Beaujolais, Georges Duboeuf and the Evolution of Nouveau: Rudolph Chelminski Discusses His New Book(2)
On top of all that, the landscape is gorgeous, just stunningly beautiful. Burgundy and Bordeaux produce some great wines, but the countryside is generally boring to look at. The Beaujolais is like a Hollywood set for an ideal vineyard region. The only places I can think of to rival it in beauty would be parts of Alsace and maybe the more spectacular areas along the Rhine.
What makes Beaujolais unique? Is it the wine itself, the marketing or the tradition?
The wine itself is such a familiar item – who hasn’t lifted a glass of Beaujolais at one time or another in his life? – that people think they know it. But they really don’t. There’s so much more behind that glass of wine, hidden away in the slopes and valleys of the Beaujolais hills. What makes the Beaujolais unique is the simple fact that throughout most of its history it was a region of backwater poverty, a little bit like Appalachia in the U.S. It was populated by poor farmers, smallholders who kept cows and grew crops to stay alive, and made wine as a side activity. Sticking with that Appalachia analogy, you could say that wine was their form of moonshine.
That situation lasted right up to the end of the Second World War, and plenty of Beaujolais oldtimers can still remember times when it was just their cows and vegetable patches that kept the family going in years when the wine market was down, or when hail destroyed the grapes. The Beaujolais is a very down-home kind of place, and you won’t find any wine millionaires there the way you do in Bordeaux or Burgundy. The people don’t take themselves seriously, but they’re absolutely devoted to their wines. Most of them are still artisans, in an age when globalization, industrialization and technicity are trampling traditions everywhere.
In what ways did the French social class structure affect the growth and popularity of Beaujolais?
Until very recent times, Beaujolais wine people were in thrall to a very particular social and economic class structure. For as long as anyone could remember, these peasant smallholders had been exploited by a dominant cartel of wine dealers – Burgundians for the most part – who bought their yearly production on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, kept the prices low, mixed it up into big batches and sold it under their own names. An old snobbery that dated all the way back to the 14th century (France is a country with a long history and a long memory) had decided once and for all that Beaujolais wine and the gamay grape it was made from were inferior to the Burgundies of the pinot noir grape.
Beaujolais vignerons suffered from a second-class status that had been imposed on them by the dealers, and it was not until Georges Duboeuf came along that they were treated with respect and their wines were given a proper chance to prove themselves on the worldwide marketplace. Duboeuf singlehandedly broke the old socio-economic structure that had dominated the Beaujolais. Born into the same class of peasant artisan winemakers, he revolted against the dealers’ cartel by going out and selling his family wines direct to restaurants. He started from next to nothing at age 18 – two bottles of wine in his bike’s carrying case – and little by little built up his business over the years. He did it so well – he’s a ferociously hard worker – that he eventually steamrolled the dealers’ cartel and drove most of them out of business. And so, ironically enough, the guy who started out by revolting against the dealers has now become the biggest dealer in the Beaujolais. But there’s none of the old-style exploitation with Duboeuf. All the vignerons clamor to sell their wines to him, because they know he’s fair, and his worldwide reputation makes them look good. When Duboeuf buys a batch of wine it means their stuff has passed a test, because he’s such a picky and demanding chooser – Duboeuf is miles ahead of anyone else in the Beaujolais for wine tasting. So when he buys your stuff it’s a little bit like winning a medal.
