Installed in his modest ground-floor office—cluttered, deliberately unglamorous, overlooking a parking lot—he is surrounded by abundantly tangible evidence of wealth, power and influence: enormous, state-of-the-art bottling lines and storage sheds bearing the steer-head logo he designed as a young man; an ultra-modern vinification plant about the size of a couple of football fields; a university-level laboratory; an amazing wine museum that he conceived, stocked and laid out himself, probably the best and most complete of its sort in the world; an elegant retail shop; a café-restaurant for tourists; and even the high-gabled bulk of the nineteenth-century Romanèche-Thorins railroad station, which he bought from the state to house an extraordinary train exhibit, both full-sized and in spiffy little electric models, demonstrating how wine is transferred and shipped.
There’s a disconcerting style to the man, though: he doesn’t follow the customary promotional script of the self-made man. A few years ago, when he built his huge new vinification plant, by far the most modern of its kind in France and probably in all of Europe, a computerized behemoth of glass, tile and glistening stainless steel—this is a mega badge of importance if ever there was one—he invited the press to Romanèche for an inauguration ceremony, but it wasn’t to get his picture taken posing by this multimillion-dollar investment. Rather, he wanted to show off
Un Jardin en Beaujolais
, the botanical garden and demonstration vineyard that he had laid out on the sloping ground just to the east of it.
Duboeuf the CEO dresses his spare frame elegantly, slings cashmere sweaters casually around his neck and drives a high-powered, silver Audi equipped with enough buttons, switches and automatic controls for a small space station. Like Yves St. Laurent, Christian Dior and Coco Chanel, he has imposed his name as a brand of worldwide recognition in his own lifetime, something that no one else in the French wine business has managed to achieve. (In fact, until he became so famous that even the most distant and benighted member of the trade was aware of the basics of his biography, foreign retailers often assumed that Georges Duboeuf was a marketer’s invented name, like Mr. Clean or Betty Crocker.) With all the worldly renown and prestige, though, it was only a few decades ago that he was the skinny kid in Chaintré clinging to a plow that was too big for him, yelling gee and haw (in French it’s
hue
and
dia
) at the family Percheron, and it doesn’t take much for memories of those years of youthful anonymity to come flooding back, sharp and clear. Duboeuf’s madeleine, the morning I saw him in Chiroubles, was the smell of burned horse’s hoof.
“Yesterday I was talking with a grower when a blacksmith came into the room,” he said in that characteristic whisper of a voice. “He still had his leather apron on, and suddenly the room was filled with that smell, that very particular acrid odor you only get when the smith hammers a hot new shoe onto a horse’s hoof. Suddenly I was carried straight back to Chaintré, when I was a boy.
“We had one horse, two cows, two goats and a pig. There had been an earlier time when we had two horses, but I only knew the period when there was one. I milked the cows, but I wasn’t allowed to touch the goats—that was Grandmother’s job. I don’t know why only women were allowed to milk the goats; that’s just how it was.
“I was good for the cows and horses, though. Every year we village boys would take our family horses to the main square to show them to the vet, who came through to check on their health and estimate their value. On the morning of the presentation I worked on mine for hours and hours, cleaning him up, brushing him, varnishing his hooves, combing his tail, braiding his mane. We led our horses up to the vet one by one. The mayor was there, the president of this association and that group, four to six serious men with mustaches who came to judge our work. I stood there admiring my horse. I was so proud. It was extraordinary.”
I had joined Georges in Chiroubles that morning for the
Concours Victor Pulliat
, a formal, blind tasting to determine the year’s best of the ten Beaujolais
crus
(when the prizes were announced a few days later “
la sélection Georges Duboeuf
” dominated the list), and in spite of the fact that we were in a high-perched little French village that scarcely could be quainter—stone houses roofed with round Roman tiles, winding streets, geraniums on windowsills, the occasional wandering cat—the atmosphere was all efficiency, organization and dead-serious business. The cell phones, electronic gadgetry and high-tech vinification chatter were about the same as what you might expect to encounter at a conference in California or Australia. When Georges entered the crowded meeting room and took his seat at his assigned tasting table, he may have been treated with a shade more respect than most, given his eminence and experience, but part of that respect was also for his white hair and the lines of fatigue on his face. He was already old, a man of another time: plenty of his fellow wine experts in the room were about half a century younger than he. Most of them could have no idea of the Beaujolais he had known as a boy, the prewar Beaujolais of Papa Bréchard and his countrymen, who still had one wooden shoe planted in the nineteenth century. In fact, I rather doubt that many of those present in Chiroubles that morning even cared much at all about the old Beaujolais, concerned as they were with scrambling for their share of sales in the globalized wine marketplace. Georges, on the other hand, was stalked as always by the essential ambivalence that defines him: old and modern; nostalgia and ambition; aesthetics and profit; tradition and progress. Within that crowd of dealers, brokers and growers, he was the one who had done the most to bring new wealth and cutting edge technology to the Beaujolais, but he was also the one whose memory was suffused with the smell of burned horse’s hoof. Duboeuf’s feet straddled a few centuries, and a few contradictions, too.
Over the years, I’ve poked and prodded at Georges to tell me about the Beaujolais fifty, sixty and seventy years ago. Our conversations have always been on the fly, between meetings, phone calls and business trips, often in his car as he drove to tasting sessions, because this perfection-crazed workaholic almost never has any free time. If my insistence on the past amused him at first, he understood and accepted the fact that Duboeuf the businessman, however much he represented a model of entrepreneurship for the French economy, interested me less at those moments than Duboeuf the descendant of and witness to a particular slice of rural France that has disappeared forever, one that few foreigners and not even so many of the French themselves could conceive of today—but one whose memory ought to be preserved, and maybe even cherished. Unsurprisingly enough, there was always plenty of nostalgia that accompanied these forays into his past, but the single leitmotif that recurred most frequently was work: the steady, obstinate, relentless work of the peasant who stakes his entire livelihood on what he grows, tends and raises, year in and year out.
“When you live in the environment of a wine family, you start very young,” he explained. “You follow the work of the vine and vinificationthrough all the seasons, even if it’s just at a child’s level. I clearly remember turning the handle of the crusher while Roger fed the grapes in from the harvest. I was five or six then. Like all the other children, I lived the period of the harvest intensely every year, carrying the tubs of grapes, then helping with the vinification as I got older. By the time I was fifteen, I was strong enough to participate in all the phases of the harvest at the same level as the adults. The harvest was only ten days or so, though, and once a year. For the rest of the time, it was all the usual work of spraying, pruning and tying up the vines. For me, that meant mostly work on weekends and Thursdays, when school was out.
“Our house in Chaintré was very simple by today’s standards. For water we went to the pump at the well in the courtyard, and we used to chill bottles of wine in the well itself. Later we had running water installed in the house, but for a long time there was no hot water supply apart from the big woodstove in the kitchen, that had a built-in water tank. We took our weekly bath in the kitchen, using the hot water of the stove’s reserve tank. For all intents and purposes, we lived in the kitchen, like all farm families. It was the warmest room in the house. The other rooms were heated just by fireplaces.
“We had ten hectares of Pouilly-Fuissé, three or four hectares of red wine and three or four of Noah. I used to plow between the vines, of course, but I didn’t start at that before I was thirteen or fourteen, because you need a certain amount of strength and dexterity to handle a horse with the reins over your shoulders. Luckily, horses were accustomed to the work. They knew where they were supposed to go. Early in the fifties, we got rid of our Noah. That was handwork, too. We did it with a big wooden lever, almost two meters long, forked at the end. It ripped the vines right out by the roots.”
Like most of their neighbors in those days, the Duboeufs were both farmers and vignerons. Wheat and hay were the two most common farm crops, and the harvesting was by a horse and the mechanical sickle bar it pulled. In the awkward spots too tight or too mounded for horse and machine, the handwork took over again: sickle and scythe.
“We ran behind the cutting machine and picked up the wheat to make sheaves, then carried them to the threshing machine. It was driven by a leather belt from the power train of one of those huge Locomobile steam engines with the smokestack and the big flywheel. We put the wheat into a chute on top of the threshing machine, and the straw came out on one side and the grain on the other.
“Once, I remember, when I was eight or nine I grabbed a big bunch of wheat, and there was a bees’ nest inside it. I got stung all over my arms. My grandmother came over and said don’t worry, it’s nothing. She rubbed vinegar all over my arms. An hour later I was back at work.
“In July, there was the haying. That was hot work. You couldn’t keep animals if you didn’t have hay for them in the winter. After it was cut we had to shake it out and load it onto the cart. Since I was little, they put me up on top of the cart. My job was to take the hay as they passed it up and lay it out. There was a whole art to handling hay. You had to take it into your arms and roll each bunch, then comb it out with your hands. When it was piled up high we tied a rope around the load and took it up to the barn in Chaintré. There were some railroad tracks to cross on the way to Chaintré. Once, when I was twelve or thirteen, I hadn’t tied it down well enough, and the whole load fell out, right onto the tracks. I had to act fast to get it off before the next train came.
“When we got to Chaintré, we brought the hay up into the loft above the stables, through a little opening like a window. My job was to take the bunches they pitched up and carry them to the back of the loft. The smell of fresh hay—ah là là, I’ll remember that all my life.”
Down on the plain by the Saône in Crêches stood the big old family house, the former abbey misguidedly acquired by the bargain-hunting Baron de Vinzelles. In Georges’s childhood, it was inhabited by his grandparents Debeaune and Berthilier. The Domain of Arbigny, people called it, and there were two details, two aspects of its situation, that particularly intrigued the boy: the chapel and the flooding. The flooding occurred when the Saône rose and overflowed its banks, as it was wont to do when the late winter rains persisted and the snow melted in the mountains. First the domain became an island, and then, if the rains persisted, the house’s ground-floor rooms went under water. Imperturbable, the family simply carried the furniture upstairs and moved into the second floor until the river receded back to its normal bed.
The chapel was a relic from the days of the monks of Saint Vincent de Mâcon, and it brought a touch of exotica that otherwise never would have come to this little corner of the French countryside: gypsies. “The chapel was part of the property, in the courtyard in front of the house,” Georges explained. “There was a statue of Mary in front and Martha inside, along with Saint Lazarus and his two sisters. The saints had the reputation of curing
la patte d’oie,
a genetic disease that was prevalent among gypsies, especially those from Hungary, who used to come there on pilgrimage. Sometimes they left rosaries behind, and notes and testimonials for the saints.”
In those days saints still counted for the French, too, and the Duboeuf family’s attendance at Sunday mass was unthinking and automatic, as much a part of the normal routine of life as tending the vines. Serious and conscientious, young Georges was inevitably drafted into altar boy duty, and he fulfilled his pious chores from age seven to sixteen. Dressed in the surplice, he prepared the altar, the wine and the host, carried cross and candle, rang the bell and murmured the responses along with the rest of the parishioners. The wine for the mass could only have been Beaujolais or Mâconnais red—what else? So it was at home, too, for both children and adults.
“We drank our own wine, sometimes white, but mostly red. Like all the children, I drank mine mixed with water. We ate a lot of bread, and mostly products from the farm—vegetables, milk, cheese. Cheese was the meat of the peasantry. When we had ‘real’ meat, it was pieces we had salted ourselves. We killed the pig once a year, and of course I participated in that. That was one of the normal rituals of farm life. Grandmother taught me how to kill rabbits with a blow behind the head, and then to skin them and tan the hides for making gloves. Same thing for killing and plucking chickens. When I was about fifteen, I raised ducks in a little shack near Grandmother’s place. You could make a pretty good profit with ducks, because they were ready for sale in just three months. I took them live to the open-air market in Chatillon. Supermarkets didn’t exist then, of course, so a lot of the merchants came to us. The baker and the butcher came by the house every day or two. They had horse-drawn wagons until the end of the war. Then, slowly, cars and trucks started taking over.