I'll Drink to That by Rudolph Chelminski Read Free Book Online Page B

of twenty-first-century customs and economics: times are changing, and not necessarily for the better, for the Beaujolais. Philibert is no fool. He knows that if his gorgeous little village is to prosper enduringly in the coming decades, it behooves him to find some supplementary sources of income to fill out his tax base, just in case. Wine alone may no longer be enough.
    “They’re worried now,” said Bernard Pivot by way of explanation. One of France’s most famous television personalities for his tremendously popular literary programs (he might be called the French Oprah Winfrey, were it not for the fact that he was reviewing books on the tube long before her), Pivot was born and raised in Quincié, deep in the Beaujolais-Villages and Brouilly area, and retains a profound affection for the place and its people. “The Beaujolais region has been propelled through three periods, very quickly. The place I knew as a kid was very much like Clochemerle, very rural and nonchalant. They loved their wine and they loved to laugh and joke with one another. I don’t think they worried too much about survival, and they didn’t ask too much of life. In general, you could say they were content.
    “Then they went through a second phase, the period of triumph— Beaujolais Nouveau, the easy sales, the sudden euphoria of money that they had never known before. With that, they made some mistakes and maybe sold some bad wine. Now they’re paying the price. They’re learning that there are other wines out there, and that Beaujolais is not universal and obligatory. Their wine isn’t just automatically selling the way it used to. So they’re having to adapt to the new realities. The countryside is just as beautiful as it always was, the church bells still ring the Angelus, the people still play boules, and they still sit down to supper to eat the same soup—but now there’s a computer in the room, too. Life is changing. Fundamentally, I think the people of the Beaujolais are still as simple and straightforward as they always used to be, but they’re worried. As soon as you get them into their caves , though, they forget their worries and become themselves again.”
    There can be no doubt that the return to one’s own wine cellar, to the faint, sour fragrance of a thousand past tastings, to the familiar heft of a half-filled wineglass and to the taste of one’s own wine, is a wonderful palliative for a wine grower’s woes, but that manner of pleasure and tranquilizing is not reserved for vignerons alone. It is equally present at the bars, bistros and cafés omnipresent in French urban architecture, and there is always a writer, a singer, a poet or a scientist to recommend a little bending of the elbow. The whole world went mad for red wine a few years ago after Professor Serge Renaud in Lyon announced that its judicious consumption was good for the heart, but long before him the great Louis Pasteur had already labeled wine as “the most hygienic of beverages.” Molière composed a wine-drinking song (“Let us drink, dear friends, let us drink, the flight of time urges us on, let us enjoy life to the fullest”), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau nicely philosophized that teetotalers were generally phonies, whereas “the taste for wine is not a crime, and it rarely causes any to be committed. For every passing quarrel it causes, it forms a hundred durable attachments. Drinkers are marked by cordiality and frankness: almost all of them are good, upright, decent and honest people.”
    But it was two lesser writers, both of them honored devotees of this region, who most convincingly applied the sentiment to the land of Beaujolais. Louis Orizet was chief regional inspector of INAO (Institut National des Appellations d’Origine), France’s official registry of product names and quality watchdog, and he loved the Beaujolais and its wines like his own family. His little book À Travers le Cristal (Through the Crystal) isn’t often seen in