We overtook an ancient Renault piloted by a wizened farmer. “And over here,” Dubosc said, leaning forward and pointing past me out the passenger window, “is all petit manseng, for one of our late-harvest Pacherencs. Unfortunately, the monsieur who tends that parcel is not very hard-working—look at all that grass sprouting between the vine trunks.”
I peered out the window, but all I could see was a blur of green leaves.
As we sped into another valley, Dubosc spoke about rainfall, microclimates, and the various cépages of the region—not just tannat and petit and gros manseng, the workhorse grapes of the Madiranais, but cultivars I’d only vaguely heard of, if at all: arrufiac, fer servadou, petit courbu, béquignol, Mauzac, Saint-Macaire, valdiguié. Dubosc characterized southwestern France as a wine geek’s dream, the cradle of dozens of indigenous grape varietals that taxonomists were still figuring out how to classify and name. “I’ve got one named after me,” he said.
The road flattened out for a stretch, and we whizzed by a ramshackle farmhouse on our left, causing Dubosc to change the subject. “The old man who lives in that house?” he said, craning his neck to get a better look as the car drifted across the centerline. “He has no electricity or TV. The floor of the kitchen is packed dirt.”
“A Parisian château owner,” Dubosc continued, “tried to buy the old man out, hoping to tear the place down—it was sullying his view. Pulled out a checkbook and said, ‘Name your price.’”
“What did the old man say?”
Dubosc broke into another impish grin. “‘Je vous emmerde.’”
Screw you.
“The hills around here used to be filled with tough paysans like him.” Dubosc sighed. “But they’re dying out.”
We turned onto a road that climbed a ridge with vine rows spilling down on either side into the hazy distance.
Dubosc said that when he founded the co-op, most of the vignerons in the Southwest were farmers like that stubborn old man, making vin à faire pisser—lousy wine.
“It was all about yield, yield, yield,” Dubosc said. “We spent many years trying to put an end to that.”
He laughed. “Do you know how hard it is to convince a Gascon farmer to let some of his grapes drop to the ground so that the best fruit thrives?”
He rapped a knuckle against his head. “They are hardheaded, those Gascons.”
“You’re a Gascon, no?” I said.
“Ah!” Dubosc held up a finger. “I was born in the Béarn!”
I said I’d read that the Béarn was part of Gascony.
“Historically, perhaps, but don’t say that to a Béarnais—or to a Gascon, for that matter.”
We’d pulled up in front of a peach-colored building that looked as if it might have once been a farmhouse. Cars were parked haphazardly around it, some overflowing into a dirt clearing across the road. A sign above the front door read LE RELAIS D’AYDIE—HOTEL-BAR-TABAC-RESTAURANT.
Inside, a hostess greeted Dubosc by name. She led us across a packed dining room to a linen-covered table by a window with frilly curtains. Dubosc conferred with her quietly about the wine, laying his fingers gently on the woman’s forearm as he spoke, just as he’d done with me earlier. Moments later she returned with a chilled Pacherenc that was honeyed and viscous, but with a stiff acidity.
Dubosc tapped the rim of his glass. “The grapes stayed on the vine until December. Tu imagines? Not an easy feat.”
He put his napkin in his lap and cocked his head slightly in the direction of the other patrons, mostly men. “Everyone in here is a vigneron,” he said. “Times have changed. When I was young, the growers and the field hands never ate at a restaurant. They had lunch with the winemaker’s family. Twenty people à table every day.”
I mentioned that Nadine had just been telling me the same thing.
Dubosc smiled. “How do you think she got to be such a good cook?”
Soon, the plates starting coming: a bright-red piperade in a cazuela, a wild-mushroom omelet the size of a small throw pillow, a confit-packed garbure, and, for my main course, an axoa de veau, the pepper-studded Basque stew that calls for chopping an entire veal shoulder into pea-size nubbins entirely by hand. (I knew this because the wrist-numbing task had fallen to me at one of the Coscuella classes, and I’d vowed never to make axoa again, though I was quite content to eat it.)
The Madiran that arrived with our main courses was gentler than the tannic beasts I’d been consuming in Plaisance—it wasn’t quite a Montus, but it more than met the definition of quaffable. I said so to Dubosc, who wiped his mouth, laid his napkin gently on the table, and raised his point-making finger.
“It took great effort for our winemakers to achieve a Madiran like this,” he said. “Tannat is the hardest of grapes to tame. It is dur, dur, dur”—“tough, tough, tough.”
For the better part of the next hour, as we emptied the bottle and worked our way through cheese and dessert, Dubosc spoke reverentially of his sacré tannat. For a while, he strayed deep into technical matters. He talked about how, in 1991, the first experiments in micro-oxygenation—a technique intended to soften and stabilize very tannic wines during fermentation—were conducted in Madiran, with excellent results. The practice soon caught on around the world. Then he started describing soil types. After that, he turned to maceration times. Next, he moved on to procyanidins and other polyphenols.
Eventually, somewhat to my relief, Dubosc drifted into more nostalgic terrain. He talked, and not without fondness, about his vexation with the Gascons, about how they were hardworking farmers but terrible businessmen. He recalled how André Daguin had dared to put a Madiran on the Hôtel de France’s wine list in the 1950s, defying convention in an era when only Bordeaux and Burgundies were deemed fit for fancy dining. He reminisced about Alain Brumont, who had been considered a playboy in his youth and, according to Dubosc, had a chip on his shoulder to this day. And Dubosc spoke of his own father, also a champion of tannat, a man who carried jugs of wine, not water, into the vine rows to slake his thirst during the harvest.
The check had arrived.
“Forgive me,” Dubosc said. “I’ve been going on much too long.”
I told him I had nowhere to be, which wasn’t exactly true—I’d promised Michele I’d run errands and make dinner.
“Ah!” said Dubosc. “Then we can make a stop or two on the way back.”
“By all means.”
Despite the one-sidedness of our conversation, I found Dubosc to be extremely pleasant company.
We drove to Madiran, the wine’s namesake village, to see the site of a thousand-year-old abbey where monks had made wine from native grapes. After that, Dusbosc said he wanted to show me a small château nearby called Mascaraàs. We took a wrong turn on the way there, and Dubosc pulled over to ask directions from a woman who happened to be walking on the side of the road. She recognized Dubosc, as had every person we’d encountered that day, and the two chatted for some time about a mutual acquaintance’s cataract surgery.
At the château, a moldering stone-walled edifice about the size of an average American suburban mansion, we were shown around by the owner, a retired college lecturer. He’d come into possession of the place a few years back and had been persuaded by Dubosc to let the co-op grow grapes on the property and sell the wine under the château’s name.
“Having a château on the label can be quite good for sales,” Dubosc said to me with another gentle arm-touch as we stepped inside. The professor, whose name was Derluyn, walked with a cane and, though the weather was warm, wore a tattered tweed blazer. He gave off a strong, well-marinated scent. Derluyn didn’t say much as he showed us around the château’s musty rooms, which contained an extraordinary accretion of relics, engravings, woodcuts, etchings, antique furniture, yellowed manuscripts, and other objets. When we stepped into one of the bedrooms, a startled bird flew out from under the canopy of a four-poster bed and exited through an open window.
In a cluttered library surveilled by a painted-marble
statue of Saint Denis holding his severed head, I noticed a book propped up on a stand. It appeared to be a very old edition of Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras’s Mémoires de M. d’Artagnan, the first, semi-fictionalized account of the life of Gascony’s legendary musketeer, written twenty-seven years after D’Artagnan’s death. In the absence of any actual memoir by D’Artagnan—the Gascon soldier apparently never picked up a quill—this was the book that Alexandre Dumas had culled from while writing The Three Musketeers and the two D’Artagnan romances that followed.
Derluyn noticed me inspecting the tome. “Ah, yes, our own Charles de Batz-Castlemore,” he said. “A local brat from a moderately well-to-do family who didn’t have anything better to do with his life than join the military.” It was the most Derluyn had said since we’d arrived, and also the first time I’d heard anyone in Gascony cast D’Artagnan in anything less than a heroic light.
I shared this observation with Dubosc as we walked back to the car.
“I wouldn’t take his comment to heart,” he said. “Derluyn is Flemish.”
The day was growing late, but Dubosc wanted to make one final stop before pointing the car back toward the Val d’Adour. We drove in the direction of Viella, turned onto a narrow, shady road that edged a steep incline, and pulled into a gravel drive that led to a modest tile-roofed house.
“This is where I grew up,” said Dubosc.
He pointed to a small brick outbuilding. “You see that shed there? That’s where I had my first drink of wine. I was ten. My father was working in the fields. I found one of his jugs and drank what was left in it. I was sick for a day.”
Dubosc put the car back in gear. “Tu sais? That was the first and last time I ever got drunk.”
Dubosc invited me on many other excursions after that. We paid visits to winegrowers, strolled through a plot of vines that had survived the phylloxera epidemic, toured the co-op’s caves, explored cemeteries and churches, snuck onto the grounds of private châteaux that Dubosc hoped the co-op would one day acquire. Each of these jaunts was as amply narrated as the first. Each included an unhurried meal and a meandering Duboscian foray into the past.
Over one of our long lunches, I asked Dubosc how much stock he placed in all that business about procyanidins, vascular health, and Dr. Corder’s various studies.
Dubosc narrowed his eyes and grinned, taking on a more than passing resemblance to the devil on his dashboard sticker. “We are winemakers, not chemists,” he said.
Then he raised his glass, offered a “santé,” and left it at that.
7
La Fête
Much of present-day Gascony was part of the Basque Kingdom of Navarre until 1589, when Navarre’s Béarn-born king, Henri III, united the northern part of the kingdom with France (in the process becoming Henri IV). The Iberian dominion receded back across the Pyrenees, but an affinity for Spain lingers among the Gascons, most famously in their enduring and occasionally fanatical love of bullfighting. In much of the Gers and parts of the neighboring Landes and Lot-et-Garonne, almost every village of a reasonable size has its own bullring. Plaisance’s, a squat concrete structure built in the 1930s to replace an older wooden arena, stands on the banks of the Arros, just across the river from where we lived.
In Gascony, the season for le corrida is summer, which is also the period of the annual village fêtes, which, in turn, offer an occasion for much outdoor feasting, often to the accompaniment of Spanish-style brass bands or flamenco dancing. Gascons take fêtes very seriously. A summer visitor to Gascony will be quick to notice the abundance of cheaply printed fliers plastered onto kiosks and shop windows announcing an extraordinary plenitude of cookouts, bandas concerts, and soirées musicales, and won’t have to travel far before stumbling on a hamlet turned out for its yearly party. Grilled foods are the star attraction at such events. The offerings, consumed at long communal tables, usually include one or more of the following (in descending order of prestige): magret, beefsteak, sausages, and, a perennial favorite, duck hearts, which are springy and meaty and have the distinction of tasting remarkably like magret and costing roughly a quarter as much.
Michele, Charlotte, and I attended our fair share of village fêtes. They were a mixed bag. At an outdoor lunch organized by a local chapter of the Young Farmers Association, rain kept putting out the grill fire that was supposed to cook the many pounds of chipolata sausages that had been procured for the occasion, and so we waited for an hour under a tent with a hundred or so stoic Gascons, watching an unflappable amateur dance troupe perform flamenco moves on a waterlogged stage, their high heels splashing in the puddles. The weather proved more cooperative when we attended a grillade in the tiny village of Préchac, just next door to Plaisance. There, we struck up a conversation with a plucky ninety-year-old named Jacqueline Sanvert, who upon learning that we were American, spent the entirety of the cheese and dessert course expressing her contempt for the English, speaking of them as if the Hundred Years’ War were still raging. When she found out we lived in Plaisance’s old mill, she said, “We are neighbors! You must come for apéro.” Then she looked at Charlotte with a wolfish, lip-smacking relish. “And of course you shall bring that petite créature délicieuse.”
In some Gascon villages the annual fête and the much-anticipated bullfights are bundled into a single Bacchanalian weekend. On these occasions, Gascons enter a kind of altered state, requiring little sleep and abandoning the propriety that governs their usual, workday feasting. If a typical Gascon meal requires stamina of the uninitiated visitor, then the fête-corrida combo requires an almost superhuman fortitude.
The most famous bullfights and the most unbridled partying take place on Pentecost weekend in the town of Vic-Fézensac, about twenty-five minutes from Plaisance. I attended the Saturday-night corrida there and decided it wasn’t for me. A few weeks earlier, in Plaisance’s arena, I’d seen the local non-lethal (for the animal) style of bullfighting known as a course landaise and had found it to be quite sporting: It required the bullfighter merely to dodge the beast or, occasionally, leap over it rather than kill it. The corrida in Vic was a gorier affair. As the torero withdrew his sword from between the bull’s blood-soaked shoulders, the animal looked in my direction with wet, imploring eyes before crumpling to its knees, keeling over, and being unceremoniously dragged out of the ring by a couple of horses, quite possibly to be butchered and made into a long-simmered daube de taureau, which, I must confess, is a most delicious dish.
I found the spectacle outside Vic’s bullring to be kind of unsavory, too. The streets of the normally sleepy village heaved with drunk teenagers in white T-shirts and red kerchiefs, peeing in alleys and stalking the main avenue with arms draped over one another while singing at the top of their lungs. Before that, I’d never seen a Gascon get drunk, at least not in public. A few days later, when I mentioned my surprise to Henri, who of all people could reliably be expected to heap opprobrium upon such behavior, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “C’est la fête.”
Plaisance’s annual festival fell on the long Bastille Day weekend and attracted its own fair share of drunk, flip-flop–wearing teenagers, most of them rugby players. Carnival rides and beer tents had been set up in the parking lot of the bullring. So had a flimsy-looking stage fitted with towering loudspeakers, multicolored spotlights, and a marquee that read DISCOTHÈQUE MOBILE.
On the first night of the fête, Michele and I were kept awake until four in the morning by the DJ’s thumping beats, which would stop tantalizingly for a few seconds, filling us with hope that our misery was at an end, only to start again with a thunderous drop. Posters I’d seen around the village had advertised this nocturnal component of the weekend’s festivities quaintly as a bal dansant.
“We should lodge a complaint,” Michele said from under her pillow.
I told her that probably wasn’t an option in Plaisance.
“There’s got to be something we can do.”
I shut the windows, got back into
bed, and pulled the sheet over my head. “C’est la fête.”
ANOTHER FESTIVE PHENOMENON THAT HAS seeped across the Pyrenees is that of the fraternal cooking club, a tradition widely agreed to be of Basque origin.
Plaisance had its very own such club. It was called Les Esbouhats, which means “The Winded Ones” in the old Gascon dialect. It consisted of a few dozen rugby players, ex-rugby players, and bullfighting enthusiasts who organized inter-village rugby tournaments and, more to the point, got together for epic Friday-night dinners at their clubhouse, which was referred to, in the Spanish style, as the bodega.
I attended my first Esbouhats gathering at the invitation of Alphonse, my friend from the cooking classes. I had run into him on the second day of Plaisance’s fête. He looked relaxed and rested, leading me to believe he lived well out of earshot of the discothèque mobile.
When he suggested I join him that night at the bodega, I demurred.
“I should probably tell you,” I said, “that I’ve never played rugby in my life, and I’m not the world’s biggest fan of le corrida.”
Alphonse gave this a few seconds of consideration and then slapped me on the shoulder. “Ça ne fait rien,” he said. “Just come with an appetite.”
I’d never been a member of a social club or, come to think of it, even a guest of a member of a social club. The only image I was readily able to conjure was that of pot-bellied men sitting at card tables, smoking cigars, reading the Racing Form, and eating meatball sandwiches.
The Esbouhats was a different thing altogether.
That evening, I made my way to the address Alphonse had given me. It corresponded to a plain wood door in a narrow alley behind a Groupama insurance office. I knocked, but no one answered. Hearing loud voices inside, I pushed the door open and peeked in. A dozen or so men were crowded around a bar along one end of a cozy, grotto-like room festooned with bullfighting and rugby ephemera—old team photos, a rugby shirt the size of a bedspread, a framed silhouette of a bull.
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