I'll Drink to That Read Online Free PDF Page B

sharp turn to the left.
    Although today, nearly four decades after the fact, I can still imagine Martray laughing as he watched us stumble out to the car and inch away from Château de la Chaize, I bear him no retrospective ill will. We didn’t have to go back there with him, and we didn’t have to drink all that Brouilly and Champagne. We did it of our own free will, and truth be told, we enjoyed it, too, even if we suffered somewhat for our excesses the next day.
    This sort of encounter is not, you may have imagined by now, an altogether infrequent occurrence in the Beaujolais. Let me underline, though, that this kind of challenge is not the sole explanation for their behavior. These people are proud of what they labor all year to produce, and sincerely want you to love it as much as they do themselves—but at the same time they also rather like to determine how well you can hold it. Wine is the social grease and catalyst of the Beaujolais, and the natives give it away with a liberality that would scandalize the purse holders of the more hoity-toity growths to the north and west of them, in Burgundy and Bordeaux. Stop at any Beaujolais vigneron’s house, knock on the door, announce your presence and intentions; there will be a handshake, a few curt words—and then, inevitably, you will adjourn to his caveau. It is only when he is in his element, surrounded by his barrels and his bottles, when he has tapped a vat or pulled a cork to fill his glass and yours, that hospitality will have been served and custom respected. Comfortable now, he will open up and you can start to talk business. The practice is ancient, immutable and immensely agreeable, but carried to the extreme, it can be a test of the simple act of remaining vertical.
    Please do not mistake me: by no means do I intend this account to be anything like an apologia for drunkenness. It does happen from time to time, of course, but there are many different degrees of alcoholic euphoria, and they rarely reach downright debauch. Here, as in every vineyard region in the world, wine is a serious business, and the 150 million or so bottles that the Beaujolais produces every year, depending on the vagaries of weather and harvest, represent a serious investment in time, toil and expertise, one that returns a weighty contribution of tax revenues to the French treasury. On the consumer’s side of matters, it is obvious that a reasoned investigation of the range and subtleties of wine, rather than just dumb chugalug boozing, is a thoroughly respectable and rewarding undertaking; few activities could be more civilized than the measured—you might almost say sober—consumption that such an investigation requires. Wine tasting, and indeed the whole spectrum of oenology, rife as it is with books, magazines, clubs, computer programs, games, competitions and who knows what other spinoffs, has become a social and business phenomenon of the first order: big money, big prestige, big opportunities.
    So: wine is fashionable. No need to labor that point any further. But with that fashion, a curtain of tiresome solemnity often descends upon the subject, and we Anglo-Saxons are perhaps more guilty than most when it comes to vinous posturing and affectation. Wine today is ever so gravely classified, parsed and analyzed to death with a vocabulary worthy of the cabala, and the high-end stuff gets bought and sold exactly like stock market shares or sowbelly futures (an excellent investment, I understand). I wish the analysts and speculators every bit of the success they deserve, but for all the times I have rubbed shoulders with the swells of the trade at château tastings in Bordeaux, for all the pomp, pageantry and bizarre costumes I have had occasion to admire at enthronement ceremonies of the Chevaliers du Tastevin, that superbly organized PR stunt of the Burgundy wine establishment, and for all the free Champagne I have swilled at press junkets in the chalky cellars of Épernay and