I'll drink to that: Beaujolais and the French peasant who made it the world's most popular wine

320 Pages·2007·0.949 MB·English

by  Dubœuf, Georges;Chelminski, Rudolph

I’ll Drink to That
Beaujolais and the French Peasant
Who Made It the World’s
Most Popular Wine
Rudolph Chelminski

I’ll Drink to That

I’ll Drink to That
Beaujolais and the French Peasant
Who Made It the World’s
Most Popular Wine
Rudolph Chelminski
GOTHAM BOOKS
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Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © 2007 by Rudolph Chelminski
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Chelminski, Rudolph.
I’ll drink to that: Beaujolais and the French peasant who made it the world’s most popular wine /
Rudolph Chelminski.
p. cm.
ISBN: 1-4362-4735-7
1. Beaujolais (Wine)—French—History. 2. Duboeuf, Georges. 3. Vintners—French—Beaujo-
lais. 4. Wine and winemaking—France—Beaujolais—History. 5. Beaujolais (France)—History.
I. Title.
TP553.C378 2007
614.2'2230944—dc22 2007016024
Set in Electra LH • Designed by Elke Sigal
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Contents
Foreword vii
i What a Glass of Wine Represents 1
ii Vile and Noxious, Downtrodden and Despised 29
iii Ruin and Salvation 53
iv The Three Rivers of Lyon 83
v Interlude 109
vi A Bike and Two Bottles of Wine 123
vii One of Us 155
viii Le Beaujolais Nouveau Est Arrivé 185
ix The Beaujolais Nouveau Run 219
x Labor and Honor 231
xi Whither Beaujolais? 259
Acknowledgments 283
Glossary 287
Index 291

Foreword
W
hen I began researching this book, I was struck by the remark-
ably consistent—I would even say uniform—reaction by friends and
acquaintances upon hearing that its subject was to be the Beaujolais:
first the smile, then the complicit burst of laughter and one of those you-
lucky-guy remarks to signify that my undertaking was certain to be fun,
but somehow not quite serious. A whole world of predigested assump-
tions underlay this reaction. With the subject of wine enjoying an un-
precedented prominence and prestige (attended by its inevitable dance
steps of protocol and snobbery), the general conclusion was that I had
chosen to write a book about a Ford instead of a Ferrari. Everyone knows
Beaujolais, or thinks he does, and everyone has an opinion, one that can
usually be expressed within a few seconds. This opinion-giving is often
wildly erroneous, but it is unfailing. After all, who has not tossed down
a glass of Beaujolais at one time or another in his life, and who has not
read an article about this or that aspect of its singular career? The saga
of Beaujolais Nouveau alone erupts in such a yearly blaze of publicity
that it can scarcely be avoided. For universal name recognition, the only
wine that can rival Beaujolais is Champagne.
The name Champagne doesn’t elicit smiles and laughter, though,
and neither do Bordeaux or Bourgogne—that’s serious stuff. For that
vii
FOREWORD
matter, just about any wine you can think of, whether it be from Alsace,
Languedoc, Midi-Pyrénées, California, Australia, Chile or anywhere
else, will be assessed with similar poker-faced gravity. Only Beaujolais
gets the smile and projects this aura of easy familiarity.
But familiarity breeds contempt, as we all know, and Beaujolais has
suffered more than its share of obloquy. This, of course, is the ransom
of its success, but it is really quite extraordinary that a success and a
notoriety of this degree should have come to a wine that represents only
slightly more than 2 percent of France’s total production and .05 per-
cent worldwide. How it reached this point of celebrity is a story of a
few turns of history’s wheel, of a certain amount of luck and a certain
amount of marketing skill, but mostly of a long background of unremit-
ting drudgery: centuries of hard work poorly rewarded. It is also to a
great extent the story of one man, a young peasant winegrower named
Georges Duboeuf who at age eighteen revolted against an unfair, illogi-
cal distribution system run for the benefit of a dealers’ cartel, and did it
so well and so thoroughly that he rose to become the biggest dealer of
all—but one of an entirely new style.
Beaujolais, then, is a double success story, the wine and the man,
but does that make either worthy of being treated in full book length? Af-
ter all, there are thousands of capitalists wealthier and more influential
than Georges Duboeuf, and any number of Ferrari wines of greater pres-
tige than Beaujolais. Naturally I answer an emphatic yes to the above
question, because beyond the predictable angle of the underdog win-
ning against the odds, the history of the Beaujolais reflects and explains
a good deal about the French themselves, “this quick, talented, nervous,
occasionally maddening but altogether admirable people” (I’m quoting
myself here), among whom I have lived for more than forty years now. As
for Georges Duboeuf, capitalism would have an infinitely better reputa-
tion today if all the world’s Enrons, Tycos and WorldComs had been run
by the likes of this model entrepreneur.
More than any other factor, the sudden worldwide prominence that
came to the wines of the Beaujolais is owed to Duboeuf. He’s a very in-
viii