Adventures on the Wine Route

Bordeaux: “They are neither generous nor vigorous, but the bouquet is not bad, and they have an indescribably sinister, somber bite that is not at all disagreeable.”

BORDEAUX LIES due south of Savennières. In terms of driving time it is not that far, only a few hours, but in terms of temperament it is a wonder the two are in the same galaxy.

For most wine importers, Bordeaux is the foundation of their business, but I arrived there several years after I had been working in the Loire, Burgundy, and the Rhône. I recall my initial reaction to the vineyard landscape when I arrived in the Médoc: “It is so flat, how can they make fine wine here?” That was the first symptom of a sort of personality clash with Bordeaux and the Bordelais.

One could probably accuse me of a tendency to rebel against façades. Bordeaux is a land of façades. In the city itself, there is the monumental façade of the Grand Théâtre with its twelve missile-sized Corinthian pillars, the smaller-scale façades of the numerous banking houses, the stolid façades of the négociant warehouses along the docks … Henry James wrote that “the whole town has an air of almost depressing opulence.” As for good claret, James wrote, “I certainly didn’t find it at Bordeaux, where I drank a most vulgar fluid.” He did find “pyramids of bottles, mountains of bottles, to say nothing of cases and cabinets of bottles,” but James concludes: “Good wine is not an optical pleasure, it is an inward emotion.”

And there are the baronial façades and turrets of the châteaux … oh, the châteaux, the number of them boggles the mind. The landscape is bestrewn and plumed with them. All this presents to the observer an impression of class, stability, reliability, elegance, permanence, tradition, and unimpeachable status. But even the name château is a façade, because many châteaux are nothing but dilapidated sheds in which wine is produced. At Bordeaux you need not be a château to be a château!

As a Bordeaux proprietor, you do not even need a good winemaker, although having one might mean a few extra centimes per bottle when the day’s price quotes appear. You need only have been included in the classification of 1855, 130-some years ago. Your vineyard might now be ten times larger than it was in 1855, your production per acre five times larger, your grape varieties blended in different proportions, your vinification new-fangled (but concealed behind a façade of varnished oak vats) … No matter. If your château’s name was included in the classification of 1855, you are on good terms with your banker. You may even be a banker.

No, the image cast by Bordeaux is not one of pious monks breaking up rocks in quest of unappreciated perfection. Here the world’s currencies shower down like confetti.

An importer can buy Chambertin from its producer, Hermitage from its producer, Château Grillet from Château Grillet, but he cannot buy Château Lafite from Château Lafite or Château Margaux from Château Margaux. I arrived accustomed to buying wine nose-to-glass in the growers’ cellars, and I attempted to conduct my affairs in the same manner at Bordeaux. It was like trying to enter a room without opening the door. At Bordeaux a château sells its wine to a négociant who then sells it to the importer. Bordeaux’s négociant structure has a long history and an intransigent grip on its commerce. My nose got bent and my ego bruised more than once.

And, after all, why should one resist? When I tried to circumvent the négociants and buy directly from the châteaux, some at Bordeaux assumed it was in order to circumvent the négociant’s commission and thereby obtain a lower price. Rarely was I given a hearing to explain that such was not the case.

I like to taste and discuss with the fellow who grows the grapes and vinifies the wine. There is so much more to divining a wine’s quality than a quick sniff and taste, but at Bordeaux the attitude is usually: “The vintage charts rate the vintage eighteen out of twenty and it is a second growth. Here is its price. What more do you need?”

Most tastings occur in the négociant offices. I detest having to judge wine based on their little airline-sized sampler bottles. Oh, if you are a good boy, you will be fixed up with a visit to a château. Here is the occasion to gauge your importance. If you are a small fry, you receive the tourist bus tour. If you are a good client, there might be a meal at a fifth-growth château. If you are really a mover and shaker, you will dine at one of the first growths with a parade of older vintages.

I like to taste through a cellar, several barrels, several vintages, appraise the character of the winemaker, listen to his appreciation of his own wine, look at his terrain, try to get a feel of what is going on there. Why does he do it the way he does it? I want to discuss the treatment of the wine at the all-important moment of the bottling. Will it be filtered? By what method? How severely? Is it filtered because he wants to, or because he feels he has to? By the same token, it is important that winemakers hear from those of us who are not afraid of a natural wine. That sort of give-and-take is valuable to both sides. However, most of the Bordeaux wine trade is quite happy keeping everybody’s eyes on labels instead of wine.

And finally, I like to buy direct because it is the only way that I can control the physical condition of the wine from the moment it leaves the château cellars until my client walks out of the shop with it.

In most instances, the public buys Bordeaux by vintage, label, and price. The wine is not necessarily tasted before it is purchased, but let us say you have attended a tasting of various 1983 Bordeaux and you decide you must have a case of Château Margaux. Next you might shop around because several importers bring in Château Margaux and several merchants stock the 1983 and consequently prices vary enormously. You buy the cheapest of course, because 1983 Château Margaux is just that, 1983 Château Margaux. Or is it? Even if all the bottles were the same wine when they left the château cellars, there is no reason to believe they will taste the same by the time you carry one home from a wineshop.

A friend in San Francisco invited me to a tasting of several vintages of Châteaux Margaux: 1983, 1982, 1981, 1980, 1979, 1978, 1961, and 1945. To reach San Francisco, the bottles had to go from Château Margaux to the négociant’s warehouse by truck, then to the docks to be loaded aboard a ship. They are landed either on the East Coast, in which case they are trucked or trained overland to the West Coast, or they go directly to the West Coast by boat via the Panama Canal. After they are unloaded, they pass sooner or later through customs, then they are stored by the importer or retail merchant. One can count several opportunities for spoilage by overheating en route, and every Margaux in the tasting had suffered to some degree (Fahrenheit or centigrade!) or another.

The 1945 was closer to black than brown in color, and it was undrinkably over the hill. Five hundred dollars had been paid for the bottle. The 1961 had only one foot in the grave. With those two older vintages, the problem was probably a combination of bad shipping and many years of bad storage. The same vintages tasted at Château Margaux are glorious. But the younger vintages, too, had all been cooked. Some were well done, some medium, but none tasted rare. Mistreatment had robbed them of nuance, rendering them practically uniform in aroma and flavor. After years tasting wines in the growers’ cellars, one learns to recognize the taste of a vibrant, healthy wine. None we tasted were in mint condition, none tasted as they do at Château Margaux, all had lost some luster, which is not Château Margaux’s fault unless one wants to reproach them for not taking the responsibility to insist that their pricey product travel at a proper temperature.

I prefer to buy wine direct because then I know that when it leaves the cold, dark château cellar to begin its voyage, it will be loaded directly into an equally cold, dark container.

For a retail client there is more to buying Bordeaux than nosing out the lowest price. Inform yourself of the history of the wine’s shipping and storage conditions, or better, taste a bottle from the batch you intend to buy. Make certain the wine you are putting down is sound. Years later, when you decide your claret is mature for drinking, you do not want an unpleasant surprise.

Year after year I returned to Bordeaux, looking to unearth good winemakers who would work directly with me. There were some successes, some failures, some happy encounters, some strange.

The quality at Château l’Arrosée near Saint-Emilion impressed me, but on the matter of a direct purchase, I made no headway with the proprietor. After some persuasion, because he does not believe anyone is qualified to taste his wine until it is in bottle, he allowed me into his chais to taste out of barrel. The tasting was accompanied by his discourse on his château; he has the best wine at Saint-Emilion, the best soil, best exposition, barrels, and vinification. It was fascinating enough (although some might have found his self-congratulation a bit suffocating) because his is indeed a hillside vineyard, which is rare in Bordeaux. True, there are plenty of gentle slopes, but rarely anything steep enough to be called a hillside. As proud as he was about his wine, it did not interest him to take steps to ensure that it arrived in the States in pristine condition. When I returned to taste his next vintage, and the one after that, he delivered the same speech I had heard the first time, practically word for word, and when I tried to interject an opinion he continued with his script as if he had not heard me. If he did pause I would leap in, trying to cram a question in edgewise, but he would simply interrupt me and continue his spiel. It was as disconcerting as a gnat in the ear. The fellow had no off switch.

Here one sees an extreme example of the tendency among the Bordelais to erect a façade of vainglory. Perhaps they have nothing to hide, but when one cannot get past the façade, when one bumps up against it again and again, it arouses suspicions.

But then there are people like Jacques Marly at Château Marlartic-Lagravière, who is proud of his wine, loves to discuss it in passionate detail, enjoys differences of opinion, and has a most exquisite sensibility. Or Claude Ricard, who until 1984 was proprietor of the Domaine de Chevalier. In his youth Ricard trained to be a concert pianist, and dinner at his domaine might be preceded by a piano concert in the living room. At table he structures the wine service with the same attention a pianist gives to organizing a concert program. Ricard warmed my heart at one of those memorable dinners. After a taste of Beethoven, Chopin, and the Chevalier 1963 blanc, he served two of his old reds side by side. It was up to the guests to divine the vintages. One bottle had aged as one would wish oneself to age. It still had spirit and vigor. All its faculties were intact. The other wine belonged in a rest home, if not the morgue. Everyone came up with their guesses, and quite logically attributed to the healthy old bottle a great birth year like 1928 or 1929. Everyone guessed a different “off” year for the senile wine. Ricard then astonished his guests by revealing that both bottles were vintage 1928. The hale Chevalier had come out of the domaine’s cellar, the tired Chevalier he had purchased recently from the cellar of a Bordeaux négociant. His dramatic comparative tasting gave me the perfect opening to hammer away at my direct-buying policy. From time to time Ricard and I visited and discussed the possibility of a direct purchase, then just as I thought I was making progress he sold his beloved Domaine de Chevalier to an Armagnac company.

Jean Goutreau is a négociant who purchased a château in order to make his own wine. Strange that he of all people is one of those who are willing to sell to me directly, bypassing even his own négociant firm, but that is only one of the many things that set him apart from the norm at Bordeaux. He says things that one does not hear elsewhere. Speaking with his négociant hat on, he says, “If I offer a petit château at fifteen francs per bottle, everyone demands a sample. They must taste it before buying. But if it is a château at a hundred and fifty francs they will buy it without sampling. It is the label that counts.”

When I arrived in early 1986 to taste Goutreau’s own wine, Château Sociando Mallet, the stampede to buy the 1985s had already begun. The wine journalists had provoked a buying frenzy. “Year of the century! Year of the comet!” I asked Goutreau whether the vintage honestly deserved the hoopla.

“Look,” he said, rolling a little cigarillo from one side of his mouth to the other, “in 1982 the Bordelais produced more wine than they ever had. A record harvest. A bonanza. In 1983 more or less as much. In 1985 30 percent more! What do you expect? Sure, there are good wines, but don’t be surprised if many are a bit liquid, a bit diluted.”

Such candor facing a potential buyer is typical of Jean Goutreau. When we were tasting his 1982, he remarked, “1982 is a very special vintage, the first time we have not chaptalized since 1961.” I began to worry for his safety. No one at Bordeaux speaks about chaptalization. Everyone’s fingers are pointed at the naughty Burgundians, who openly admit to it. In the public’s perception there is a taint on Burgundy’s reputation because of chaptalization, while the word never arises when one is speaking about Bordeaux wine, but according to Goutreau the Bordelais chaptalize almost every year and some even chaptalized in 1982. “Either that,” he said, “or the winemakers’ wives made an awful lot of jam, because at harvesttime you could see the sacks of sugar piled up at the wineries.”

The proprietor of the Château de l’Hospital in the Graves district near Bordeaux has thick graying hair that likes to fall into her lively eyes. Her attire is fine and careless, an earthy-brown-flecked sweater, a charcoal-colored wool skirt, and worn leather loafers. She has class, she has character, she is a character. Closer to seventy than to sixty, she is what the French affectionately call la vieille France, the old France. Some people probably think she is a chatterbox, but I love her chatter.

“Near here,” she begins confidentially, pulling her hair away from her eyes, “there is a little winery, and what a traffic there is through it. C’est incroyable! There are wines from Corbières, Italy, Algeria, wines from all over, both reds and whites. Sometimes after an evening out I come home by that route, and my God, you should see the trucks lined up. Those wines leave that cellar with a Graves label—ça, c’est grave—or with other Bordeaux labels. One of these days there will be a scandal there, I’m sure.”

Her shattered expression, her eyes wide open and incredulous, conveys the seriousness of such a dreadful deed, a sin perpetrated against earth, man, and the laws of the appellation contrôlée. “Incroyable,” she sings, falsetto.

She has the same pained attitude toward the large, commercially oriented châteaux, including some rather famous names. “It’s a factory,” she will declare, or, “He’s a good cook,” meaning the winemaker concocts his wine from a dubious recipe with who knows what in it.

Then she shivers with horror as she recounts the winemaking practices of her neighbors. “Right now there are only three proprietors here in Portets, including myself, who analyze the sugar content of their grapes before they harvest. No one does it! They pick the grapes, and then en route. If it is raining, they pick anyway. If it rains the night away, they pick the next day, and no one worries about it. The great châteaux as well as the petits. Last September I weighed my must, which was at 13 degrees alcohol. To make a good wine, you don’t need more than 11 degrees. And someone said, ‘I hope you’ve added some water to it.’ What a horror. Add water to my wine? I don’t want to see frogs crawling out of my vats.”

I believe that wine can reflect the personality of the man or in this case the woman who makes it. Madame de Lacaussade has a flamboyant personality and her wine is far from bland. Then I realize that as true as my theory might be it is absurd-sounding. Can fermented grape juice express the personality of a man or woman?

Female winemakers are rare in France. It remains a male-dominated profession. Madame de Lacaussade took charge of the vinification when tragedy struck the first day of the 1964 harvest. The weather was perfect, and she had gone off to collect the grape pickers. When she returned, everyone was in a tizzy. “Monsieur is in the fermentation vat,” someone cried.

Her husband had descended into a vat to make sure it had been properly cleaned. The ladder slipped on the moist wood and he fell over backward, breaking three vertebrae.

The doctor arrived and climbed down into the large oak fermenter to examine the injury.

“I said to myself, now there are two in the tank,” Madame recalls. “My husband was suffering horribly. They tied him to the ladder to raise him out of the vat. The ambulance came and carried him to the hospital. I found myself faced with a fait accompli because the grapes were ready to be picked. It was beautiful weather, the pickers were there, so I had to proceed.

“I must say, I had a neighbor who was very kind, who came over to give me advice. He told me, ‘When the thermometer in the fermentation vat reaches 35 degrees [centigrade], you must rack the wine, transfer it to another vat, in order to cool it down.’ After dinner I toured the cellar. I checked the thermometer. I couldn’t believe it. I hurried back to the kitchen and told the pickers, ‘We absolutely must rack the wine.’ So we had some tea and worked through the night. We worked until five in the morning, and at eight we started again as if nothing had happened. It was a rough day, but in a way I was lucky because 1964 was an excellent vintage, relatively easy to make.”

I have tasted her 1964 and it is as perfect a wine—aromatic, flavorful, and complete—as wine can be. It is not all that unusual for a first effort at vinification to provide results that might never be surpassed. My theory, another vague conjecture that cannot be proven, goes like this: The winemaker is nervous and lacks self-confidence. “There are the grapes—what do I do now?” So they stick to the book. They use the simplest, surest, most primitive techniques. They fuss over their wine as if it were their firstborn child. And then, voilà! something exceptional is bottled. So they decide that they are talented, gifted, and the next vintage they begin to intervene instead of allowing nature a chance to make the wine. I remember the words of California winemaker Joseph Swan, who told me that once you have good grape juice, the role of a winemaker is “not to screw it up.”

Château de l’Hospital’s vineyard is so small that Madame de Lacaussade is able to sell all her wine directly. She need not pass through the agent and négociant system that dominates the Bordeaux trade, a system which, she is quick to point out, is entirely male-dominated. They have no admiration for a woman in the cellar, she says, only distrust, and women who have larger domaines (there are a few) have a rough time of it because they must deal with those Bordeaux agents.

After her husband’s death, Madame de Lacaussade’s problem was with the private clientele that had previously bought from him. Sales dropped 80 percent. Not only did the clientele desert her, but the staff thought they could do whatever they pleased. Those were difficult days, she says, and her two sons, Parisian businessmen, who in fact inherited the domaine, did not give her much help.

“After the death of their father, they told me, ‘Mama, we’ll buy you a little apartment in Bordeaux or in Paris, whichever you prefer. Or wouldn’t you like a trip around the world, wouldn’t that amuse you?’

“I told them I’d get bored all alone in a little apartment. I’m used to large rooms; I have my dogs, my cats … What would I do with them? No, that wouldn’t please me. Not at all! In the country there’s always something to do. I’m not claustrophobic, but I would have become claustrophobic.”

Instead, she enrolled at the University of Bordeaux in the enology department in order to learn the craft of wine.

Her two sons saw the clients buying three bottles at a time instead of twelve and told her it would have been better if she’d listened to them.

“That was not very encouraging,” she says with some bitterness. “At my age, it is painful to hear that.

“They say I’m impossible. But they’re completely in the world of business. Business, business, business! They’re bachelors, both looking for an extraordinary woman. Me, I always tell them: no one is extraordinary, and even if you have a mistress who is, the day you marry her she won’t be extraordinary. They have many married friends and they see them arguing, you know, and they see the child with the measles, the mumps, and who knows what else. So, to their beautiful freedom, adieu! And that scares them.

“Here, I assure you, they had a very simple life. The family picked strawberries, dug up potatoes, and so on. The day they left the university and went to Paris, they began to drop their family. They made friends in the upper class—the easy life, you know, extravagant, superficial … I think that I … There’s a saying here in the country … I won’t be cold in the grave before they sell this château to buy a villa at Saint-Tropez.

“The other day one of my sons was here. He spent eight days here, and a bunch of his friends came, which made a lot of work for me. He had little pity for me; his friends came first. He telephoned a girlfriend in Paris … I don’t know, a mistress … and I heard them. The girlfriend must have asked, ‘How’s it going, are you happy on your vacation?’ Then I heard him say, ‘What do you think, it’s like always. There’s nothing to do here but bang your head against the walls…’”

Despite the attitude of her sons, Madame de Lacaussade persisted, carrying on the tradition at the Château de l’Hospital. Happily, the clients have returned. She now faces another problem, if you can call it that—never enough wine to satisfy the demand. I’m fortunate if she supplies me with fifty cases of twelve bottles per year. More often than not, she’ll promise fifty and later cut my reservation because she was not able to say no to people who ring at her gate to buy a few bottles.

While reducing my quantities, she’s fearless when it comes to raising her price one healthy chunk after another. Upon receiving a hefty increase, I wrote her a note, trying to finagle a better price. Her reply is so perfectly true to her personality, and a classic example of how the small French growers conduct business negotiations:

I am absolutely devastated to know that you are upset by the price of the wine. I gave you a “friendly” price for the 1979, not thinking that it would become a habit to continue like that!

If I have the pleasure to see you again, I will show you the bills for the materials and the workmen who repaired my cellars! I don’t count my own labor. And don’t ignore the fact that these shipments to the U.S.A. take longer, too!

The ’79 was actually at 30 francs and there remains no more than 24 bottles and a few magnums that I’d like to keep for myself. It seems altogether normal to raise my selling price 3 francs.

Don’t forget that my vineyard, though modest, though small, is an exceptional growth attached to the Graves of Léognan. In this area it is impossible to offer a price as low as other growths that practice the politics of quantity, of overproduction. Besides, their quality is not the same as mine.

As I don’t want to ruin a man so nice and passionate about wine as you are, I would like to agree one more time to a “friendly” price of 30 francs instead of 33 for the 1980 vintage, in exchange for more rapid payment.

Her eighteenth-century château is near the banks of the Garonne River, the waterway which flows past the vineyards of Sauternes and Graves, through the town of Bordeaux, past the vineyards of the Médoc and into the Atlantic. Madame says that when the château was constructed, one traveled by boat because of the constant danger of scuffles between Protestants and Catholics on the local roadways. The river was safer and faster, so the château was conveniently situated. The vines were already there when the château was built.

One approaches the iron grill gate of the château by a tree-lined dirt road. The first time I visited, I passed by it four or five times because there is no sign.

There are flowers, shrubs, trees, vines, and abundant vegetation all around the U-shaped château, with a pretty little garden in the central courtyard. During one tasting, Madame de Lacaussade went to the steps outside the main entrance to empty her glass into a flowerpot. She says plants like wine, especially red wine! “Wine is so very rich in nourishment. What I don’t use for cooking I feed to my plants.” Her plants appear to be abnormally healthy.

MADAME DE LACAUSSADE

As châteaux go, there are grander by far, but the amazing feature of the Château de l’Hospital is the interior, the furnishings and decorations, which remain exactly as they were a century ago. Nothing has changed. It is a glorious artifact which is still a home, full of old paintings, family portraits, grand vases, dishware, an enormous porcelain heater, and magnificent statuary cast from models at Versailles. “The king gave his authorization to reproduce them,” says Madame de Lacaussade. It is a step into another era, a refuge from the modern world, and far, very far, from a little apartment in Bordeaux.

I remember rising from my chair during one luncheon, with a hand on the table to steady myself after several vintages of Château de l’Hospital, and I inquired where I might find the bathroom. Madame was busy talking to someone else, so she gestured vaguely toward the entrance hall. I crossed three large rooms, though room is a word inadequate to describe these pièces, as they are called in French, three vast rooms filled with period furniture and, here and there, vases of splendid cut flowers. Subsequently, I had to try many doors (most led into darkness, because few of the light switches were functioning), and I had to feel my way along until I found the quaint bathroom with its wooden toilet cabinet. It is flushed with a pitcher of water which one then refills for the next visitor. Going to the loo in the Château de l’Hospital is more of an event than we in the twentieth century are accustomed to.

My first visit to Madame de Lacaussade’s was one cold November day, and we confined ourselves to a tiny, triangle-shaped room, surely at one time the servants’ antechamber, trying to keep warm by a fire of old barrel staves while we tasted back through some older vintages. I’ll never forget the view out the window, a wintry scene of leaves swirling down upon an icy, rippling pond with two stoic white swans cruising like props on a stage set.

Her neighbors tell her to cut down the little forest around the pond, to use the land for vines to produce more wine, creating more income, of course—perhaps enough to make the property financially viable. But she resists, she says, because it is a different soil there, a poor soil for wine grapes, and the character of her wine would change. Most would sacrifice quality in the name of economic necessity. She frets about it. Finances are a constant source of worry for her, but her passion for quality is stronger. She was angry that one of her sons had sold a few bottles to an industrialist friend just after the bottling, while the wine was still, as we say, bottle-sick.

“What if this Monsieur opens a bottle too soon? He might find the wine not at all good. And if it is a disappointment for him, he’ll say, ‘Madame de Lacaussade fobbed off a stinky wine on me,’ which is not at all the case. Let’s hope he waits a bit…”

When I meet a winemaker who is so obviously seeking quality at any cost, I always try to get him or her to divulge other addresses. Madame de Lacaussade generously supplied me with a list of eight to ten producers in the Saint-Emilion/Pomerol area. The next day, armed with her addresses, I set out to reap the harvest. By midday I noted with a certain amusement that each proprietor I met was female. Was it solidarity? The Sisterhood of the Vine?

Madame has a horror of certain modern vinification techniques like chemical fertilizers and asbestos filter plaques, and a studied acceptance of others.

“Upon laboratory analysis, everything comes out,” she says. “If the vines are treated with copper sulfate, you find traces of copper in the wine. Wines that have been in stainless-steel tanks have traces of steel, a metallic taste. So of course I don’t allow weed killers in my vineyard, because I don’t want it in my wine.”

The vinification and style of her red Graves has not changed since the death of her husband. The vinification cellar is antique—most of the equipment is from the turn of the century. She continues to use it, she says, because it has proven itself.

Her red Graves is of Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, and a little Malbec. Malbec is a fragile varietal, difficult to grow, and Madame says that many of her neighbors have yanked out their Malbec vines. Instead of the rich juice of the Malbec, high in sugar content, they simply add plain sugar to their must. Of course, something is lost.

Fermentation and aging of the red is in wood. She thinks the taste of oak marries well with the earthy, berry, dead-leaf flavors she finds in her red.

For the white, however, she no longer uses oak. “For white wine,” she says, “I think oak is harmful because one has a good white wine when there is the taste of the fruit, and if you put it into wood the flavor of the grape is masked.”

I brought up the great white Graves from the Domaine de Chevalier because I knew that it sees some new oak aging.

“Oh yes,” she said, “but Chevalier has a high percentage of old vines, sixty years old, which is very important. Then it can be done in oak. The wine has more nerve, more body, more strength, because the roots go deeper into the earth. Here they pulled out all the white vines and replanted. I was furious, but at that time I didn’t have any say in the matter. The vines for my white are only ten years old. That is really young. So it is unthinkable to put it into new oak. My husband ran into problems because he had too many old barrels. They had to be replaced. Given the expense of new barrels, I really preferred to buy glass-lined tanks.”

* * *

La vieille France. How relentlessly it disappears. During fifteen years I have traveled there, and the changes have been dramatic. And in the new France, corporate France, where the board of directors is the government, where agriculture is geared for production at any cost, is there a future for a twelve-acre domaine like Château de l’Hospital where weeding is accomplished by a flock of sheep and where organic compost is the only fertilizer? Or will it be only the giant cooperatives and corporate-owned négociants who supply us with their bland, impersonal plonk?