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THE
winemakers of Beaujolais are not happy this year.
That
seems odd, considering they live in some of France’s
most beautiful villages, where old stone houses are
decked with flowers amid hillside vineyards heavy with
grapes, a half-day’s drive south of Paris.
But to
hear the growers tell it, the world is in a perilous
state. New wines from Australia are flooding the market,
even in France. The cost of labor—each grower hires
students, retirees and migrant workers to pick the
grapes—keeps going up every fall. The European Union
wants to reduce production by ripping out thousands of
vines. Even the weather is causing trouble—by being too
good: An unusually warm spring meant that this year’s
harvest began in August, throwing summer vacation
schedules into chaos.
 Worst
of all, the bright, fruity Beaujolais Nouveau that
became a worldwide fad in the 1980s has gone the way of
all things, throwing these villages’ once-booming
economy into a palpable slump, if not quite a bust. It’s
still released on the third Thursday in November, but
there’s no longer quite the same exuberance for the
autumnal rite of passage.
Shaking
his head as he led a walk through the vineyards,
winemaker Jacques Perraud said, “The demand isn’t
there.”
Happily
for visitors, the winemakers’ worries haven’t made them
inhospitable. Quite the contrary: They are happier than
ever to see you. They want you to know that Beaujolais
isn’t just its Nouveau, a novelty wine that many of them
were never that happy to be famous for. No, the vintners
of Beaujolais would much rather be known for their
high-end work: the 10 special crus, such as
Moulin-a-Vent and Morgon, the best of which can compete
with the elegant wines of Burgundy to the north. The
worldwide wine glut has held down prices: A bottle of
perfectly nice Beaujolais can be bought at a winery for
$6, a good cru for $11, and much of the best for $16.
Even
better, Beaujolais may be France’s prettiest wine
region, worth visiting for its summer and fall
landscapes even more than its wines.
Real
wine enthusiasts, when they come to France, may aim for
other spots on the map: Bordeaux in the southwest or
Burgundy in the center. But the terrain that produces
the world’s most refined wines in those regions often
turns out to be, well, disappointing: nothing but long
rows of vines marching along gentle river valleys.
Beaujolais, on the other hand, is worth a journey and a
stay. Most of its wine is merely fun, not quite
distinguished. But the countryside is lovely: rugged
hills and winding roads, villages with ancient stone
churches, forest ridgelines touched at sunset by
tendrils of fog. It’s like the wilder parts of
California’s Napa Valley, but with church bells and
chateaux.
And the
food—this being arguably the “foodiest” part of France,
where people talk about the provenance of not only their
wines but also their chickens—is simply splendid.
A visit
to Beaujolais is mostly about simple pleasures, because
that’s the only kind here: a countryside made for walks,
bike rides or lazy drives, vest-pocket villages with
flower-lined paths, hundreds of little wineries with
owners who want you to taste their wares, dozens of
little restaurants trying to outdo one another with
local ingredients, and plenty of good inns.
This is
France at its least intimidating. The wine is
unpretentious, and so are the restaurants and hotels.
Jeans and khakis are fine most of the time; at dinner, a
casual dress or blue blazer will do. Tourists are valued
here, and many people speak workable English. All are
gently supportive when an American bravely tries to use
his high-school French.
There’s
but one museum to visit, no serious art to admire, no
historical monuments to speak of—just landscapes, food
and wine.
The
French come here mostly for the walking and biking
trails, and so did we. In late May my wife, Paula, and I
headed into the
Beaujolais hills armed with little more than a rented Peugeot, a
Michelin guidebook and walking shoes. At
3
o’clock one afternoon, just as the guidebook promised, a
winemaker appeared on the steps of the old stone church
in the center of Vauxrenard, a village of tile-roofed
houses clinging to a west-facing slope. It was Perraud,
a rangy, silver-haired man with a sun-baked face and
wary eyes that made him look like a Gallic Gary Cooper,
a third-generation grape grower and, that Saturday, the
village’s designated vineyard guide.
“You’re
here for the walk?” he asked, allowing a tentative
smile. “Good, then. Let’s go.”
As we
followed him on the village’s well-marked, two-mile
“wine path,” here and there a few tiny plots of vines
had been taken out of production in exchange for
subsidies from the European Union.
“They’re
talking about building houses on this one,” Perraud
said, gesturing with disapproval at a sandy, denuded
slope between two fields of glorious spring-green vines.
(The sandy soil, produced by slowly eroding granite, is
what makes the wine so good.) But the rest of the view,
from the pine-green mountain range down across
symmetrical vineyards to the broad Saone River Valley
below, was sunny and glorious.
“On a
clear day you can see the
Alps,” Perraud
said brightly, the troubles of wine-selling forgotten
for a moment. He bent down to a gnarled root. How old?
“Forty years old, maybe more,” he said with respect.
A few
minutes later, we were inside the Perraud family
winery—a small but tidy workshop with a mechanical
presser, a handful of fermentation tanks and a total of
four oak casks for the family’s best product, its
Moulin-a-Vent. (The name means “windmill,” after an old
mill in a vineyard; it’s one of those 10 special crus.)
The tasting room was spartan—a small wooden bar and a
picnic table set on a pea-gravel floor—but the tasting
was free, and the wine was delicious. “Not bad,” Perraud
allowed. The price for a bottle of his best two-year-old
Moulin-a-Vent: $9.50.
Another
winery was just around the bend in the road, and another
after that. The family-owned wineries of
Beaujolais are tiny. Twenty-five acres of vines is considered a
good-sized property; 18 acres is the average. A holding
that size produces enough grapes for about 38,000
bottles of wine a year, but most of the fruit is sold to
Georges Duboeuf, Louis Jadot or other big winemaking
houses. In the Perrauds’ case, two-thirds of their
grapes go to Duboeuf; of the 20,000 or so bottles they
make under their label, only about 1,000 qualify as
Moulin-a-Vent.
In the
evening, a few hours later, we stood on an old terrace
in Julienas, two villages to the north, and watched the
sun set over the same ridge after bathing the vineyards
in golden light. We sat down for dinner in the courtyard
of a charming restaurant, Le Coq a Julienas (coq au vin,
delicious cheeses, several pages of wines from the
neighborhood). And we repaired happily to a country inn,
the Auberge de la Boucle, whose sole defect was the
noisy debate, early the next morning, between the
innkeeper’s dog and a neighbor’s angry goose.
The
villages here are a few miles apart, tantalizingly close
on the map. But the landscape is rugged enough—all hills
and canyons and switchbacks—that our initial plans to
hike a neat circuit through three or four villages a day
turned out to be overly ambitious.
Happily,
each village came to the rescue with its own little
walking map: one trail for vineyards, one for forests,
one to take you by the old chapel and so on. We
discovered it was easiest to choose a village, start at
the main square (inevitably centered on the church) and
chart a hike along one or two of the designated paths,
depending on how energetic we felt and how much time we
had before the next meal. There are well-marked bike
paths, too, both along the main highways and a converted
rail bed.
Up in
the hills, the traffic is sparse and unthreatening,
unless you count the otherworldly appearance of
insect-like high-rider tractors built for straddling
3-foot-tall vines.
From the
village square in Fleurie, just down the hill from
Vauxrenard, we followed a well-marked trail through a
vineyard (the farmer politely returned our wave from his
tractor) and a little wood, down paths lined by purple
delphinium and along country roads punctuated by
farmers’ ornamental rosebushes.
The
reward, after a 35-minute climb, was a hilltop chapel
with another breathtaking view. The downhill walk to the
village took 25 minutes, and the reward was lunch under
an umbrella on the veranda of an old bistro: salade
beaujolaise, a local specialty made with a poached egg,
croutons, chopped tomatoes and chunky bacon on top of
greens.
Among
the region’s wineries—which could, by Day 3, turn into a
bit of a blur—the Chateau de La Chaize, the only classic
big-chateau winery among the 10 crus, is worth
mentioning. Relatives of François de La Chaize, one of
Louis XIV’s military officers, have been growing grapes
and making wine here since 1676, clinging to the
property through the revolution and wars. The winery is
newer than the castle; it was built between 1771 and
1811 and is still being used.
The
current proprietress, the Marquise de Roussy de Sales,
inherited the chateau from an aunt who married into the
La Chaize line; even if she’s not technically a La
Chaize, she has devoted herself to maintaining the
winery, the chateau and its gardens full of boxwood and
lavender. She has responded to the challenge of slumping
consumer demand by marketing some of her low-end
production in 5-liter boxes even as her high-end reserve
de la marquise wins glowing reviews.
The
marquise and her 242 acres are an exception. For most
Beaujolais growers on smaller holdings, bottling
proprietary wine is not economical.
Three-quarters of the region’s grapes are sold to the
wine merchants, the negociants, who blend, bottle and
market
Beaujolais worldwide. The largest is Georges Duboeuf, the marketing
genius who made Beaujolais Nouveau a global phenomenon
two decades ago. Duboeuf is the Robert Mondavi of
Beaujolais, respected and resented in almost equal measures. He and his
son Franck, his designated successor, buy about 20
percent of the grapes produced in this area. Like the
Mondavis and Gallos of California, they would like more
respect for the best wines their giant company makes,
but the ocean of just-pretty-good wine that made the
family fortune keeps getting in the way.
What to
do with all the wine you’ve bought? As you know, you
can’t carry liquids onto the plane anymore. We packed
three of our best finds—wines that aren’t sold in the
United States—inside our sturdiest suitcase, cushioned
by shirts and sweaters. (Serious oenophiles buy foam
packing forms.) All three bottles made it home, and
we’ve already served them at dinner parties. It’s hard
to resist: “We found this outside the nicest little
village in Beaujolais. Can’t buy it here; they don’t
make enough to export. The winemaker said it was one of
the best he’d ever made....” |
