I'll Drink to That (36 page)

“He shouldn’t do that, Marcel. He can work his vines that way because he’s lucky—he’s strong as a horse himself. But he’s giving people the wrong idea. That’s not how wine is made anymore. If you give people the idea that you have to use horses to make good wine, then everyone’s going to leave the trade. I started with a horse, too, but I’m not going back to it. What Marcel is doing is just folklore for the press.”

Jean-Pierre Labruyère, president of the Moulin-à-Vent winegrowers union, emphatically shared Cinquin’s feelings about the old ways versus the new. Rich, well connected and quite influential in French political and economic circles, Labruyère inherited family vines in Moulin-à-Vent, but you won’t find any dirt under his fingernails. About as far removed from the peasantry as wealth, bespoke suits and the signature Parisian manner can make a man, he has wide holdings in supermarkets and food distribution, owns vineyards in Bordeaux and California, is thoroughly accustomed to commanding and shows little patience with romantic notions or sentimentalism in the face of the hard-edged realities of commerce. At a quick business lunch shared with the mayor of Mâcon, he made a vibrant apologia for modern chemical treatment of vines and dismissed the return of grassy bands to the vineyards—and indeed, the entire movement toward organic agriculture in winemaking— as nothing better than a passing fashion. There was an edge of disdain in his voice when he delivered his verdict: “It’s like short or long skirts for women. I’m not at all convinced that the quality of bio wines is any better than those made with chemical treatments. But grass is good for the image—
c’est une mode.
”

So much for Marcel, his bands of grass, his horse and his compunctions about using too much chemistry. In reality, though, he is the least fashion-conscious of men, and far from being a Luddite, he has used machinery all his professional life, so whatever the tough guys and the economic swaggerers may think, he is not attempting to turn back the clock or to suggest that vignerons should give up their tractors and treatments. It is simply that working with Hermine makes him feel good, and he can’t avoid the suspicion that the wine they make together is a little bit better, too. But his hand on the plow behind his horse is irritating, because it is a reminder that there is another way, slower and harder though it may be. If his fellow winemakers see that as a kind of reproach, that’s their problem. The nub of the issue is starkly simple: mechanization is faster and easier, and, like the chemical industry, it is here to stay. And even if they were interested in trying a different approach, the vast majority of the younger generation of vignerons, the Beaujolais baby boomers, have never even touched a handheld plow. They’re tractor jockeys now, and plowing and treating the vines with a horse would be as mysterious to them as saddling a unicorn. Marcel and Hermine are true anachronisms, then, but there’s nothing fake or insincere about their relationship. Nor, he insists, is working the vines with a horse all that difficult or impractical, even in the twenty-first century.

“It’s free energy,” he cried. “If I had a son, the two of us could handle fifteen hectares with two horses. I’ve even offered to teach some of the young local vignerons to work with horses, but they’re not interested. I think it’s a shame to lose these old techniques.”

Marcel is far too good-natured to feel sorry for himself, but his single regret is his lack of offspring. His first marriage, in 1970, was childless and ended in divorce. When he remarried in 2004, it was too late for children. In between there were a few wild oats to be sown, but he was occupied mostly with work. The already generous helping that he had on his plate increased in 1971, when the town council voted him mayor of Lancié. This was an honor for a young man of only twenty-seven, of course, but the honor came at a price, because there was and is a central fact about French small-town politics: in exchange for the exalted title and the tricolor sash, the mayor is the one who is expected to do most of the work and to take all the criticisms. That Marcel was able to hang on in the office for twenty-four years was testimony not only to his capacity for work but his patience, too—and his firmness in enforcing the rules.

“They used to call me The Sheriff when I was mayor. I made some enemies. That didn’t always make life simple, either.”

It was during this long period of involvement in local politics that Marcel enjoyed a brief moment of fame, as the result of his one and only experience of competitive sport. In 1985 for a lark he accepted an invitation to join a Bordeaux-to-Paris bicycle race of French mayors. Never in his life had he participated in any such race before, and he was totally ignorant of specific training and racing technique, but he was strong, he was determined, and he knew how to pump the pedals. Faced with a pack of fancy city gents on fancy bikes, the Beaujolais peasant put his head down and worked—first and last race ever, and he won it—French national champion of mayors at age forty. The 615 kilometers were to be covered within a twenty-four-hour period, and he came in first: twenty-one hours.

By then, he had already developed his own very particular commercial style, building a customer base by direct individual contact. Quite apart from the high quality of his wines, his affable nature, his perpetual good humor and his willingness to go the extra mile—quite literally—built him an extraordinarily loyal clientele, because he offered an additional service: he delivered. Marcel finally got his long-awaited truck driver’s license when he bought a secondhand tractor-trailer rig big enough to stash as many cartons of wine as he needed for his customers, anywhere in the country. Customers led to other customers, and at any time of the year his old white truck might have been seen rumbling over the back roads (by principle he avoided expensive toll roads—a penny saved is a penny earned) from Brittany to Alsace, Normandy, Picardy or wherever else anyone wanted the wines he was selling. Marcel the wanderer kept long, frugal hours, sleeping in the truck, eating his sandwiches in the cabin and dropping off his orders at any time of day or night because, on the road as at home, he never slept much. Over the years, clients accustomed themselves to his unpredictable hours and unorthodox delivery system: cases of Beaujolais delivered to their doorstep at three or four in the morning with the bill on top, to be paid at their leisure.

Marcel was Marcel. That was just how he did things. In Brittany he sponsored uniforms for a local soccer team by offering the players T-shirts emblazoned with a fetching slogan: MARCEL PARIAUD EN BEAUJOLAIS. It was a clever little bit of marketing, because the simple word “Beaujolais” could have been construed as an incitement to drinking, and thereby fallen afoul of France’s draconian laws against publicity for alcohol. His simple identity, on the other hand, could hardly be contested. The T-shirts weren’t nearly as sumptuous as a first-class trip on the TGV or a three-star dinner with Paul Bocuse, but small-town athletes in the middle of nowhere in Brittany were glad to have them, and word got around that Marcel was a good man who sold good wine. And he was accommodating, too. If for some reason his wine didn’t live up to expectations, he might push his service-oriented commercial approach to the point of offering something entirely novel in the wine business: a take-back guarantee. One evening, as we were sampling different years of his Morgon and Beaujolais in his
caveau
, he told me about a customer in Saint Brieuc.

“He hadn’t paid me for the cartons of 1995 that he had ordered,” he explained, “and I couldn’t understand why. When I came by to see him the next year, he said the wine had a strange taste. Well, it turned out that he had stored the cartons next to a radiator in his kid’s room. Never mind, I said, I’ll take it back and give you some others. I’m happy I did it, too, because after I put those cartons in proper storage, they came right back. They’re perfect now. I’m still drinking them.”

Seeking to accommodate his clientele further, he extended his reach by registering as a
négociant
after some of his customers asked him to bring both Beaujolais and wines from outside the region. Sure, no problem. His was a decidedly small-time operation compared to Duboeuf, Jadot and the others, but it turned a tidy little profit, and he was beginning to feel like a real capitalist when disaster struck in 1994. It arrived in the form of two bailiffs rapping smartly on his front door. They had come on behalf of a couple of banks, they explained, to seize his furniture, his bed and anything else of commercial value they could find, including his wine business.

Marcel had been too accommodating, it turned out—not just once but twice. Two friends had asked him to stand as guarantor for loans they were negotiating. The first was his banker, who wanted to retire and open a bar in Marseille. Who would not back a loan to his own banker? Marcel signed. The other, a local man, planned to set up a bottle-washing business serving the wine industry. He already owed Marcel 125,000 francs, so that sum could be put toward a share in the new business. Marcel signed for him, too. Bad luck: both men went bust. Finding the beneficiaries of those loans insolvent, the banks behaved as banks do, and turned against the guarantor. Nothing personal, you understand, the bailiffs explained. You can demand the money from the friends you signed for. That was no comfort, and there was no way out—a signature was a signature. Over the next seven years, laying out increments month by month, Marcel paid back his friends’ debts: somewhat more than $400,000 in capital and interest.

“I learned the hard way how business works,” he said, smiling ruefully. “But I left this affair with my head held high and my honor intact.”

My honor
. It is difficult to overstate the absolutely central importance of the concept of honor for the Beaujolais peasantry. It is painful to lose money, to be sure, but dishonor in the community is intolerable. That, too, is a reminder of the old ways, and the cynical dealings and financial hanky-panky of big-money hustlers will always remain an inexplicable mystery to these people. Less than ten years after Marcel’s catastrophe, two new incidents—far more sensational, these ones—would be underlining that importance, when first the collective Beaujolais winemaking community and then Georges Duboeuf in person would be suffering grievously for honor unjustly impugned.

For the moment, though, the order of the day was to celebrate the debts expunged. Marcel did it the best way possible: he got married. Nathalie Joanton was a northerner, a girl from Picardy, a radiant, fresh-faced blonde who had been working as a hairdresser when Marcel met her while on one of his delivery rounds. She moved down to Lancié in 1994, but there was no question of marriage just then, not with the debts and their various legal complications hanging over Marcel’s head. They officialized their union in 2004, when Nathalie in white and Marcel in his Sunday suit trotted up to the Lancié
mairie
(town hall) in Marcel’s best secondhand buggy, pulled by Hermine. Splendid in her tricolor sash,
Madame le Maire
read out the ceremonial republican marriage pronouncement with appropriate gravity while Marcel mentally mouthed the familiar words along with her. He had performed the same ceremony himself, dozens and dozens of times.

“You know,” Marcel said, grinning enormously as he recalled that trip to the town hall with Nathalie, “I clearly remember my father telling me about the two things he had learned in life. Never get into politics, he said, and never marry without a contract. So of course what did I do? I got married twice without contracts, and I became mayor.”

With Nathalie, a new project had arisen. Across the road from the Pariaud family house, on the other side of the village, there was the ruin of an old sheepfold and, on a rise above it, a deserted and slightly less dilapidated two-story stone house, both for sale and not too expensive. Marcel snapped them up, brought out his mason’s tools again and set to work, back into the rhythm of ten straight hours of masonry. Over the next few years he transformed the tumbledown sheepfold into a two-story, L-shaped building with four rooms on top and kitchen, dining room and storage space below. Tourism was bound to be growing in the Beaujolais, he reasoned, and modern, well-equipped rooms inside picturesque old stone would make an attractive bed-and-breakfast. As he withdrew progressively from working his vines, the B and B could provide a nice supplement to his state pension and send him and Nathalie into old age with something like security. Just to make sure that tourists would come and then pass the good word on to their friends, he added a heated swimming pool and one more room, larger this one, equipped as a studio. The Pariauds’ Petit Nid de Pierre (Little Stone Nest), entirely run by Nathalie, is now Lancié’s best B and B, and Marcel is working on making the old house comfortable for the day when he and Nathalie move in. When they do—no date determined yet—he will have a deeply satisfying view from the upper windows: his own mini-hotel compound overlooking vines stretching away toward Fleurie and Chiroubles, the medieval turrets of the Château de Corcelles looming in the distance and Belgian, Dutch and English tourists splashing in his pool. Not bad for a peasant who left school at fourteen. Characteristically, though, Marcel appraised his good fortune modestly—it was mostly, he insisted, the result of luck and timing.

“I had it easy because I got started just when Beaujolais was beginning to be popular. I feel sorry for the young guys who are just starting out now. It’s tougher and tougher to be a vigneron these days. There are a lot of new problems that I never had—competition from foreign wines, overplanting and oversupply, the government’s anti-drinking programs and the police controls on the roads, all that. Me, I’m all right. I’ve got enough to live on, and I’m basically retired. But I pity the guys who’ve got themselves in debt up to the ears for land and equipment because they wanted to make wine. Their future’s not clear.”

Marcel and I were once again in his
caveau,
dining on
boeuf bourguignon
that Nathalie had prepared for us and drinking his muscular 2003 Morgon with it. Although it might have been reasonable to suspect the judgment of a man whose idea of having it easy was his lifelong habit of nonstop work from sunrise to beyond sunset, Marcel’s sympathy was not misplaced. By the time the twentieth century had creaked over into the twenty-first, the salad days of the French winemaking community had come and gone. The woe was largely apportioned out among the brotherhood, but it was felt with particular distress in the Beaujolais, because the peasant vignerons, poor cousins of the trade, had grown accustomed to being invited to the front parlor and having a bit of money in the bank. Now those whose vines grew in marginal
terroirs
, or who did not possess Marcel’s strength, exuberant good health and nose for vinification, found to their stupefaction that bankruptcy was a very real menace.