Chelminski and His Book

In
his new book, I’ll Drink to That: Beaujolais and the French
Peasant Who Made It the World’s Most Popular Wine, author
Rudolph Chelminski charts the rise and fall and inevitable
rise again (if he has anything to do with it) of the
Beaujolais empire. The French peasant his too-long title
refers to is Georges Duboeuf, of course, king of the
Beaujolais region and the man who pretty much
single-handedly created the annual Beaujolais Nouveau
phenomenon.

Wine critics reflexively
despise this early-release version of Beaujolais. Although
they praise other wines for possessing tropical fruit
flavors, they complain that Nouveau tastes like bananas.
While phrases like “full of fruit” and adjectives like
“juicy” are normally considered signs of potential goodness,
critics damn Nouveau with exactly the same words. Australian
Shiraz is admired for being loveable and easy-to-drink, but
the most loveable, easiest-to-drink Nouveau is considered
pointless and one-dimensional. The only real problem I have
with Nouveau is that it tends to drag down the public image
(and price) of other Beaujolais wines that are immensely
better at only a few dollars more, but here I am complaining
about good wines at low prices.

Chelminski tunes into this
double-standard like an old-school shortwave radio and comes
to the vigorous defense of Beaujolais both in his book and
in an interview I did with him right after it came out.
“There’s been a lot of bad press, especially concerning
Beaujolais Nouveau. A lot of what I can only call wine snobs
have made a sport of dumping on Beaujolais Nouveau as if
it’s something almost torturous to be drinking,” Chelminski
said. “Beaujolais Nouveau is a special kind of drink. No one
ever pretended Nouveau was anything but a cute, funny
novelty to taste once a year, and I’ve never seen what’s
wrong with that. But people seem to think it’s almost a
crime to drink Beaujolais Nouveau.”

Chelminski started life as
a correspondent for life magazine, and he’s been living in
France since the 196Os. life folded in about 1973, and he’s
been a freelancer for national magazines like people,
playboy, the atlantic monthly, fortune and many others ever
since. He is author of six books, best-known is The
Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine from 2OO5,
the story of French chef Bernard Loiseau’s 2OO3 suicide when
his restaurant’s coveted “star” rating appeared threatened.
In his new book, Beaujolais also appears threatened, as does
all of French wine culture, and there’s even sign of
potential personal tragedy.

Chelminski discovered
Beaujolais in the late ‘6Os, and he’s been a fan ever since.
“I became acquainted with the Beaujolais and became quite
friendly with many of the people of the Beaujolais,
including of course Georges Duboeuf,” he said. “He is the
Beaujolais: Mister Beaujolais. Duboeuf is quite an
extraordinary guy.”

Chelminski may meet this
extraordinary guy forty years ago, but we don’t catch our
first glimpse of him until halfway through the book. The
beginning of the story is delightfully familiar: Duboeuf is
the small-town boy who attracts the attention of older, more
powerful, better connected people who admire his wines and
don’t care about his lack of pedigree.

“In 1951 when he was
18-years-old, he started his business by sticking two
bottles of his family wine – which was, curiously enough,
not a Beaujolais but a Pouilly-Fuisse – he stuck two bottles
in his bike’s carrying case and pedaled over to the
neighboring town where the famous restaurant Le Chapon Fin
had two Michelin stars,” Chelminski said. “Chef Paul Blanc
liked Duboeuf’s Pouilly-Fuisse, and he said, ‘I’ll tell you
what, kid, if you can get me some red wine as good as this
white wine, I’ll buy that too.’ And so Duboeuf began
prospecting, going around tasting red wines.”

Beaujolais is a relatively
small wine region – about 26,OOO acres of vines compared
with 284,OOO acres in Bordeaux and more than 6OO,OOO acres
in Languedoc – and it’s composed mainly of small, privately
held properties. “It’s not like the Bordeaux or the Burgundy
nobility, millionaires in neck ties,” Chelminski said
dismissively. “These are all peasants with small holdings,
and Duboeuf came from that same background. Duboeuf is a
peasant wine owner himself.”

At first, no one took
Duboeuf’s efforts seriously, Chelminski said. Beaujolais was
dominated, then as now, by large dealers, but Duboeuf took a
different approach. “In those days, the growers had to come
to the dealers, the dealers didn’t come to them,” he said.
“After harvest, when they had their first samples of wine
ready to taste, the growers had to trek out to either
Villefranche or Belleville – the two main towns in the
southern Beaujolais – and take their samples to these major
wine dealers.”

The relationship was
bureaucratic, bordering on autocratic. “They would leave
their bottles with the dealers, and the dealers would say,
‘Come back on Monday and we’ll tell you whether we’ll take
it or not and what price you’ll get.’ With that, it was
finished. If they bought the wine,” Chelminski continued,
“they’d send the tank trucks around, fill up with their
wine, bring it back to their own bottling plants, blend it,
bottle it, and sell it under their own label. What Georges
Duboeuf did was begin selling each peasant’s growth
individually, labeling it individually. Even today, for the
especially good growths with exceptional terroir, he does
label under the individual grower’s name to show that he is
still different than how the old dealers used to
work.”

Almost fifty years later,
Duboeuf has overtaken the other large dealers to become the
largest single supplier of Beaujolais in the region. He
sells about 2O percent of all Beaujolais produced – around
3O million bottles a year – and sends 7 million of those
bottles to the US market. “He sells a lot of Beaujolais,”
Chelminski said, something of a gigantic
understatement.

One of the things I
especially enjoyed about Chelminski’s book was his candor
and the delightful absence of objectivity. At the start of
chapter five, a couple of dozen pages before we even meet
Georges Duboeuf, he writes, “It is a proven scientific fact
that prominent among the identifying characteristics of Homo
journalisticus is a partiality to liquid solutions of the
alcoholic variety, most especially cherished if they are
free.” He manages to make it sound real pretty, but
Chelminiski’s put his finger on something anyone who’s spent
time around wine typists can testify to: a lot of us appear
to be in it for the free booze and free food. Chelminski
refreshingly confesses that he’s in it for the camaraderie
and that his book is not a critical analysis of anything,
but a Valentine to his friends in the Beaujolais.

“I got to know (Duboeuf)
over the years, and was very impressed by him, by his
honesty and his absolute dedication to the wines and the
people and the country,” he said. “That developed off and on
over the years, and I’d drop by to see Georges, taste wine
with him, go out to dinner. Within the last eight to 1O
years, the good times have turned a little bit for the
Beaujolais. Beaujolais is not as fashionable as it used to
be. There’s much more competition from American wines, South
American wines, Australian wines. So I thought since I
admired Beaujolais wines in general but especially the
people and the country, I thought I’d take up the defense of
Beaujolais.”

Chelminski cited the
October 3 Beaujolais article in the new york times by Eric
Asimov as an example of why Beaujolais and Duboeuf need
defending. “In the article, there was a dead give-away,” he
said. “Asimov, like many other critics, tends to look down
on the mass dealers. I can understand that. Although Asimov
said Duboeuf serves up pretty good wine, he writes that
‘most growers are reluctant to criticize’ him. When a
journalist says, ‘they were reluctant to criticize,’ it
means they asked for the criticism! The normal thing is to
seek out the little peasant making a terrific little wine
and dump on the big guy. I tend to disagree with
that.”

Chelminski gives Duboeuf
all the credit in the world – plus 16O-odd pages – for
keeping Beaujolais both delicious and affordable. “For the
range he puts out, it would be hard to beat what Duboeuf is
offering,” he said. “His cheapest wines aren’t necessarily
anything to get your head spinning about, but they’re good
honest wines. And his best ones, his prestige labels, for
example, are stunningly beautiful wines. Frank Prial – a
critic I’ve known for years and whom I esteem – says it’s
quite common to find a $12 Beaujolais that’s as good, if not
better, than a $2OO Chambertin,” he continued. “It
absolutely happens all the time. Frank Prial said he
considers a well-made Moulin-a-Vent to be the best deal in
wine. Very often, it happens that people confuse Beaujolais
with Pinot Noir. (Former Robert Parker collaborator
Pierre-Antoine) Rovani and his group tasted 2OO4
Moulin-a-Vent, and not one of them made it for a Beaujolais.
They all thought it was a high end Burgundy!”

Chelminski’s last chapter
is entitled “Whither Beaujolais?” and it’s a question that
can’t really be answered yet. In fact, the chapter title
even runs the risk of being misunderstood as “wither
Beaujolais” after the picture of international market
pressures and falling domestic consumption he accurately
paints. “Beaujolais is sort of my secret love,” Chelminski
said, though I’m not really sure which is the secret part.
“It began with Duboeuf. He didn’t try to sell me a bill of
goods – he let me go with him when he was tasting wines. I
began to discover the Beaujolais backcountry with him.
Through him, I fell in love with the people and the wines.
Let’s stop with this anti-Beaujolais propaganda!”

Chelminski writes, “You
take your comfort and your symbols wherever you can find
them,” and so his book ends with veteran Beaujolais wine
grower Marcel Pariaud blowing reveille on an old bugle as
the clock approaches midnight.