After finishing the tour, we went to the office that he shared with his wife, Rachel, an affable woman with short red hair who was doing the company’s bookkeeping. She continued working as Alléosse and I chatted at his desk. He said that the battle over Camembert was indeed symbolic; if lait cru Camembert was allowed to be cast aside, then no cheese was safe. This was a fight over tradition, he said, but it was also a war over taste. I told Alléosse of my conversation with Morelon and how the Lactalis spokesman had insisted there was no way to distinguish raw-milk Camembert from that made with treated milk. At this, Alléosse shook his head, threw his hands in the air, and turned to his wife. “Can you believe this?” he said, his voice rising in indignation. “Can you believe what Morelon said?” She shook her head and assumed a look of disgust (a sincere one, too; she wasn’t just humoring her husband). Pivoting around to look at me again, Alléosse said, “That’s an insult; that’s an industrialist speaking to you.”
To Alléosse, the Camembert situation was nothing out of the ordinary; this was the way things worked in France now. “The industrial companies are such a powerful force here,” he said. “The state just closes its eyes, and small producers are destroyed.” But while the wrangling over Camembert didn’t surprise him, he was perturbed by it; he was perturbed by much of what he saw happening around him. He had a habit of prefacing his remarks with the words, “Do you find it normal that …” The phrase was inevitably the lead-in to a rhetorical question, a way of underscoring his incredulity at the course of events in France—at the industrialization of agriculture and the demise of the artisan and the loss of good cheese and good taste. To hear him tell it, quality was plummeting everywhere; finding cheeses of character was increasingly difficult. “In France,” he said, “we have a lot of cheeses, but a lot of them are without quality. Look at the large producers of Camembert. If you produce fifteen thousand Camembert a day, how do you control the quality? Impossible. You get quantity, but not quality.” I didn’t tell him that Lactalis was making six hundred thousand a day, but he probably knew that already.
What troubled Alléosse more than the fate of this one, totemic cheese was that his compatriots seemed unconcerned about its plight and the plight of raw-milk cheeses generally—that they just didn’t care anymore. He understood that many French couldn’t afford to make a daily diet of the kinds of cheeses that he sold, but the public’s apathy about the continued existence of such cheeses dismayed him. Having dedicated his life to upholding France’s gastronomic tradition, he naturally took the apathy as a personal slight, a statement that his work no longer had any value. And it wasn’t just the attitude of the man on the rue; echoing Durand, Alléosse said that even the professionals seemed unconcerned with cheese. “No French chefs come to visit here,” he said. “We get foreign chefs. [Japanese chef Hiroyuki] Hiramatsu came here with an entire team, but no French chefs.” At this point, he said, it was the passion of his foreign clients that kept him going. “The French think that good cheese is too expensive,” he said. “It is the Americans and other foreigners who support quality. I have Americans coming into the store saying ‘Philippe, you must continue, you must protect lait cru cheeses, you have the best métier in the world.’ I never hear that from French people.”
Before leaving Durand’s farm, I had purchased a disk of his Camembert, which I had brought back to Paris and opened that night. The cheese came in the familiar thin round wooden box and wrapped in paper, but that’s where the similarities with other Camemberts ended. I knew Camembert to be a pale, somewhat rubbery, and very mild cheese. Durand’s rendition was different. For one thing, it was incredibly creamy and had a richer yellow color than other Camemberts. But it was the aroma and flavor that really set it apart. The cheese had an almost feral bouquet, with a bracing whiff of fresh grass and mushrooms. It was once said that Camembert smelled like God’s feet; I could only hope that He was so lucky. The cheese tasted as strong as it smelled: It wasn’t as powerful as Époisses or Reblochon, but it bore a closer resemblance to those divinely stinky cheeses than it did to the anodyne Camemberts found even in some of the better fromageries in Paris. Here was a heavyweight cheese with an unmistakable goût de terroir, and as I cut wedge after wedge of Durand’s handiwork, I found myself expressing mental solidarity with him and Rouchaud and Roger and others battling on behalf of le véritable Camembert. This was a cheese that needed to be saved.
“Without Wine, It Would Be a Desert”
ON MAY 15, 2007, the day before Nicolas Sarkozy was to be inaugurated as French president, a group called the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, identifying itself as Al-Qaeda’s European arm, issued a statement on an Islamist Web site warning of a terrorist campaign in France in response to the election of the “Zionist” Sarkozy. Several hours after Sarkozy took his oath, another group delivered a threat. In a grainy videotaped message sent to a French television station, seven balaclava-clad men, speaking in what appeared to be a cave, told the new president he had one month to satisfy their demands or “blood would flow.” The ultimatum echoed the previous day’s warning, but that’s where the similarities ended. The men in the video were not Islamic extremists; rather, they were militant French winemakers, part of a shadowy organization known as the Comité Régional d’Action Viticole, or CRAV, which was waging a campaign of low-grade violence in the Languedoc-Roussillon region, the area hardest hit by an economic crisis decimating broad swathes of France’s wine industry. They were wine terrorists.
La crise viticole, as it was known, was the greatest peacetime menace French winemakers had faced since the phylloxera root louse had chewed its way through the vineyards of Burgundy and Bordeaux in the 1860s. A sharp, decades-long decline in domestic wine consumption, combined with the emergence of robust competition from abroad, had led to a collapse in prices at the lower end of the French wine market, leaving thousands of vintners facing financial ruin. Across France, there were huge inventories of unsold Cabernet, Chardonnay, and Syrah—what the French media referred to as “the wine lake.” By 2005, the lake was overflowing and required draining: One hundred million liters of Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) wine—which is to say, premium wine—were distilled into ethanol. In 2002, authorities in the Beaujolais region, another flash point, were forced to order the destruction of thirteen million unsold bottles, representing 7 percent of the previous year’s total production.
The crisis didn’t affect all French winemakers. For the country’s most acclaimed producers, business had never been better. The global wealth boom that had begun in the 1990s had created ravenous demand for France’s most prized wines and sent their already-high prices soaring. The 1982 Château Pétrus, from one of Bordeaux’s most illustrious estates, had come onto the market for sixty dollars per bottle; within months of its release, the 2005 Pétrus was trading hands for five thousand dollars a pop. (And that ’82 Pétrus? Twenty-five years later, it was fetching six thousand dollars). As the thirst for fine wine spread from New York and London to Beijing and Moscow, a bottle of Pétrus became a trophy—as much a totem of success as a Gulfstream or a Porsche. The French wine industry was increasingly divided among a tiny number of globally recognized luxury brands and a vast army of unheralded and economically pressed vintners, and as prices continued to surge at the top and plummet at the bottom, the distance separating them became a chasm.
Nowhere was the wine crisis more acute than in the Languedoc, a sprawling region that hugged the Mediterranean coast from west of Marseille down to the Spanish border. The Languedoc had always been a viticultural backwater, producing cheap wines for the French working classes, and the area had a tradition of agrarian militancy. In 1907, Languedoc winemakers staged one of the most serious rural uprisings in French history. Angered by falling prices and what they perceived to be the French government’s indifference to their plight, eight hundred thousand vintners, their families, and their supporters waged several days of angry protests that very nearly sparked a civil war. French soldiers
were sent in to quell the unrest, which they succeeded in doing only after six of the demonstrators had been shot dead.
One hundred years later, it was déjà vu all over again, except the only deaths to this point had been suicides: A handful of Languedoc vintners had brought the axe down on themselves rather than waiting for it to fall. But others, unwilling to surrender their livelihoods, had taken to violence, and the parallels between 1907 and 2007 were certainly not lost on them. CRAV’s videotaped warning to Sarkozy urged winemakers to take up the old banner: “Wine producers, we appeal to you to revolt. We are at the point of no return. Show yourselves to be the worthy successors of the rebels of 1907, when people died so that future generations might earn their living from the land.”
CRAV activists were doing their part to help history repeat itself. In April 2005, they hijacked a Spanish truck carrying wine across the border into France and dumped its thirty-thousands liter payload on the highway. Eight months later the group staged a daytime assault on a bottling facility near Montpellier, smashing open vats and sending 750,000 liters of French, Italian, and Spanish wines gushing out. In February 2006, CRAV turned a protest by several thousand winemakers in the city of Narbonne into a day of mayhem; its members damaged train and phone lines, disrupting rail service and communications across the Languedoc. More recently, it had detonated crude bombs at several Languedoc supermarkets, claiming they were deserving targets because they sold foreign wines. And now, with a new president in office, CRAV was threatening to take its campaign in a more lethal direction.
CRAV was said to have around a thousand members, and it appeared to be a well-disciplined organization; the police had been stymied repeatedly in their effort to apprehend those responsible for the attacks. Finding CRAV sympathizers was not as challenging. In standing up for destitute winemakers, those embattled sons of the soil, CRAV sent a message that resonated deeply. This was true even among people who deplored its tactics—even, it appeared, among people who had felt the brunt of those tactics. A manager of one of the bombed supermarkets told reporters, “They picked the wrong target; in this supermarket, we don’t sell foreign wines. We understand the winegrowers’ problems. My father is one of them.”
By portraying its battle as one not just about vintners but also about vineyards, CRAV tapped a deep vein of French nostalgia. Agriculture held a sacred place in French life; the French considered themselves to be a nation of small farmers, and their reverence for the land and those who worked it seemed to grow stronger as more and more people abandoned the country for the city and French farming progressively declined. It was claimed that thirty thousand farms were now going out of business each year. In the 1960s, 20 percent of French workers were employed in agriculture; by the mid-2000s, the figure had fallen to just 3.5 percent. You couldn’t keep the French down on the farm, but they still felt its tug, which was why thousands of Parisians turned up at the Salon de l’Agriculture every year and why la crise viticole was seen not just as a wine problem, but as another milestone in the demise of French farming and the depopulation of rural France.
On a chilly, overcast day in November 2006, I traveled to Assas, a village near Montpellier, to visit with Pierre Clavel and his father, Jean. Pierre’s winery, Domaine Clavel was one of the most respected in the Languedoc, producing savory, sun-splashed reds composed mainly of Syrah, Grenache, and Mourvèdre. It had a loyal following in France and could be found on retail shelves overseas, too. Jean, now retired, had been one of the most politically active and influential vintners in the region. He was also a historian of Languedoc wine making—and author of a book on the subject—whose expertise extended to the 1907 riots.
Lunch, served at a long table in the tasting room, consisted of lamb stew and salad, prepared by Pierre’s wife, Estelle. She joined us for the meal, along with the couple’s two young sons, Antoine and Martin. In deference to Estelle and the boys, we mostly made small talk while eating; as they cleared the table after lunch and Pierre uncorked a second bottle of his top cuvée, La Copa Santa, the conversation drifted to the problems in the Languedoc. I wondered about the human toll. How many of the Languedoc’s ten thousand vintners would likely be put out of business? Jean prefaced his answer with some context: Around one third of the region’s winemakers, he said, had traditionally depended on government subsidies to stay afloat, and the loss of those cash infusions (no longer allowed now under European Union rules) had put them in an untenable position even before the onset of the current troubles. He also noted that the vulnerable included a number of older vintners who were nearing retirement; they would just be en retraite sooner than they expected. Nonetheless, an enormous number of Languedoc winemakers would go under—“Thirty percent minimally,” Jean said. At that, Pierre exploded. “This is murder!” he roared, pounding the table. “It’s a tragedy!” His anger caught me off guard. I understood his concern for his friends and neighbors, but I pointed out that the crisis posed no threat to him—he produced good wines that sold well. “It’s true; I’m okay,” he said, his voice calm again. “But don’t you understand? I don’t want to work in a desert. I don’t want my sons to work in a desert.”
In 2004, a documentary called Mondovino, about the globalization of wine, was nominated for the Palme d’Or, the most prestigious award at the annual Cannes Film Festival. Several months after its splashy debut there, Mondovino was released in French theaters and garnered an equally enthusiastic response. Although the filmmaker, Jonathan Nossiter, was an American himself, the gist of the movie was that American interests were homogenizing the production and taste of wine and subverting French viticulture in the process. The critic Robert Parker with his vulgar palate, the Mondavis with their deep pockets and assembly-line Chardonnays: France’s wine tradition was under assault from these avatars of globalization. The film’s emotional high point comes when the acclaimed Burgundy producer Hubert de Montille tells Nossiter that the French have fallen victim to a fiendish American plot. “In the U.S., in California, they know all about marketing,” de Montille explains. “ ‘Let’s hide our lack of terroir with the taste of new oak. We’ll explain that wine should taste like the vanilla of new oak … And we’ll convince the French, who really do have terroir, that that’s what sells.’ ”
In fact, it was the French who popularized the use of new oak, a small point in the service of a larger one: De Montille’s nefarious tale bore no relationship to reality, and the entire thrust of Mondovino was deeply misleading. It was certainly the case that wine was an increasingly globalized business, and that Parker and the Mondavis wielded enormous power; yet, to suggest that these were the main causes of the crisis roiling the Languedoc and other regions was just not true. But Nossiter didn’t make that claim; he didn’t even acknowledge the economic calamity befalling small French winemakers. Although la crise viticole was already ripping through French vineyards, it went unmentioned in a documentary supposedly meant to sound the alarm about French wine making. Nossiter’s omission perhaps wasn’t so surprising, though: Had he addressed the wine crisis, he would have been obliged to concede that the biggest problem facing French viticulture was the French themselves.
For one thing, French consumers were drinking less wine than ever before. Since 1960, France’s per capita annual wine consumption had plummeted by an astonishing 50 percent. Initially, the decline was driven by the same trends (health considerations, changing social mores) that led to the demise of the three-martini lunch in the United States and reduced alcohol intake in other countries. Now, though, there were uniquely French factors at work. In the mid-1990s, the government enacted some of the toughest drunk driving laws in Europe. The results were impressive: By 2004, alcohol-related road fatalities had declined 40 percent. But the French wine industry paid dearly for that progress: Restaurant wine sales fell sharply in response to the crackdown, and a critical source of demand for French vintners dried up accordingly.
However, the government wasn’t just taking aim at drunk driving; it
seemed intent on discouraging alcohol consumption, period. Indeed, French politicians on both the left and the right were increasingly demonstrating a neo-prohibitionist mindset. In 1991, a law was passed forbidding alcohol advertising on television and in movie theaters and barring liquor companies from sponsoring events like sports matches. Later, the government would seek to extend the ban to the Internet. In 2008, a court fined a Paris newspaper for publishing an article about holiday Champagnes: In a jaw-dropping display of adjudicatory jujitsu, it said the offending column constituted a form of advertising, in that it “intended to promote sales of alcoholic beverages in exercising a psychological effect on the reader that incited him or her to buy alcohol.” Also in 2008, the government moved to bar all promotional activities involving free alcohol; among other things, the edict was meant to curb in-store wine tastings and—truly chilling—prevent winemakers from pouring samples for visiting journalists. All this, coupled with punishing inheritance taxes—up to 60 percent of the value of a property—that made it exceedingly hard to keep family wineries intact, suggested that France had a government that was at war with French oenology.
There was one development above all others that underscored the extent to which French wine culture was in retreat: America’s enthusiasm for wine was beginning to eclipse France’s. By 2007 the United States was in the midst of a wine boom that had seen consumption increase by 75 percent since the early 1990s, and it was now on course to surpass France in total wine consumption by 2015 (although on a per capita basis, France was still many bottles ahead). Thanks to the efforts of people like Robert Parker and the acclaimed Berkeley-based importer Kermit Lynch, vast numbers of Americans got hooked on wine in the three decades following the Judgment of Paris. And it wasn’t just California wines that they embraced; the United States became home to the most ardent collectors of the finest French wines, and contrary to Hubert de Montille’s conspiracy theorizing, many American oenophiles and vintners held France’s wine-making tradition in the highest esteem. In 2005 Gallup reported that for the first time ever, Americans preferred wine to beer. This change in taste was reflected not just at the checkout counter, but in the proliferation of wine bars, wine schools, and instructional wine books. When it came to wine, it appeared that Americans were now the libertines, and the French, increasingly, were the puritans.
Au Revoir to All That Page 16