Read Online I'll Drink to That by Rudolph Chelminski - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rudolph Chelminski
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legend of Claude Brosse, a kind of commercial Robin Hood whose exploit is celebrated again and again in the region, today still. Although he is most often described as a vigneron from the Mâcon wine fields, I have occasionally heard claim laid to him as a Beaujolais man, but the exact zip code doesn’t really matter, because in any case he is probably mythical. What counts is that Claude Brosse represents the mystique of the Beaujolais in the triumph of an underdog who bursts free of provincial confinement, brings wine to the king—and wins.
He was a giant of a man, the story goes, surely over six feet tall, which was pretty sensational for those days. It was around 1700 or so that the legend has him loading his oxcart up with barrels and trudging northward for thirty-three days, somehow avoiding or bluffing his way through Burgundy’s tollhouses and customs sheds until he arrived safe and sound in Versailles. Parking his oxen outside the royal chapel on a Sunday morning, he betook himself to a bench far in the back, the only spot where a commoner like him could expect to attend a mass in the king’s presence. At the moment of benediction when everyone knelt reverently, the king’s master of ceremonies looked the congregation over and, to his unutterable shock, spied a man in the back who apparently had remained standing.
“On your knees, peasant!” (or something of the sort) he shrieked.
“Well, ain’t I on my knees already?” rumbled Brosse imperturbably, still looming over the rest of the faithful. What made the story even more heartwarming for his compatriots down south was that he spoke in the barely understandable patois of his region. And naturally, the story continues, the king sampled his wine, loved it and ordered that it be served thenceforth at the royal table.
If only it were so. In spite of the boosterism of the Brosse legend, the dreary truth was that the wines of the Beaujolais and the neighboring Mâconnais were—as often they still are today—casually dismissed as mere sub-Burgundies: pleasant enough to drink but devoid of big brother’s character and nobility.
When Claude Brosse made his legendary trek to Versailles, the French monarchy had less than a century of life left in it. Compared to the debasing serfdom that held most of the kingdom’s peasant farmers in bondage, the shared harvest of the fifty-fifty “half-fruit” vigneronnage system that prevailed in the Beaujolais was undeniably a real social progress for the personal responsibility and freedom of choice it offered to the skilled winemaking artisan, but considering the essential nature of the ancien régime, it was a humiliating, class-bound structure all the same. Vignerons’ contracts tied them to extra chores like cultivating their lords’ vegetable gardens, supplying them with a certain amount of eggs, butter and live chickens, maintaining their firewood supply, making their hay, heating their ovens and watching over the cooking of their bread, while their wives were required to clean their houses, help itinerant washerwomen at the river with the twice-yearly laundering of their sheets, bedclothes and household linens and, when needed, to wait on their tables.
After the French Revolution of 1789, the great noble and ecclesiastical estates were broken up, and power and vineyard ownership began shifting downward. With that, the stewardship of the Beaujolais countryside changed to resemble what it is today: thousands of small family holdings, either in a more democratic style of vigneronnage or land rental ( fermage ) or, more and more frequently, in outright peasant ownership of the land. This pattern continued well into the twentieth century: peasant farmers and raisers of cattle who also made wine. But the forces of history and economics were increasingly nudging them away from the former and toward the latter. Today, just about every square centimeter of ground in the Beaujolais that is favorable to winegrowing is
He was a giant of a man, the story goes, surely over six feet tall, which was pretty sensational for those days. It was around 1700 or so that the legend has him loading his oxcart up with barrels and trudging northward for thirty-three days, somehow avoiding or bluffing his way through Burgundy’s tollhouses and customs sheds until he arrived safe and sound in Versailles. Parking his oxen outside the royal chapel on a Sunday morning, he betook himself to a bench far in the back, the only spot where a commoner like him could expect to attend a mass in the king’s presence. At the moment of benediction when everyone knelt reverently, the king’s master of ceremonies looked the congregation over and, to his unutterable shock, spied a man in the back who apparently had remained standing.
“On your knees, peasant!” (or something of the sort) he shrieked.
“Well, ain’t I on my knees already?” rumbled Brosse imperturbably, still looming over the rest of the faithful. What made the story even more heartwarming for his compatriots down south was that he spoke in the barely understandable patois of his region. And naturally, the story continues, the king sampled his wine, loved it and ordered that it be served thenceforth at the royal table.
If only it were so. In spite of the boosterism of the Brosse legend, the dreary truth was that the wines of the Beaujolais and the neighboring Mâconnais were—as often they still are today—casually dismissed as mere sub-Burgundies: pleasant enough to drink but devoid of big brother’s character and nobility.
When Claude Brosse made his legendary trek to Versailles, the French monarchy had less than a century of life left in it. Compared to the debasing serfdom that held most of the kingdom’s peasant farmers in bondage, the shared harvest of the fifty-fifty “half-fruit” vigneronnage system that prevailed in the Beaujolais was undeniably a real social progress for the personal responsibility and freedom of choice it offered to the skilled winemaking artisan, but considering the essential nature of the ancien régime, it was a humiliating, class-bound structure all the same. Vignerons’ contracts tied them to extra chores like cultivating their lords’ vegetable gardens, supplying them with a certain amount of eggs, butter and live chickens, maintaining their firewood supply, making their hay, heating their ovens and watching over the cooking of their bread, while their wives were required to clean their houses, help itinerant washerwomen at the river with the twice-yearly laundering of their sheets, bedclothes and household linens and, when needed, to wait on their tables.
After the French Revolution of 1789, the great noble and ecclesiastical estates were broken up, and power and vineyard ownership began shifting downward. With that, the stewardship of the Beaujolais countryside changed to resemble what it is today: thousands of small family holdings, either in a more democratic style of vigneronnage or land rental ( fermage ) or, more and more frequently, in outright peasant ownership of the land. This pattern continued well into the twentieth century: peasant farmers and raisers of cattle who also made wine. But the forces of history and economics were increasingly nudging them away from the former and toward the latter. Today, just about every square centimeter of ground in the Beaujolais that is favorable to winegrowing is
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