Adventures on the Wine Route

BEAUJOLAIS MUST be the most inspired invention in the history of wine. What a concept, downing a newborn wine that has barely left the grape, a wine that retains the cornucopian spirit of the harvest past. It even serves to remind us of the first time man tasted fermented grape juice and decided it was an accident of nature worth pursuing.

Who invented Beaujolais? We don’t know, but some of the revisionist winemakers who quite recently snuffed it out are very well known indeed.

From Ampuis it is only about fifty minutes of life-threatening-French-autoroute-madness to Lyons, where most of the Beaujolais produced used to be consumed. The cuisine of Lyons happens to be the kind that you eat with gusto, but it can stay with you. Waverly Root called it “liver-assaulting.” Traditional Lyonnaise cuisine needs to be accompanied by cool draughts of the wine that was once Beaujolais. A heavy wine would have diminished the requisite appetite. It had to be a wine with a cutting edge of acidity to cope with the sausages and tripe and various other forms of pig. And it had to be light in alcohol because the cuisine of Lyons arouses a gargantuan thirst.

The Beaujolais vineyards commence just north of Lyons. When clients planning a trip to France ask my advice, I try to talk them into going to either Alsace or the Beaujolais. For the time being, demand and prices for Bordeaux and Burgundy make it difficult for tourists to get into the best cellars. The winemakers have more clients than wine, so they are not eager to pour samples for everyone who passes by. One year, one of my growers in Vosne-Romanée had one single barrel, twenty-five cases, of Richebourg, so it is easy to understand his reluctance to dip his thief into it.

In the Beaujolais there are cellars open for tasting wherever you look. And it is a prettier region than Bordeaux or the Côte d’Or. The Beaujolais offers vine-covered panoramas of undulating hills, winding country roads, forgotten hamlets built upon wine cellars, and unspoiled natives who like visitors. Beaujolais has everything a wine-loving tourist could desire except good wine.

When those who remember real Beaujolais describe it, they make my mouth water: a light, grapy, fizzy, tart, quaffable red wine. Bring on the gras-double (tripe with onions and parsley), the boudin aux pommes (blood sausage with baked apple), the cervelas aux pistaches et truffes (sausage stuffed with pistachio nuts and black truffles). With real Beaujolais, we can handle it.

Jean-Baptiste Chaudet, Paris’s leading wine merchant from the 1940s through the early 1970s, recalls in his autobiography Marchand de Vin a Beaujolais “very light in color, at times really pale, slightly aggressive, even a touch green, and rarely above 11 degrees alcohol. In those days,” Chaudet continues, “Beaujolais was still very good, which is not the case today because of extreme overproduction, less and less attention in the cellar, and above all because of this chaptalization, this addition of sugar to the must which allows them to raise the wine’s alcoholic content up to 3 degrees. A chaptalized Beaujolais is recognizable because it is excessively supple. When the alcohol content rises above 12 degrees, it is no longer Beaujolais. Put a stop to chaptalization and the wine could become what it was before—young, light, and aggressive.”

Compare Chaudet’s descriptive adjectives with the following taken from Robert Parker’s 1987 Wine Buyer’s Guide, concerning today’s Beaujolais: soft, lush, silky, full, fleshy, rich, supple, and so on. Mr. Parker is correct. His adjectives perfectly describe today’s overchaptalized, overalcoholic Beaujolais.

One contemporary critic described the finest Beaujolais he had ever tasted as having a “sledgehammer-like feel on the palate,” leading presumably to a smithereen-like finish?

In his autobiography Chaudet dropped the name of a Beaujolais producer he respected named Chauvet, so I looked him up, hoping to understand what had happened to the old-style Beaujolais and perhaps even to taste one. In Jules Chauvet I found a gracious, guileless man with a poetic streak that he seemed to want to repress, an eighty-year-old bachelor who is semiretired and who has no heirs to take over his small négociant firm.

Chauvet had just taken delivery of his 1986 Beaujolais-Villages and it was in barrels (a sight rare enough today in the Beaujolais) on the ground outdoors in his courtyard. We began tasting through them under a persistent drizzle. Chauvet would place the tip of his thief at the edge of the bunghole, raise his nose and eyebrows, and plunge the glass pipe down into the wine like a matador’s coup de grace. Such an unlikely motion, barrel after barrel, from such a proper old fellow began to strike me as humorous, and I had to conceal a smile.

His Beaujolais was pale in color, with a light, pretty perfume. There were reminders of flowers, grapes, and fruits like peach and apricot. It was all quite delicate from start to finish, but lively all the same, and the flavor was elusive; more than anything, it perfumed the palate.

“It has 11 degrees alcohol,” he said, “no chaptalization and no sulfur dioxide. You can drink it without getting vertigo.”

Monsieur Chauvet has been in the Beaujolais business sixty years. I asked him what changes he has witnessed.

“In 1930 there was lower production, around forty hectoliters to the hectare, whereas now it is up to sixty and seventy. Well, it is rare to have both quantity and quality. They rhyme, but apart from that, they have nothing in common. And the soil is no longer cultivated. They simply add herbicides and fertilizers now. They poison the earth, instead of working it. For the moment, production is high, but the quality of the grape juice has fallen. One day soon, we shall see production drop, too, when the soil has been transformed by chemicals. That is a danger.

“And there is a difference today because everyone wants wines that are visually empty [optiquement vide]. We used to pay no attention to limpidity. I don’t know how we got to this point, judging a wine by its limpidity. No one demands that fruit juice be clear. Why must wine be clear? I remember in 1930 with the great vintage of 1929, some Swiss clients bought some Fleurie in barrel, full of carbon dioxide gas, still on its lees. They rolled it into their restaurant in Switzerland, put it up on the counter, opened it up, stirred it up, turned the spigot, and served it like that. It was like red soup, but what a perfume! The Swiss were like that, they wanted the whole wine. Now you have to de-gas it, you know, take out the carbon dioxide, but when you do that, you also take out the wine’s perfume. I wish we could convince the consumer to accept a fizzy wine with all its perfume intact. Have you noticed how everyone loves champagne, but they won’t accept a bubbly Beaujolais?”

I asked Monsieur Chauvet what degree of alcohol Beaujolais had back in the thirties.

“In the little years, 9 to 10 degrees. In the hot years, 12 to 13 degrees. I remember when my father delivered Beaujolais to Paris at 9 degrees alcohol. People liked to consume healthy quantities of it.”

“We had two years, 1945 and 1947, when the wines were unusually rich in natural alcohol. Prices went up and afterward, that was Beaujolais, always 13 to 14 degrees. What a mistake! People here wanted to mimic the Burgundians and make big money. But Beaujolais is a simple wine. It is a beverage which must first of all calm one’s thirst, but at 14 degrees alcohol it is difficult to drink much of anything. We must come back to lighter Beaujolais for several reasons. Back in the old days, there was not so much automobile traffic, but nowadays everyone drives a car. How can you drink a wine at 14 degrees and then drive home from a restaurant? That is not true Beaujolais. I say if you want something with lots of alcohol, drink whiskey.”

I said I did not believe people consciously looked for high alcohol. But high alcohol equals full body, and by some twist of fate, people think full body is better than light body.

“Well, those people shouldn’t drink Beaujolais. After all, wines with body are easy to find. They’re everywhere. But a wine with perfume, that is what is difficult to find. If people would use their nose, learn how to smell again…”

And Monsieur Chauvet frowned, thrusting it all back on us, the buyers, the consumers.

And I am still searching for a rude, flirtatious little Beaujolais with a bit of a sting, because Monsieur Chauvet must now occupy himself with his health instead of his wine business. The last time I saw him he said, “I must warn you, I am receiving radiotherapy treatments at Lyons. I don’t know if I will be here to receive you next spring. It is a cancer. They tell me that the treatments have stopped the progress, but we don’t really know anything. We will know more in the spring. Or perhaps you will know, and I will not.”

The Italians still make gay little thirst quenchers in the spirit of the Beaujolais of yesteryear, but I must admit that my clientele refuses to embrace them. Alas, the French have civilized the wine of Beaujolais, tried to disguise it as a society lady who wears cosmetics, phony scent, and costume jewelry. Whatever the vintage might give, whatever village it may be from, Brouilly, Saint-Amour, or Moulin-à-Vent, whichever, today’s Beaujolais all turn out nearly alike in the end: it will be 13.5 degrees alcohol even if the grapes came in at 9 degrees natural sugar, which happens. The extra 4.5 degrees are obtained by chaptalization. It will have a limpid, slightly deep color even if it started with a cherrylike blush. It will have just enough acidity to keep it from tasting like mush, but will be almost as cloying because a little tartness might offend someone. It will have been degassed, of course, so that no one in a restaurant turns it back because they think it is fermenting in the bottle. Chaptalization and degassing leave it with a slightly thick, tongue-numbing texture. It will never throw a sediment. It will have a polite perfume, mildly fruitlike. Yes, sorry, the wine’s natural, rambunctious fruitiness has been washed out by overproduction, masked by chaptalization, and brutalized by degassing and filtrations. Drink a carafe of the stuff (I do not like to call it Beaujolais) and your headache the next day will make you wish you had suffered a fatal accident on the way home from your restaurant. Alcohol, sulfur dioxide, prescription tannin, and I do not wish to know what else will be hammering at the inside of your skull. Your blood will feel thick, heavy … chaptalized. But Beaujolais should make you feel light-headed!

JULES CHAUVET

Here in the Beaujolais one sees that the nightmare can happen. A recipe, a formula, can take over an entire region. When old-timers like Chaudet and Chauvet are gone, even the memory of the old-style Beaujolais will have vanished.

When I see the wine writers taking the current formula Beaujolais seriously, treating it like wine, awarding points and stars, discussing the “banana” aroma, for example, I want to scream, THESE ARE NOT LIVING WINES. These are wine robots rolling off the assembly line, millions and millions of them.

Jean-Baptiste Chaudet wrote, “The day the consumer demands a more natural product, the winemakers will be obliged to take up the methods of their ancestors.” I agree that the consumer can influence quality. Winemakers began to filter and refilter their wines because of idiot complaints about sediment, which proves that consumers can change vinification practices, for better or worse.

Start by accepting Beaujolais as a gift of nature, with all that implies, including the cliché: Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Value what nature gives, quirks and all. If ever you find a real Beaujolais, glory in its virtues, its immediacy, its spirit, instead of swirling and sniffing and seeking size and grandeur. Americans, comparative newcomers to fine wine, seem to look for a Great Experience every time they uncork a bottle.

Beaujolais should not be a civilized society lady; it is the one-night stand of wines.