shops anymore, but its most famous lines are endlessly reprinted wherever and whenever anyone needs a little persuading about the benefits of a glass of wine. What does a glass of wine represent? Orizet could say it very precisely.
“It is a message of friendship transmitted from year to year by more than a hundred generations of vignerons. It is the prospecting of thousands of rootlets to deliver up the secret of the rocks. It is the sublimation of a summer’s heat. It is the fruit of a year’s labor. It is the laughter of the harvest hand, the efforts of the vinifier, the love of the cellar master, his vigilance and his skill in perfecting the masterpiece. Everything that is good in mankind is transmitted to the wine: courage, gaiety, strength, perseverance, love, optimism. Everything that is beautiful in nature appears in wine: warmth, strength, light, color, mystery. Wine is matter becoming mind, and all of this can be seen through the crystal.”
“You’ve got to hand it to this place,” Gabriel Chevallier wrote after the enormous success of Clochemerle . “The people there are never mean drinkers, because Beaujolais is the kind of wine that never does anyone any harm. The more you drink, the more you find your wife pleasant, your friends faithful, the future encouraging and humanity bearable. All the misfortune of the world comes from one single fact: that on this planet there is only one Beaujolais region. This is where you’ll always find people with honest, open faces, in good cheer, all of them with their hearts in their hand—the hand that holds the glass, of course.”
I’ll drink to that.
II
VILE AND NOXIOUS, DOWNTRODDEN AND DESPISED
GAMAY’S LONG STRUGGLE FOR RESPECT
A s his name suggests, Philip the Bold was not a man for halfway measures. Youngest son of King John II, he was barred by primogeniture—inheritance to the firstborn—from taking the throne of France, but as duke of Burgundy he wielded quasi-royal authority from his seat of power in Dijon, and his domains extended all the way north, deep into present-day Belgium. A statue for the personal necropolis he built to assure his posthumous glory, carved by the Dutch sculptor Claus Sluter around 1390, displays a strong, boorish face with a fleshy nose, a grim, thin-lipped mouth and a prominent, very determined chin, vaguely reminiscent of Mussolini. Big man, big ambitions, big power. He had a generous helping of problems on his plate—with his brothers he ran the affairs of France during some of the most trying days of the spread of the plague and the Hundred Years War—but in addition to playing the great game of war and international politics, he was also a collector and patron of the arts who did not hesitate to dip into everyday matters of local taste and lifestyle. On July 31, 1395, he issued an edict that, today still, many wine growers of the Beaujolais can cite for you by heart.
The thrust of his edict was as simple as it was uncompromisingly severe: his subjects were summoned to rip out and never again put into the ground “the vile and noxious gamay plant, from which plant comes a very great abundance of wine . . . which wine is of such nature that it is most injurious to the human creature . . . for it is full of a very great and horrible bitterness.”
Those who drink it, he warned darkly, have been “infested with grave maladies.” Then, soaring on his own rhetoric, he triply underlined the urgency of ridding his duchy of the offending root. It had to be “extirpated, destroyed and reduced to nothing,” under penalty of stiff fines. Similarly penalized, he added, would be those who “brought animal droppings ( fiens) and waste to the vines where good plants were located.”
As always with French wines, this edict concerned a matter of terroir. Burgundy had the good fortune to possess in its native flora a certain wild grape that had proved, under cultivation, to be exceptionally well adapted to the making of fine
“It is a message of friendship transmitted from year to year by more than a hundred generations of vignerons. It is the prospecting of thousands of rootlets to deliver up the secret of the rocks. It is the sublimation of a summer’s heat. It is the fruit of a year’s labor. It is the laughter of the harvest hand, the efforts of the vinifier, the love of the cellar master, his vigilance and his skill in perfecting the masterpiece. Everything that is good in mankind is transmitted to the wine: courage, gaiety, strength, perseverance, love, optimism. Everything that is beautiful in nature appears in wine: warmth, strength, light, color, mystery. Wine is matter becoming mind, and all of this can be seen through the crystal.”
“You’ve got to hand it to this place,” Gabriel Chevallier wrote after the enormous success of Clochemerle . “The people there are never mean drinkers, because Beaujolais is the kind of wine that never does anyone any harm. The more you drink, the more you find your wife pleasant, your friends faithful, the future encouraging and humanity bearable. All the misfortune of the world comes from one single fact: that on this planet there is only one Beaujolais region. This is where you’ll always find people with honest, open faces, in good cheer, all of them with their hearts in their hand—the hand that holds the glass, of course.”
I’ll drink to that.
II
VILE AND NOXIOUS, DOWNTRODDEN AND DESPISED
GAMAY’S LONG STRUGGLE FOR RESPECT
A s his name suggests, Philip the Bold was not a man for halfway measures. Youngest son of King John II, he was barred by primogeniture—inheritance to the firstborn—from taking the throne of France, but as duke of Burgundy he wielded quasi-royal authority from his seat of power in Dijon, and his domains extended all the way north, deep into present-day Belgium. A statue for the personal necropolis he built to assure his posthumous glory, carved by the Dutch sculptor Claus Sluter around 1390, displays a strong, boorish face with a fleshy nose, a grim, thin-lipped mouth and a prominent, very determined chin, vaguely reminiscent of Mussolini. Big man, big ambitions, big power. He had a generous helping of problems on his plate—with his brothers he ran the affairs of France during some of the most trying days of the spread of the plague and the Hundred Years War—but in addition to playing the great game of war and international politics, he was also a collector and patron of the arts who did not hesitate to dip into everyday matters of local taste and lifestyle. On July 31, 1395, he issued an edict that, today still, many wine growers of the Beaujolais can cite for you by heart.
The thrust of his edict was as simple as it was uncompromisingly severe: his subjects were summoned to rip out and never again put into the ground “the vile and noxious gamay plant, from which plant comes a very great abundance of wine . . . which wine is of such nature that it is most injurious to the human creature . . . for it is full of a very great and horrible bitterness.”
Those who drink it, he warned darkly, have been “infested with grave maladies.” Then, soaring on his own rhetoric, he triply underlined the urgency of ridding his duchy of the offending root. It had to be “extirpated, destroyed and reduced to nothing,” under penalty of stiff fines. Similarly penalized, he added, would be those who “brought animal droppings ( fiens) and waste to the vines where good plants were located.”
As always with French wines, this edict concerned a matter of terroir. Burgundy had the good fortune to possess in its native flora a certain wild grape that had proved, under cultivation, to be exceptionally well adapted to the making of fine
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