither man was a true Brit, not in the usually accepted sense of ancient lineage on the island, at any rate. Berkmann had been born and raised in the Tyrol and Freud was the grandson of a Viennese shrink named Sigmund. But, warmed-over Austrians as they were, both had so thoroughly imbibed of the atmosphere and standards of behavior of their adopted island that they spontaneously came up with an undertaking that possessed to the highest degree every quality that makes an Englishman’s heart throb with joy: it was arduous, exotic, expensive, moderately exhibitionist, potentially very dangerous and—best of all—totally futile.

As bottle succeeded bottle that night and as midnight drew nigh, Berkmann and Freud found themselves becoming keener of insight, bolder, more intelligent and more certain of their own virtues and capacities. The germ of an idea took shape; jovial boast became affirmation; affirmation became insistence; and insistence became challenge. The glove was hurled: I can get my cartons of
primeur
to London before you can. Some time after midnight, each man roared away from Romanèche with several cartons of 1970 Beaujolais Nouveau in the back of his car, muttering Central European imprecations at the other and vowing to write nasty things about his rival’s oenological ineptitude.

That year and the next, the race was purely a private affair between Berkmann and Freud, and both times Berkmann won, not by any exploits of great speed (both men caught the same morning ferry from Calais to Dover), but because of Berkmann’s superior knowledge of how to deal with London’s rush hour traffic. Little by little, amplified by appropriate tauntings in their respective wine columns, word got around town that something interesting (that is, arduous, expensive, exhibitionist, dangerous and futile) was going on, and others rushed to join in.

By 1972, it was already serious stuff. Smarting from his two successive defeats, Freud attacked the Run with grim seriousness and a brand-new Range Rover, which he counted upon to get him to the Channel in comfort, elegance and high speed, by cross-country with its four-wheel drive, if need be.

“He cheated, naturally,” Berkmann said piously. “He left ten minutes before midnight, but he didn’t have a chance, anyway. I had a three-liter BMW, and I figured out that I could make it up the
autoroute
to Dunkirk in time for the ferry that left at 4:20 in the morning. So I belted on up there, passed Freud on the way, and just missed the ferry by a couple of minutes.” (Driving legally, within the 130 kph speed limit of the
autoroute
system, Berkmann would have spent something like six hours en route to Dunkirk. As it was, even arriving late for the ferry, he established an
average
speed of just under 170 kph from Romanèche to the Channel. This imperialistic attitude toward the French traffic code was a constant of the New Beaujolais Run in the seventies. It became impossible only years later, when the gendarmes wised up, got fast chase cars and decided to crack down an anyone driving more than 130 kph.)

“So I hurried on down to Calais,” Berkmann continued, “but at 5 A.M. there was no ferry in sight. Then someone told me about a vegetable ship leaving from Boulogne a little bit later. I drove like mad and just made it—and Freud was there. He had known about the ship all along, but of course he had hidden it from me. When I walked into the lounge he was sitting there telling everybody how he had beaten me. His face fell apart when he saw me. After that, all he had up his sleeve was to give me directions for the wrong turn up to London, but I didn’t fall for that. So I won again, in spite of his cheating.”

The halo of sanctity was almost visible over Berkmann’s head as he recounted tale after tale of the villainy of his rivals and his own irreproachable rectitude. Having attained the supreme consecration of three consecutive victories, he decided to retire the nonexistent cup and voluntarily removed himself from the high-speed category in 1973 in order to “give the Run a bit of class” by covering the route sedately in his new Rolls-Royce and allowing Freud to fight with the newcomers against the chronometer. In 1973 the organization of the Run was in such chaos that no outright winner could be declared, but everything changed the following year when Alan Hall, gossip columnist for the
Sunday Times
, published an article about the race and offered a bottle of Champagne to the first person to bring a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau to him at his office.

This threw the floodgates open. What had been a semiconfidential competition between rival dealers was suddenly broached to the public and given a precise goal: one bottle of the year’s
primeur
, to be delivered to the
Times
, Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1, as soon as possible after the stroke of midnight of November 14 to 15. Since Hall didn’t specify the means of transportation, it was clear that the winner would be among those dedicated seriously enough to professionalism in inconsequentiality to make the Run not on the French roads but high above them.

Sure enough, the winner of this first “official” race was an enterprising, twenty-eight-year-old Londoner named John Patterson who ran a computerized dating service and who conveniently had opened a wine bar a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace. Entirely innocent of expertise in the subtleties of Beaujolais procurement beyond the fact that he sold the stuff for a tidy markup in his bar, Patterson simply hopped into his Cessna 310, flew a beeline to the tiny airport at Mâcon, asked the man at the control tower where he could buy a case of
primeur
and took a taxi to the first address indicated. After a relaxed French dinner (he swore he drank only mineral water), he returned to the airport at five to midnight—and there he saw a Piper Navajo, props already turning, into which a crew from the Peter Dominic Wine Club was loading cases of
primeur.
Scorning police, customs and other such normal formalities, Patterson sprinted out to his Cessna with his carton under his arm, taxied away on one engine as he labored to fire up the second one and made an emergency takeoff, heading north-northwest.

For the next two and a half hours the two aircraft were in constant radio contact, lying to each other about their positions. Patterson chose to land at Gatwick, the Dominic crew at Heathrow, and their wheels touched ground at almost exactly the same moment. It was finally the cars that decided the race. Patterson had presciently parked his Mercedes 350 SL in a good getaway position, and motored back to London through fog and rain at 150 kph, leaving a fog light, front license plate and part of a fender at a poorly marked corner. He arrived at the
Times
front entrance just as the luckless Dominic crew was rattling the rear door, which, Hall had assured competitors, would be left open, but wasn’t. Patterson persuaded a cleaning lady to let him through and nipped up to Hall’s office to be declared winner over the indignant vociferations of his rivals.

Throughout that night and well into the next day, dozens of other contestants straggled in, driving everything from Ferraris to motorcycles to open-top vintage cars. Scarcely anyone in London paid them any attention, but for twenty-four hours or so the racers had been the media darlings of France, reinforcing the unshakeable Gallic conviction that all inhabitants of the British Isles were as mad as hares, spent their entire lives getting drunk and walking about in the rain saying “lovely weather.”

The organization in 1975 improved considerably after Hall decreed that there would thenceforth be three categories: aircraft, automobiles and a third one, incomprehensible to anyone but a Brit: “any other form of transport imaginable.” Patterson and Berkmann—back in the road race now—were favored in the plane and car classes, and for good reason: both had laid meticulous plans and had greased the right palms. Patterson’s new Twin Aztec was a good deal quicker than his Cessna and for the final sprint home he had hired a former police driver with a three-liter BMW and a motorcycle escort out of Heathrow.

“No one even came close,” he recalled, savoring his victory. “I made it door to door in two hours and fifty-five minutes.”

Berkmann was less lucky. Having covered the route from Romanèche to London innumerable times over years of dedication to drinking, he was determined to show all the contemptible upstarts that no one knew the Run like its inventor and prophet. This time he chose to race in a blood red Jaguar XJS, an even more terrifying automobile than his former three-liter BMW. He knew that there was one absolute requirement: to arrive in Calais in time to catch that 4:20 A.M. ferry. Which was why he had bribed the harbormaster to hold the boat for his arrival.

Berkmann set off from Romanèche that night under a driving rain that offered a visibility only slightly better than zero. Around 2 A.M., his speedometer was registering 225 kph and the tachometer needle was hovering near the 6,500 rpm red line when the trouble happened. A tractor-trailer rig, lumbering along on some anonymous delivery, strayed across the separator line into the
autoroute’s
fast lane, all but invisible behind the cloud of mist and spray churned up in its wake. At the instant the truck’s taillight sprang out at him from the gloom, Berkmann jerked the wheel over, but he was a second too late. With a ripping crash the truck’s protruding bumper sliced open the left half of the Jag’s roof, and the car bounced off the trailer’s right rear tires, heading for the guard-rail. Berkmann was saved only because his car, being English, had right-hand drive: the incision in the roof was exactly where his head would have been in a normal car. Fishtailing and countersteering, he skillfully regained control, but now his car was thoroughly air-conditioned and humidified. He turned the heater up to maximum and plowed on, wondering why he was doing it but doing it even so.

He made the ferry, too, with about five minutes’ help from the harbormaster,only to have victory snatched from his hands when the crew suddenly decided to go on strike just as the white cliffs of Dover were coming into view. For the next five hours he sat impotently, buttoned up tight in Folkstone harbor, making useless attempts at further bribes as the other competitors caught up with him. He could only watch in helpless rage as car after car laden with
primeur
was discharged from the other ferry. There and then, he vowed never to engage in the race again, limiting himself to watching over the normal arrivals of wine from Duboeuf, making sure it got delivered on time, and enjoying the profits.

“On the day of release,” he told me, “there was more
primeur
in London than there was in Paris. I used to sell twelve thousand cases in the first week alone. If a restaurant didn’t get its supply by lunchtime on the fifteenth, I lost a client. The whole bloody town went mad.”