Au Revoir to All That

by Michael Steinberger

  Richard, too, was a farmer at heart, a fifth-generation winemaker, and his attachment to the land was as profound as Moueix’s. It was so great, in fact, that in 2006, he sold his house in order to keep his winery. He now lived with his family in a pair of mobile homes parked on the lawn of the château. Richard was one of the thousands of French winemakers slowly going bust. Many had sad stories to tell, but few stories were as tragic as Richard’s, and fewer still exposed so starkly the fault lines running through the vineyards of France. The reversals Richard had suffered—the evaporated demand for his wines, the forced sale of his house—were dismaying; the fact that all this had transpired fifteen minutes from Saint-Émilion and Pomerol, fifteen minutes from Christian Moueix and Pétrus and vineyards turning out five-thousand-dollar bottles of wine, beggared belief.

  I had first met Richard three months earlier, when I was in Bordeaux for Vinexpo, a mammoth wine trade show. Some fifty thousand wine professionals and hangers-on from around the world had descended on Bordeaux in the middle of June for a week of sipping, slurping, and deal-making. The fair itself had taken place in three cavernous exhibition halls on the northern edge of the city of Bordeaux, but scores of private tastings and lavish lunches and dinners also had been held off-site. Many big-spending clients had come to Bordeaux for all or part of Vinexpo, giving the sprawling wine region the feel of the Hamptons in mid-August. Eager to bypass Bordeaux’s clogged highways and streets, some of the visitors had hired helicopters to ferry them back and forth between châteaux, creating a daily airborne flotilla in the skies above the vineyards.

  Located on the edge of a somnolent village twenty or so minutes from downtown Bordeaux, Fourton La Garenne sat at the end of a long, pockmarked driveway that eventually turned into grass. Approaching the château, I noticed the two mobile homes on the lawn. The château itself was in an advanced state of decrepitude. Its stone exterior was chipped and decayed, the corrugated roof completely rusted. The barrel room, located in the back of the château, was a small, dark chamber with crumbling walls and shards of rotten wood strewn about. Perhaps a dozen or so oak barrels sat in the unkempt yard behind the château, along with some stray farm equipment and cinderblocks. As I surveyed this scene, it occurred to me that I’d taken a wrong turn out of Bordeaux and somehow ended up in Appalachia.

  One problem was immediately apparent: Fourton La Garenne was on the periphery of Bordeaux, in a place that probably wasn’t very conducive to making wine—good ones, anyway. A few years earlier, in Burgundy, I’d spent several hours in the vineyards of Meursault with Stéphane Thibodaux, the estate manager for Domaine des Comtes Lafon, one of the region’s most acclaimed wineries. As we had driven through the Goutte d’Or vineyard, Thibodaux had explained to me the lay of the land. “If you are on the left side of the road here,” he had said with a wry smile, “you are a loser. If you are on the right side, you are a winner.” This crude formulation got to the essence of French viticulture: Ultimately, you were only as good as the dirt you owned. Fourton La Garenne had a name that sounded every bit as distinguished as Pétrus and Bélair, but it didn’t have the soil to match, and that was surely one reason for its troubles.

  As I exited the car, Richard came out to meet me, along with his oldest daughter, Aude. Richard’s three-year-old granddaughter, Leane, eyed me suspiciously and then scurried into the château. Richard, a trim, bearded fifty-eight-year-old with weather-beaten skin, was dressed in a blue mechanic’s suit—a far cry from the suits and loafers worn in Bordeaux’s more posh precincts. Richard’s other daughter, Amandine, Leane’s mother, was behind the château, laboring to push full barrels onto a wooden platform for racking. She was a strikingly pretty blonde, but she had an unsettling hardness to her eyes.

  Using several different grapes—mainly Merlot, but also Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, Sauvignon Blanc, and Semillon—the Richards produced around twenty-five thousand bottles of AOC-designated wines each year. Richard had started bottling his own wines only in 1994. Previously, he had sold his grapes to a nearby cooperative, which used them for wines that went out under its label. This was a common practice in France, but selling to a cooperative didn’t have the cachet that selling wine under one’s own label did. To do the bottling himself, Richard had to upgrade his facilities and had taken out a loan from Crédit Agricole, a major French bank. This was on top of a loan he had received from the same bank in 1991, when frost destroyed nearly his entire crop and he needed help covering his expenses.

  He had still been repaying the loans when the crisis had struck in 2002 and the prices that his wines could obtain collapsed. Before, Richard was getting two euros per liter wholesale; by 2007, the wholesale price was less than a euro. Adding to his woes, the local merchant who had previously distributed his wines dropped him as a client, forcing Richard to sell them himself. Then, the land values in his part of Bordeaux plummeted. A decade earlier, he could have sold one hectare of vineyard for the equivalent of sixty thousand dollars; now, the same patch of land could get maybe fifteen thousand. Suddenly, the Richards found themselves tending grapes and producing wines that were just about worthless. They pleaded with the bank to adjust the terms of the loans, but the bank refused; it wanted its money and began pressuring the family to liquidate assets. “I told them to stop strangling me,” Richard recalled. He was eventually forced to choose between selling his home or the winery. He opted for the house. “It was a choice between dying and cutting off my arm,” he explained. “I decided to cut off my arm.”

  We were talking in the yard behind the château, which I assumed had been the family’s residence. Aude corrected me; they’d only ever used the château for wine making. She pointed to a large house visible just through the trees; that was their old home. It was now owned by “a rich Parisian who wanted a vacation place,” Bernard said with a mordant laugh. He said the decision to sell the house had been painful. “It was the house we moved into when we married and where we raised our children,” he said. (Richard also had a twenty-four-year-old son.) Why, I asked, hadn’t they just sold the winery and kept the roof over their heads? Aude, who was rolling a cigarette, smiled wanly and answered for her father: “We love this property; we can’t leave it.” As we were chatting, now under a light rain, Amandine let out a groan. I looked over and saw her struggling to push a barrel of wine onto a slightly raised wooden platform in the middle of the lawn, her face flushed and contorted from the effort. Her sister and father didn’t seem to notice. I commented to Aude that her family was in a sad situation. “Sad? No, just hard,” she replied.

  They were doing everything they could to bail themselves out, starting with plans to rip up around seven acres of vines and to use the land for vegetables and as grazing area for some cows and pigs. “We realized last year that we were producing too much wine,” Aude told me. “Plus, the government will pay us a little money to uproot the vines.” (Although subsidies were no longer available, winemakers were now being paid to tear out their crops.) She said that they would try to become a full-service farm for their neighbors: People would come and buy wine and fresh vegetables, and they could bring their children to pet the animals. In an attempt to carve out an additional niche for themselves, the Richards had also converted to biodynamic wine making, an ultra-organic approach to vineyard management. This would hopefully give them entrée to organic wine shops throughout France.

  The rain had let up, and Richard opened a bottle for me to taste: the 2001 Château Fourton La Garenne Cuvée Fût de Chêne. The pale, washed-out color told me all I needed to know. The bouquet was just as feeble; it was a challenge to coax any aromas out of the glass. The wine tasted emaciated, with a strong herbal note that suggested unripe fruit and coarse, rustic tannins. Still, while it didn’t deserve AOC status, it wasn’t egregiously bad, and back when French factory workers would quaff a liter for lunch, there undoubtedly had been demand for such a wine. But those days were over. As we tasted, I asked Richard why he didn’t have a booth at
Vinexpo. He laughed. “That’s just business,” he said. “It isn’t about wine.” I said that there was a lot of money on display this year and mentioned the helicopter traffic. “Oh, yes, we hear the helicopters every night,” Aude said with a bemused grin.

  When I returned to Fourton La Garenne three months later, on the eve of the harvest, the Richards told me of a new outlet for their crop and a source of some possible short-term relief: They were now bottling and selling unfermented grape juice. As Bernard and I walked through the family vineyard, joined by Aude, we discussed the crisis and what had triggered it. They acknowledged that domestic consumption was a factor. “People in France just don’t want to drink wine anymore,” Aude said. They conceded, too, that the government and the banks had made it too easy for people to get into the wine business and that France had produced too much wine. Mostly, though, they blamed the crisis on foreign competition; against these mass-produced, shrewdly marketed Australian and Chilean wines, what chance did small French vintners have?

  We talked about the growing economic divide in Bordeaux. I mentioned a recent remark made by Pierre Lurton, who was the scion of a prominent Bordeaux family and the managing director of two venerable wineries, Château Cheval Blanc and Château d’Yquem. In an interview with Time magazine, Lurton had expressed concern about the region’s prosperity gap and compared it to the striking inequality that one found in many South American countries. Richard, who had been a study in serenity until this point, suddenly erupted in anger. “These are the people who are killing us!” he barked. “They are the ones who are telling us we make bad wines and that we need to become more like the New World producers.” He noted, too, the irony of the South America comment, pointing out that Lurton had a winery in Argentina called Cheval des Andes. Aude nodded in agreement. “They should be helping the people here instead of going over there,” she said.

  Moueix was over there, too; in 1982, he had established Dominus Estate, which now produced one of Napa Valley’s most respected wines. But Bordeaux was his home, and the wine crisis and the plight of small growers like Richard weighed on him. There was no escaping the crisis—not even in Pomerol and Saint-Émilion. His wife, Cherise, a beautiful Chinese-American woman whom he had met when she worked as an art dealer in Paris, had told me that Moueix was now routinely buttonholed in church by winemakers desperate for his help. He was doing what he could. In addition to Pétrus and his other properties, Moueix had a line of generic Bordeaux. He purchased wines from producers throughout the region, blended them, and sold them under the “Christian Moueix” label. He wasn’t putting out plonk; he had a reputation to protect and the wines he bought had to be good. But he felt the crisis keenly, and wanted to provide a lifeline to struggling neighbors. “Bordeaux has given so much to my family, and we have to give back,” he said.

  He knew, though, that his contribution was small; while it might buy a handful of winemakers some time, it wasn’t going to change the grim prognosis. Bordeaux—France—had a surfeit of vintners and vineyards, and the crisis would only end when there were many fewer of both. “We were too lax in the seventies and eighties,” Moueix said. “Things were too easy. There was no world competition, so we said, ‘Let’s plant more.’ Terrible mistakes were made.” But while the solution was obvious and unavoidable, that didn’t make it any less wrenching. Finding new uses for former vineyards would be simple; finding new uses for former winemakers would not be. “Many of these people, this is all they know,” he said. “Wine is the only thing they know.”

  King of the World

  IN FEBRUARY 2007, Alain Ducasse hosted a tribute in Monte Carlo in honor of Paul Bocuse. The event was originally scheduled to coincide with Bocuse’s eightieth birthday, the previous year, but his heart surgery had delayed the celebration. The weekend fête was held at the Hôtel de Paris, home to Louis XV, Ducasse’s three-star restaurant, and at a handful of other venues in the tiny principality. Ferran Adrià, Juan Mari Arzak, Daniel Boulud, and Charlie Trotter were among the dozens of culinary eminences who took part in the festivities, which included a gala dinner, replete with magnums of Dom Pérignon, and a lunch prepared by an all-star ensemble of chefs. The gathering also featured the big-tent flourishes beloved by Bocuse: dancing girls in fishnet stockings, a performance by the Monte Carlo circus, and a fireworks display.

  The occasion wasn’t merely a chance to toast Bocuse. It was a symbolic passing of the toque—the moment the fifty-year-old Ducasse staked his claim to being the new godfather of French cuisine. Ducasse even donned chef’s whites to pose for a picture with Bocuse, underscoring the significance of the moment: Unlike Bocuse, who had always sought to maintain the illusion that he was still a practicing chef by dressing up as one whenever cameras were nearby, Ducasse had long ago dropped any such pretense. His standard attire was a business suit, because he was now a businessman, and a very successful one. With over twenty restaurants on four continents, a prestigious cooking school, his own publishing imprint, and more than a thousand employees worldwide, Ducasse presided over a culinary empire of unprecedented size and reach. It even extended to the heavens: A few months before the Monte Carlo event, the Ducasse group had prepared meals for the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. (Among the items on the menu: roast quail and rice pudding.)

  In the course of building l’univers Ducasse, the peripatetic chef had gained a reputation as a remarkably savvy manager, with an unerring eye for talent and a knack for putting people in the right jobs—in his own restaurants and in other ones, too. Top kitchens in France were crawling with Ducasse alums. All this had made Ducasse the most recognized chef of his generation and the logical choice to inherit the throne occupied by Bocuse—and by Point, Escoffier, and Carême before him.

  It was a role that he was eager to assume. Six months after the Bocuse event, the newly elected Nicolas Sarkozy had lunch at Ducasse’s three-star restaurant in Paris. Ducasse was there to greet him, but also to corner him. After exchanging pleasantries, he delivered a blunt warning: The 19.6 percent value-added tax was killing the restaurant industry, and if the government wanted him and other leading chefs to continue doing business in France, it was going to have to sharply reduce the rate. Sarkozy was later heard to remark to his guests, “Can you imagine if France were to lose Alain Ducasse?”

  In the opinion of some critics, it would have been good riddance. To his detractors, Ducasse was a gastronomic bantamweight who had contributed little of lasting value to French cooking. François Simon called him a purveyor of “xeroxed” cuisine and a “sleek atomizer—spritzing his brand over you from a plane on his way to New York or Hong Kong.” For Simon—and it was a view widely shared—Ducasse epitomized much of what was now wrong with high-end French fare: the absentee chefs, the relentless branding and self-promotion, the dearth of path-breaking ingenuity at the stove. In addition to being the best-known chef of his era, Ducasse also seemed to be the most unpopular.

  A casual observer, stumbling upon the celebration in Monte Carlo, might have assumed that Ducasse was Bocuse’s protégé. In fact, he had been a disciple of Alain Chapel, with whom he had worked in the late 1970s. By now, however, Bocuse had become his role model; it was even rumored that a deal had been struck for Ducasse to take over Bocuse’s restaurant. If you believed that one reason for the malaise in French cuisine was too much Bocuse and not enough Chapel—too many chefs in airport lounges, too few in the kitchen—it was only natural to regard Ducasse as the embodiment of this unfortunate imbalance, and to perhaps also view him as something of a turncoat. But did Ducasse really betray Chapel’s legacy to embrace Bocuse’s, or did it only look that way?

  Alain Ducasse grew up on a farm in southwest France; the aromas coming out of the kitchen on Sundays, when his grandmother cooked the family meal, aroused his interest in food, and in his late teens he went to work for Michel Guérard. It was 1975, the nouvelle cuisine movement was in full bloom, and Guérard’s cuisine minceur was attracting widespread acclaim, which
made it very difficult to land a position in his kitchen. But Ducasse, showing the moxie that would become a signature, talked himself into a job by offering to work for free. His talent so quickly manifested itself that within weeks he was on the payroll; he eventually ended up preparing most of the dishes that were photographed for Guérard’s magnum opus, Michel Guérard’s La Grande Cuisine Minceur.

  In 1977 Ducasse left to apprentice with Roger Vergé at Moulin de Mougins, a three-star restaurant on the Riviera. It was there that Ducasse encountered Provençal cooking, which so enthralled him that he would eventually make it his own. He was especially smitten with the vegetables and the creative possibilities they presented. But while the Mediterranean became his reference point and abiding passion, he realized that his culinary education would be incomplete without a stint up north, in France’s butter belt. So in 1978, Ducasse left the warmth of the Côte d’Azur and went to work for Chapel. The two years he spent there proved to be the most formative experience of his budding career. Ducasse immersed himself in his work and in mastering the Chapel way. From Chapel, he developed a reverence for quality ingredients and a bedrock conviction that the essence of good cooking was to present a few bright flavors in absolute harmony with one another. These were the ideas that would guide his career—or at least the cooking phase of it.

  Having completed his training, Ducasse returned to the Riviera in 1980 to run the kitchen of another restaurant owned by Vergé, L’Amandier. Soon thereafter, he moved on to La Terrasse, a restaurant in nearby Juan-les-Pins, where he was installed as head chef. In 1984, La Terrasse was awarded two Michelin stars, an achievement that announced to the culinary world what had been instantly apparent to his mentors: The twenty-seven-year-old Ducasse was a very special talent. A third star was now regarded as a mere formality, and it was thought that Ducasse was on the cusp of one of those historic careers that would decisively influence French cuisine. Indeed he was, but no one could have anticipated the obstacle that yet lay in his path, or the direction that his career would take after he found his way past it.