I'll Drink to That Read Online Free PDF

journalistic sort. The shorter man introduced himself as Pierre Martray, régisseur (manager) of Château de la Chaize; he and his cellar master were dining at Chez La Rose to celebrate the latter’s birthday. By the time we were tucking into a cheese platter (some absolutely remarkable goat’s milk creations), it somehow became established that we, the interloping outsiders, would be forever marked in history as the merest of churls and poules mouillées (wet hens) if we did not accompany them forthwith to the château to toast the birthday and gain an appreciation of different years and different batches of wine from different sections of its vineyard.
    Well, now. Château de la Chaize is a big, prestigious name, known around the world. It is one of the brightest stars of the Brouilly growth, and at nearly 250 acres its vineyard is one of the region’s largest single holdings. Its enormous vaulted cellar, considerably greater in length than a football field, is the longest in the Beaujolais, and is officially classified as a French historical monument. This was, in short, a serious reference, and Martray’s proposition was a serious one that we would have been remiss to neglect.
    We accepted. Midnight had come and gone by the time we left the restaurant, and the hostilities commenced without delay. At the wheel of his powerful German car, Pierre found to his dismay that he was hard put to keep up with Martray, who shot away from Juliénas in nothing better than a boxy, battered old Renault van that looked like an automotive caricature of itself. But he knew by heart every curve and bump in the roads winding through the vineyards back to the Brouilly hills, and he negotiated them at breakneck speed. The stock-car race that ensued was pure foolishness, of course, but on we roared after him, up hill and down dale, Pierre manically intent on not losing sight of the shaky tail-lights disappearing around the next bend, and it was probably just as well that in the dark of night we were unable to see just how precipitous were the slopes on either side of us. We arrived at the château with an apocalyptic clamor of brakes, and Martray led us without delay down into his beautiful subterranean domain. Tasting glasses in hand, we were soon treading the cellar’s central alleyway of dank clay, preceded at a shambling, languorous pace by our very own Frankenstein, a syringe-like glass pipette in hand. Twin rows of enormous wooden tuns on either side of us stretched away in perfect parallax to a dimly perceived conclusion somewhere at the far end of the ill-lit tunnel. Not even bothering with a ladder, the cellar master clambered skillfully up the supporting framework of one of the first tuns, removed the bung on top, inserted the pipette into the hole and drew forth a column of glistening, ruby red liquid. He nodded at us, and we held out our glasses. He lifted his thumb from the little orifice on top of the pipette, and atmospheric pressure did the rest: before you could say Jacques Robinson, a crimson stream shot out to fill our glasses.
    I don’t know how many of that endless array of tuns we drank from that night, but I do remember that there was a perfectly plausible oenological reason for every one of them—a different year, a younger or older set of vines, a different parcelle of the vineyard and so forth—that our hosts watched intently to be certain that we drank every drop, and that we ended the visit in Martray’s office, where Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy smiled down on us from a large photo on the wall. Martray produced a bottle of Champagne, and we drank it in honor of the birthday boy, or of the Kennedys, or of andouillette sausages. (By then it could have been anything at all.) It was close to two-thirty in the morning when Martray finally released us, and Pierre crept away from Château de la Chaize at half speed—which did not prevent him, however, from motoring straight into a cow pasture at the road’s first