Rudolph Chelminski, the critically acclaimed author of “Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine”, is a great friend of Georges DuBoeuf and has spent many days enjoying the pleasure of Beaujolais Nouveau.  In “I’ll drink to That: Beaujolais and the French peasant who made the world’s most popular wine” he has created a story that is part travelogue, part historical reference, and part juicy tabloid.  If you are a fan of Beaujolais Nouveau or any of the many wonderful wines that are produced in the same region you will love this real life rags to riches story about a young man and his “little” wine.

Salut!

A Bike and Two Bottles of Wine

From I'll Drink to That: Beaujolais and the French Peasant Who Made It the World's Most Popular Wine by Rudolph Chelminski, Gotham (2007). 

The story of Georges Duboeuf’s beginning in the wine business has been frequently written, but what is most significant is his prescience: he was the first to see what should have been glaringly obvious to everyone, and he was young enough - not settled into the stultifying ruts of routine - to go out and do something about it.  His idea of selling restaurants exceptional wine in bottles, directly from selected producers, rather than relying on the traditional practice of selling whole barrels to bistros, was an inspired anticipation of the changing trends of the modern world, and it had never been done before - not in the Beaujolais, in any event.  The days when bistros and restaurants bought wine in bulk and bottled it by hand in their cellars (usually reached via a trapdoor in the floor by the bar, than a vertiginous ladder down in the black hole) were drawing to a close.  Professionalism and specialization were entering the modern world; the old folklore was on the way out.  And Georges Duboeuf, the kid solemnly leaning on the pedals that afternoon as he left Chaintre, was gifted with an extraordinary lucidity that in following yeas was to make him the author of a considerable pack of innovations that, put together, constituted something very much like a revolution in the wine trade.

The famous first bike ride to Thoissey was easy, a mere ten kilometers or so down the N.6, then a hook left across the Saone and a pleasant promenade in the shade of a majestic canopy of towering roadside plane trees to Paul Blanc’s famous restaurant, Le Chapon Fin.  The great chef received the boy in the bar.  The standard version of the story is that Blanc tasted on the spot, but I suspect that he took Geroges’ samples, put them in his cellar of the fridge to settle and cool off, and then contacted him a day or so after.  At any event the result was this: “Petit,” he growled, “I’ll take your white wine. And if you can find me some reds as good as this, I’ll take them too.”

He found them, and then some.  In coming years the spectacle of this black-haired youth with the soft voice and the inquiring brown eyes, as skinny as a Giacometti statue and hardly any more voluble, single-mindedly nosing through vineyards, cellars, and caves cooperatives in a quest to do as Chef Blanc had said, was to become one of the unfailing constants of Beaujolais life.  Sooner or later, everyone who had anything to do with wine would have met or heard about Georges Duboeuf.  For the moment, though, all that interested him in 1951 was to squirm free of the dealers’ armlock and sell his own Pouilly-Fuisse, under his own label, as he and Roger made it. 

About I’ll Drink to That: Beaujolais and the French peasant who made the world’s most popular wine

I’ll Drink to That transports us to the unique corner of France where medieval history still echoes and where the smallholder peasants who made Beaujolais wines on their farms battled against the contempt of the entrenched Burgundy and Bordeaux establishment. With two bottles of wine in his bike’s saddlebag, young Duboeuf set out to revolutionize the stodgy wine business, becoming the richest and most famous individual wine dealer in France. But this is more than one man’s success story. As The Perfectionist used Bernard Loiseau to tell the layered history of French haute cuisine, here Chelminski uses Duboeuf’s story to paint the portrait of the often endearing, sometimes maddening but always interesting inhabitants of a little-known corner of France, offering at the same time a witty, panoramic view of the history of French winemaking.  

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