“No wine, no soldiers,” Napoléon famously remarked, and it was as true around the year zero as it was in Bonaparte’s time (or today, for that matter, with the sole adjustment of substituting beer, whiskey or vodka for non-Latin soldiery). The Romans almost got it right, too, when they stuck the gamay into the ground in the hills around Lugdunum (present-day Lyon), capital of the Gauls. If only they had done it a few dozen miles farther north, they would have hit the jackpot, and the story of Beaujolais would be several centuries older.
After the collapse of the Roman empire, the various barbarian invasions, the Dark Ages and all the dimly perceived history attendant to that period, the Beaujolais began evolving as an organized entity with the appearance of its first Christianized lord, Bérard, and his wife Vandalmonde, who in the year 957 set up shop in the rough fortress-castle they called Pierre Aiguë, a Gallic Wuthering Heights anchored on a high escarpment above the poor settlement that was later to become the town of Beaujeu. New to the faith and fired with touching evangelical enthusiasm, this worthy couple made a pilgrimage to Rome and returned with a load of holy objects for the chapel they had ordered built on their vast estate. The collection they proudly brought back with them consisted of the usual religious flimflammery of that period, and included hairs from the Virgin Mary’s head, shreds of the gown and shoes she wore while pregnant with Jesus, a hair of Saint Peter’s beard and a clipping of Saint Paul’s thumbnail.
Religious matters aside, there was already mention of vineyards around Beaujeu at the time of Bérard and Vandalmonde, but it was not until 1473 that the little city came to its great hour of geopolitical glory. It was in that year that Anne, eldest daughter of King Louis XI, was married (at age fourteen) to the youngest son of the House of Bourbon, Pierre de Beaujeu. With that, Anne of France became Anne of Beaujeu. She was a clever, discerning girl, and she rapidly assumed a dominant position in the couple she formed with Pierre, in spite of his twenty years of seniority. Her leadership was not all that surprising, because her father had already predicted great things for her, even if, as it happened in this case, when she married Pierre she had swapped her august patronymic for nothing better than that of an obscure little city in an obscure little wine area. Anne was, King Louis famously allowed, “the least giddy of women, for of levelheaded ones there are none,” but in spite of this faint and indubitably sexist praise, she ruled as de facto queen of France for eight years while her baby brother, Charles VIII, waited to accede to the throne. At no time since has the name Beaujeu exercised such influence and prestige. It is a measure of her brains and charisma that while everywhere in Beaujeu today people refer back to Anne, most citizens would have the devil of a time to give you the name of her husband.
Within less than a hundred years of Anne’s union with Pierre, Beaujeu had slipped back into the shadows of history, supplanted as the region’s administrative center by the larger, more modern and more strategically located city of Villefranche-sur-Saône. As the centuries rolled on, wine replaced politics and war as the great and abiding concern of the area. Even as the acreage given over to vineyards expanded, though, their production seemed doomed to remain a strictly local phenomenon. The twin problems of the frustratingly short life span of wine in general and the primitive state of France’s transportation networks were aggravated by the various interdictions, tolls, inspections and special taxes that barred the free movement of medieval commerce. Customs barriers at the entrance to large communities guaranteed that transport was both slow and expensive, and the inspectors and toll collectors of the Burgundian satraps lying between the Beaujolais and Paris could always be relied upon to follow Philip’s ancient example and make life hell for any enterprising wine seller from Villefranche, Juliénas or Chiroubles who took it into his head to carry his wares on the main road northward. It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that dealers in Beaujolais wines were able to establish a regular and fairly reliable liaison with the attractive Paris market, by avoiding their obstructive Burgundian rivals altogether. Improved roads over the hills westward made it possible for heavy oxcarts laden with barrels of wine to reach the river Loire, where horse-drawn barges could take the cargo aboard for the slow plod toward the capital. Even then, though, the vexations and exactions were far from over. Highwaymen frequently attacked wine convoys en route for the river, and the bargees of the Loire were notorious for their great thirst. Adding river water to the casks they broached certainly disguised their theft of Beaujolais, but it did nothing for the reputation of the wine when it finally reached consumers in the big city.
The injustice of the suffocating parochialism into which the gamay’s wines had been closeted for so long might have largely accounted for the inward-looking, somewhat suspicious manner of the peasant vintners of the Beaujolais, one that lasted well into our modern times. It was doubtless this sense of injustice that gave birth to the legend of Claude Brosse, a kind of commercial Robin Hood whose exploit is celebrated again and again in the region, today still. Although he is most often described as a vigneron from the Mâcon wine fields, I have occasionally heard claim laid to him as a Beaujolais man, but the exact zip code doesn’t really matter, because in any case he is probably mythical. What counts is that Claude Brosse represents the mystique of the Beaujolais in the triumph of an underdog who bursts free of provincial confinement, brings wine to the king—and wins.
He was a giant of a man, the story goes, surely over six feet tall, which was pretty sensational for those days. It was around 1700 or so that the legend has him loading his oxcart up with barrels and trudging northward for thirty-three days, somehow avoiding or bluffing his way through Burgundy’s tollhouses and customs sheds until he arrived safe and sound in Versailles. Parking his oxen outside the royal chapel on a Sunday morning, he betook himself to a bench far in the back, the only spot where a commoner like him could expect to attend a mass in the king’s presence. At the moment of benediction when everyone knelt reverently, the king’s master of ceremonies looked the congregation over and, to his unutterable shock, spied a man in the back who apparently had remained standing.
“On your knees, peasant!” (or something of the sort) he shrieked.
“Well, ain’t I on my knees already?” rumbled Brosse imperturbably, still looming over the rest of the faithful. What made the story even more heartwarming for his compatriots down south was that he spoke in the barely understandable patois of his region. And naturally, the story continues, the king sampled his wine, loved it and ordered that it be served thenceforth at the royal table.
If only it were so. In spite of the boosterism of the Brosse legend, the dreary truth was that the wines of the Beaujolais and the neighboring Mâconnais were—as often they still are today—casually dismissed as mere sub-Burgundies: pleasant enough to drink but devoid of big brother’s character and nobility.
When Claude Brosse made his legendary trek to Versailles, the French monarchy had less than a century of life left in it. Compared to the debasing serfdom that held most of the kingdom’s peasant farmers in bondage, the shared harvest of the fifty-fifty “half-fruit”
vigneronnage
system that prevailed in the Beaujolais was undeniably a real social progress for the personal responsibility and freedom of choice it offered to the skilled winemaking artisan, but considering the essential nature of the ancien régime, it was a humiliating, class-bound structure all the same. Vignerons’ contracts tied them to extra chores like cultivating their lords’ vegetable gardens, supplying them with a certain amount of eggs, butter and live chickens, maintaining their firewood supply, making their hay, heating their ovens and watching over the cooking of their bread, while their wives were required to clean their houses, help itinerant washerwomen at the river with the twice-yearly laundering of their sheets, bedclothes and household linens and, when needed, to wait on their tables.
After the French Revolution of 1789, the great noble and ecclesiastical estates were broken up, and power and vineyard ownership began shifting downward. With that, the stewardship of the Beaujolais countryside changed to resemble what it is today: thousands of small family holdings, either in a more democratic style of
vigneronnage
or land rental (
fermage
) or, more and more frequently, in outright peasant ownership of the land. This pattern continued well into the twentieth century: peasant farmers and raisers of cattle who also made wine. But the forces of history and economics were increasingly nudging them away from the former and toward the latter. Today, just about every square centimeter of ground in the Beaujolais that is favorable to winegrowing is covered with vines, and it is rare to find any livestock at all in a Beaujolais vigneron’s backyard. They used to grow rye in Chénas, Chiroubles was famous for the quality of its turnips, and in any village you could always find a farmer to draw you off a bucket of milk, but all that is from the local supermarket now.
Wine production soared throughout France in the bright new republican world of the nineteenth century, spurred on by advances in technique, improved selection of vine plants and the simple fact of greater individual ownership of vineyards. Wine drinking was truly becoming democratized, and the French took to it with dedication. More wine meant cheaper wine, hence more of it available to even modest incomes. When super-abundant harvests drove prices to rock bottom, deplorable displays of wide public drunkenness were reported, but as a rule wine was treated with the respect it deserved for its undoubted medical and spiritual virtues. Infants often had their first little encounters with wine as soon as they were weaned from the breast, and doctors, ever cautious about their patients’ health, routinely advised that women and children should drink water only after it had been mixed with wine.
This, then, was the consensus: wine was good, wine was safer and more salubrious than water, and the French soil and climate were ideal for producing large amounts of wines of a fantastically rich array of types, ranging from the exotic Alsatian gewürztraminer, redolent of rose petals, to the
vin jaune
(yellow wine) of Arbois in the Jura, whose
terroir
imparted a surprising bouquet of spice and walnuts, to the innumerable flavors and textures of the multitudinous Champagnes, to the depth and intensity of the great Bordeaux and Burgundy reds, complex enough to test the vocabulary-making skills of a battery of oenologists. In short, wine was a godsend, and France was blessed as the world’s center of winemaking. Hardly surprising, then, in the context of the blithely optimistic nineteenth century, when business leaders, economists, colonialists and men of science had the world nicely figured out and wrapped up in neat theoretical bundles, that some, even among the best, allowed their enthusiasm to run riot.
The most famous of them all, the great Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), was a true giant of scientific research, a pioneer of microbiology who more or less single-handedly invented vaccination against infectious disease and, of course, developed the procedure that carries his name for heat-treating various edibles, notably milk. Pasteur deeply studied the process of fermentation, had vines of his own, and for the first time elucidated the complexities of vinification that for centuries winemakers had been approaching with empirical, hit-or-miss guesswork. That alone would have been enough for him to be venerated in France, but what shot him to the wine community’s summit of admiration was a single lapidary phrase he pronounced: “Taken in moderate quantity, wine is the most healthy and hygienic of beverages.”
The date and context in which the phrase was born seem to be unclear, but they never let him forget it. The phrase is constantly reiterated and celebrated in France—most often with the first part, the bit about moderate quantity, subtracted—and it is easily the most famous quote attributed to the great man. It has done signal service to the industry, but Pasteur’s endorsement was as nothing compared to the passionate convictions of his contemporary and fellow eminence of science, the brilliant medical doctor, agronomist and physicist Jules Guyot. Commissioned by Napoléon III to write a massive study on the state of the French wine industry, Guyot concluded that wine could be substituted for bread at family meals and advised a consumption for an average French family (mom, dad and two children) of at least fifteen hundred liters a year—which averages out to almost 1.5 U.S. quarts per day per individual every day of the year, the two kids included. In Guyot’s time, such a recommendation appeared neither unusual nor shocking. It was accepted wisdom that wine—especially red wine—boosted strength and courage, for workers in the field as it did for soldiers in battle, and the concept of alcoholism was little understood among the general population. The good doctor will always be remembered with fondness for a few key paragraphs in
Culture de la Vigne et Vinification
, a study he wrote in 1861.
“A beer-drinking country will never have the mental liveliness and gaiety of the inhabitants of a wine country,” he wrote. “The inhabitants of a cider country will never have the candor of the people of a vine country; so it isn’t the alcohol that constitutes the value and the goodness of wine, because beer and cider contain just as much and sometimes more. Wine is not good because it contains more or less alcohol. All natural wine, weak or strong, is a good wine if it maintains its organic life and shows it by an honest odor, by a concert of all its elements in a harmonious savor of taste, by an easy digestion, an increased muscular force and a greater activity of body and mind. Whether wine’s savor be fresh, sharp and light; whether it be sweet, unctuous and rich, whether it be pungent, warm and austere, wine is good and supports and augments physical and intellectual strength without tiring the digestive organs.”