It seems odd, now when on the turn of a button we can hear and look at fiscal and moral derring-do in capital places, that before things like Watergate, many otherwise preoccupied Americans felt worried by a mere rumor of some peculiar plumbing in central France.
Of course, it is common knowledge that various kinds of emotional excitement, such as anger or even incredulity, can cause startlingly obvious reactions: pallor, faintness, tremblings, and so on. A fine example of this was the audible rumble of an outraged digestive system in our body corporate of Gastronomy in the fifties, when it was reported in metropolitan dailies that a hotel in Dijon, the capital of Burgundy, had red and white wines piped into its bedrooms for the unlimited and free consumption of its guests.
Top-drawer members of eating clubs and wine-and-food societies from Boston to San Francisco clipped this outrageous bit of information, and passed it around with a basically frightened combination of anger and scornful amusement. What next, what next, in this world of pre-prandial alcoholism—cigarettes with the roast?
It was coincidental that gastronomers of Boston and equally devout colleagues in San Francisco sent me, almost on the same day, the horrid clipping. There was an air of tremulous and almost nauseated disbelief in their accompanying notes. In effect they said, half weeping, half accusing, “You used to live in Dijon. Find out for us. This cannot, must not be. What will people think, if in the wine-capital-itself, ignorant tourists guzzle from taps and fall sodden on their beds? How could any respectable Frenchman have permitted such display of cheap sensationalism? It cannot be!”
However, it was and it is true. I have drunk, myself, from the neat tiny taps in Dijon, and more than once.
First I wrote to my friend Georges, who in the past had been university dean, mayor, and practically every other kind of Dijonnais official except a bishop. I sent him the fullest of the several clippings forwarded to me by outraged American wine-lovers. And then, there I was again, in Dijon where I had learned so much, and so much less than I should have, so many years before. I felt fluttery as once more I walked into the café-restaurant of the Hotel Terminus. I was with Georges, my revered teacher.
The place was trimmer and smarter than it had been years before, more modishly designed for leisurely dining and drinking and card playing and the things Burgundians do in a public room when they like it. Georges told me that it had been badly shattered when the Germans blew up the big station across the square as the last military measure on retreating in 1944. Certainly the modern translucent glass panels down the middle of the room were much worthier than the old art moderne imitation Lalique things I remembered, and the two big dim paintings of student life in Paris in the eighties had been cleaned and better hung. There was still a flourishing movie behind the restaurant, with the hotel above it, and my friend told me that it too remained plain and good, in spite of the bacchanalian aura of its notorious Burgundian Rooms. We were to see them as soon as we had finished our coq au Chambertin and I had met Monsieur Maillard, the proprietor, or one of his hotelkeeper sons.
We went up the wide pleasant stairs to the first floor, and into one of the four chambres bourguignonnes, in the tumbled process of being turned out between guests. A young Maillard, an attractive solid-looking man who had spent several years in prison camps and confessed that he still ate green salads with a barely repressed gluttony, told us that the rooms were no more in demand than any others in their price range, but that when travelers found that one was available, they would take it with an understandable mixture of amusement and curiosity, in spite of the noise from the street and the station.
We went through a large simple bedroom hung with soft green, past two beds which were low and “modern” and the two shuttered windows which looked out into trees along the Rue de la Liberté, and into the bathroom. I felt a kind of quiet nervousness in both myself and my companions: was I going to be annoyed, scoffing, repelled, shocked, by this really ridiculous idea of piping good wine through the walls like water?
“And there it is,” Georges said without expression. “You will notice that Monsieur Maillard has very prudently placed it near the washbasin, in case some tipsy guest forgets to turn it off properly, and it dribbles.”
“More teasing,” Maillard said mildly. “Go right ahead, old fellow. You know such a thing has never occurred.”
On the wall to the side of the basin, and about breast-high, was what looked like the front half of a fat little wooden wine cask, with two toy spigots sticking out and two pretty little silver tastevins, typically Burgundian, hanging beside them. It was the sort of fakey amusing toy an assistant director in Hollywood might order built into his bar, filled with scotch for his housewarming party and then a dust catcher until he became a producer and ordered a bigger and better one.…
Monsieur Maillard rather solemnly took down one of the tastevins and half filled it with a couple of tablespoons of red wine. “The reservoir is almost empty,” he said as he handed it to me. “It is filled every morning, on the top floor, and of course checked at night. In the summer we keep the white wine chilled, but we leave the red alone.”
The wine was a good firm grand ordinaire, the same Georges and I had drunk downstairs for lunch. It was, the proprietor’s son told us, one of the passe-tous-grains, a yield from the noble Pinot Noir grape, stretched with Gamay, which some vintners lied about but he felt proud to serve as what it was. Certainly it was pleasant to drink, and he said smilingly that he had never had any complaints about it, either in his restaurant or up in the bedrooms.
I did not taste the white wine, but recognized it from the day before, when I had drunk it at my friend’s house with some cold ham and a mild cheese. It had been correctly labeled as an Aligoté, and like the red was a grand ordinaire from the southern edge of the Côte d’Or, near Mâcon. By now, in spite of the basically ridiculous position I was in, crowded with two gentlemen in a small bathroom with a fake silver winetaster in my hand, it was plain that I was not at all annoyed, repelled, shocked, or even faintly scoffing. The discreet unvoiced tension vanished. I drained the last sip of the passe-tous-grains and as we went out through the shadowy peaceful bedroom I said, “I’m truly glad I saw that, you know.”
Georges laughed, and said to Monsieur Maillard, “I showed you the clippings Madame sent. It seems that the venerable wine-and-food boys in the States were really upset at the thought of your vulgar publicity stunt. They envisioned crowds of drunken American tourists, roaring and hiccoughing out of the hotel, spreading scandal and general ill-will.”
The young Frenchman grinned comfortably. “I have a pile of clippings a foot high, mostly from America and England! It was indeed a kind of stunt, but I never considered it vulgar. And it has never contributed to the alcoholic problems of the world. The average consumption for two guests in twenty-four hours is much less than a quart, and of course it is mainly white in hot weather and red in the cooler months.”
When I asked him which nationality drank the most, he looked thoughtful and said he had not noticed, but would devote himself to some sort of census during the next winter.
“It never occurred to me to raise the price of the rooms,” he went on. “With me it was simply a sort of advertising for Dijon, and not for our hotel.”
“But how did you ever think of piping wine through the walls?” I asked half teasingly as we stood by the clerk’s desk in the small entry hall downstairs.
He looked with an air of pretended surprise at Georges. “But listen, old man! Didn’t you explain that it is basically an American trick I stole?” They both grinned at me, and Maillard went on, “It happened a couple of years ago during a very dry summer. We had two charming schoolteachers from New York in the room you just saw, and they needed an astonishing amount of ice, or so it seemed to us provincials. One night the maid was ill or something, and I myself ran upstairs with a bowlful from the café. And somewhat to my surprise”—and here Monsieur exchanged a poker-faced look with Georges—“these elderly but charming travelers were drinking floods, literally floods, of plain chilled water!
“I asked them respectfully if this could not be a dangerous habit, digestively speaking, and they assured me that they had drunk nothing but ice water, both night and day, since their arrival in New York from the Midwest some thirty years before. New York, they said, is the ice-water capital of the world, with thousands of miles of pipe carrying nothing but this glacial flood throughout the whole metropolis!
“I put two and two together then, like any businessman, and decided that as a citizen of the wine capital of the world”—and here he and Georges bowed slightly to each other and to me—“it was my clearly indicated duty to pipe wine at the proper temperature into as many of my rooms as possible.”
We all sighed and smiled. Maillard held up his hand apologetically. “So far,” he added, “that is only four.” He sighed again, and we parted with even more than the usual spate of amenities.
“One more proof that water can indeed be changed into wine,” Georges murmured as we walked slowly under the trees toward the station. “And now perhaps you can reassure some of those Doubting Thomases, and ease their blood pressure. Tell them that you came, you saw, you drank. Even gastronomical publicity is not as indigestible as it sounds in the newspapers.…”
Several times over several years I went back to the little bathrooms. It still irked me to tap a cool decent white wine (best before breakfast!) from between the toilet and the washbasin, but I surmounted this aesthetic quibble bravely. And late at night, when traffic thinned below the windows and mysterious bleeps and hummings came from the station, I slipped unsodden into Burgundian dreams with a tastevin of “the red” beside my bed.
I had done my earnest best by letter to reassure Yankee doubters that this was no more a trick than any other. It was as logical as the American pipe dream of constant ice water, once as prerequisite to elegant hotel life as air conditioning seems to be in the seventies. There were other things to worry about, perhaps more politic … but not then, in Dijon.
—St. Helena, 1970