They Eat Horses, Don't They?

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  He is said to be able to cook a chicken in two hundred different ways, including in Coca-Cola, which he is alleged to have served at his wedding feast – surely an endorsement of the culinary potential of fast food at the highest level.

  For the sophisticated Parisian intelligentsia, McDonald’s represents an intriguing social phenomenon: a dark rebellion against the social Zeitgeist, a transgression of the sacred French rules relating to family meals and dining out. And it’s not just French intellectuals who are interested in the socio-economic effects of fast food. Top French chefs like Alain Ducasse have spotted the economic potential of France’s desertion of the long lunch in favour of the quick snack. All over Paris and other major French towns, posh sandwich chains are mushrooming. Gone are the days when the standard Parisian worker’s lunch was a steak au poivre and a half-carafe of tepid wine in a local bistro. These days, it could just as well be a croque-monsieur with shavings of Cantal, a brioche with foie gras and wasabi dressing, or even sushi (France is now Europe’s biggest sushi consumer). Critics like François Simon take a laid-back view of the matter. ‘When a food culture is strong,’ he observed during his secretly filmed foray into McDo, ‘you can allow a mixing of influences and accept foreign imports such as hamburgers, sushi, pizza and the like. There’s nothing to get in a flap about.’

  Even if they might have the occasional secret fling with a Royal Deluxe or a McFlurry, the French will always come back to the potage bonne femme of hearth and home. Cuisine simply runs in the Gallic blood, as visceral a reflex as hitting the street, or queuing on the motorway in August. And what is a burger and fries anyway, if not a variation on the traditional steak-frites?

  Myth Evaluation: False.

  THE FRENCH DRINK WINE WITH EVERY MEAL

  Burgundy makes you think of silly things, Bordeaux makes you talk of them and Champagne makes you do them.

  JEAN-ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN (1755–1826)

  For a gourmet wine is not a drink but a condiment, provided that your host has chosen correctly

  ÉDOUARD DE POMAINE, FRENCH SCIENTIST AND BROADCASTER (1875–1964)

  André Simon, a French-born gourmet and wine merchant who dominated the British wine scene for much of the early twentieth century, once observed that ‘food without wine is a corpse; wine without food is a ghost; united and well-matched they are as body and soul, living partners.’ A few decades ago, a French meal without wine would have been gastronomic heresy. Gingham-checked bistro tables in Paris and the regions came ready-dressed at lunchtime with a carafe of the local libation; dinner involved at least three or four glasses of vin de table; even at breakfast, barflies in the local café would customarily start the day with un express and a p’tit rouge to accompany their daily croissant. Those who abstained from wine were regarded with the deepest suspicion. ‘People who never drink wine are imbeciles or hypocrites,’ the poet Charles Baudelaire observed. ‘A man who only drinks water has a secret to hide from his peers.’45 The French, in fact, lived off wine in the way other people live off water; and the medieval custom of drinking wine because it was safer than water persisted well into the age of sanitation.

  I drink champagne when I win, to celebrate... and I drink champagne when I lose, to console myself.

  NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE (1769–1821)

  But things seem finally to be changing. Nowadays, France is still the world’s biggest wine producer (followed by Italy and Spain).46 The French are also fourth in the league of wine consumers, drinking 46 litres per person a year, or almost three bottles per person a month.*

  * Oddly enough, the leader in world wine consumption is the Vatican City State, whose 800 faithful manage to down an impressive 55 litres per head annually. Second comes the minuscule Pacific enclave of Norfolk Island, whose 2,300 residents – claiming a mixture of British and Tahitian descent going back to the mutiny on the Bounty – drink an average of 54.5 litres per head a year. Third comes the tiny state of Luxembourg, with a per capita figure of 52 litres.

  Yet while in terms of world wine consumption the French figures may seem as buoyant as a cork, the reality is that the nation’s wine drinking has plummeted in the last thirty years, decreasing from 50 billion litres in 1980 to 32 billion litres in 2008.47 In two generations, the number of bottles of wine downed annually by the French has dropped from seven to four billion bottles – the equivalent of losing one bottle a week for every adult. And whereas in 1970 the French drank over twice as much alcohol as mineral water or fruit juice, that situation has now been reversed: by 2002, they were drinking twice as much water as alcohol.48

  What accounts for this oddly reversed transubstantiation of wine into water? It seems that the explanation lies in a profound generational shift of French attitudes to the vine. A 2011 study by researchers at the University of Toulouse49 into wine-drinking practices across three generations of French people – those aged over 65, those aged 30–40, and those under 30 – found that only the oldest generation were daily wine drinkers. For them, wine had a sacred status as a symbol of French family life and conviviality. This was the group that recalled stories of Henri IV being baptized in Jurançon wine and had memories of swilling a cup of troussepinette* when sweating in the fields, or the daily ‘beaker of wine’ that was the standard army ration.

  * A form of sloe wine, produced in the Vendée in the region of the Loire.

  For this generation, lunch without a bottle of the local wine was unthinkable. The 30–40 year olds, on the other hand, had only the most basic knowledge of wine, namely that it involved different types of grape, vintage and complicated labelling. They were aware that top-rated French AOC wines carried huge prestige, and so provided an opportunity to show off to bosses and colleagues by ordering the very best. Yet in their eyes, wine was no longer an essential accompaniment to the family’s daily meal, but rather something to drink in significant quantities once a week or so, with friends or colleagues. Finally, for the youngest generation – the hard-wired, social-networking under-30s – wine was almost never consumed outside of family occasions with older people.*

  * Not that this means that alcohol is not consumed within this group, as we shall see in the next chapter.

  Outside a small group of ardent young enthusiasts born into regional wine families, knowledge of wine in France’s Generation Y† was practically non-existent.

  † The term Generation Y is used primarily to refer to the generation born from the 1980s onwards. Sometimes also referred to as the Facebook or Millennial Generation, members of this cohort are typically perceived as increasingly familiar with digital and electronic technology.

  While they appreciated that wine was of enormous national and cultural significance, their prevailing attitude to the libation of Bacchus was one of mystification, of disconnection from an arcane and somewhat sinister Sphinx presiding over a bygone age.

  And so it seems that the Anglo-Saxon myth of the French as a nation of quotidian wine-bibbers applies mainly to an older segment of the population. Across the younger French cohorts, drinking patterns appear to be converging with the Anglo-Saxon norm. For the French wine industry, this state of affairs has been hard to swallow. And the home market is not the only place where beleaguered Gallic winemakers are taking a drubbing. For over thirty-five years, a global war has been raging between Old and New World wines for conquest of the planet’s palate. On 24 May 1976, there took place in the French capital a seminal event that has come to be known as the ‘Judgement of Paris’, in which celebrated wine critics carried out blind-tasting comparisons of Old and New World wines (Chardonnays and red wines). To the surprise of Steven Spurrier, the Francophile British wine merchant who had arranged the tasting, and to the lasting mortification of the French, Californian wines were judged to be the best across the board. The Judgement launched a thousand New World wines onto a market hitherto dominated by the Old. The war of the wine worlds has been raging ever since. The world’s biggest importer of wine is the UK, and while French wines tradit
ionally dominated UK wine imports, by 2012 that list was headed by Australia, followed hot on its heels by Italy,* with France trailing a poor third.50 Although Champagne and the French AOC wines are still going strong, it is the French regional wines that have retreated in the face of the onslaught by the likes of Jacob’s Creek (at the lower end of the market) and Penfolds Grange (at the upper).

  * While Italian wine imports came second to Australia in 2012, Italian wine is the fastest growing wine on the British market. This is partly due to the ‘Pinot Grigio effect’ (Pinot Grigio swiftly replacing Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc as the ‘standard’ white wine), but also to the relentless rise of Prosecco as an alternative to the pricey Champagne.

  Every year, while the vineyards of Europe stagnate, hundreds of hectares of vines spring up in the New World (the most spectacular increases are in Australia and Chile).51 But the battle between Old and New World wines is far more than a matter of simple geography. It is a conceptual battle over what, ultimately, wine actually is. For the French, wine is identified not so much by the type of grape (virtually all red Burgundy wines come from the Pinot Noir grape, and all white Burgundies from the Chardonnay). Rather, wine is intimately bound up with the concept of terroir: the wine produced from this grape, in this vineyard, on this slope, in this subsoil, aged in these barrels, in this cellar, in this particular year. It follows, therefore, that characterizing a wine by grape type alone – say, a Merlot – is strictly meaningless in French terms, as a wine produced from Merlot grapes grown in the Limari Valley in Chile will be a completely different wine from one produced by Merlot grapes in Valeyrac in the Médoc. It is the way in which wine from a particular vineyard gives ‘expression’ to the Merlot grape that matters. It is this reasoning that underlies the unfathomable complexity of French wine labels. There will inevitably be the region (say, Mâcon-Villages), estate (Domaine de Champ Brûlé), producer (Vincent), date and AOC statement, but no obvious reference to the grape variety (which, clearly, you will know already thanks to your intimate knowledge of the wine map of France). In contrast, New World wine labels do not assume a PhD in oenology. Indeed, they jump out at you with the enthusiasm of a waitress in a Californian diner: ‘Hi, I’m Chardonnay from the Blackstone Winery, Monterey County, can I get you a drink?’*

  * The labelling of wines by grape variety rather than vineyard was pioneered by one of the founding fathers of the Napa Valley, Robert Mondavi, and is now followed by most New World wines. It doesn’t tell you much more about the wine, but it is easier to remember.

  The New World winemakers’ technique of prominently identifying particular brands of wine by grape variety has had so great a success that many people believe that, for example, Chardonnay is a wine produced by Jacob’s Creek, not a grape variety of which some of the most classic expressions hail from Burgundy. It is as though the grape variety known as Chardonnay – and consequently the wine produced from it – has been appropriated by certain brands of New World wines. At the same time, Chardonnay is strongly identified by evocative wine labels and advertising slogans with the sunny climes of America, South Africa, or the Antipodes: as the Australian slogan put it, Chardonnay is ‘sunshine in a bottle’.

  The French for their part will swear that New World wines taste different from those of the Old World: big, buxom fruit bombs with artificial enhancements like oak chips – more Pamela Anderson than Emmanuelle Béart. A perennial French complaint against New World wines is their alleged masking of natural flavours with additives, which imposes a fruity, smoky uniformity across the wine spectrum. The man accused of diffusing this monotaste is the American wine critic Robert Parker, whose newsletter, The Wine Advocate, publishes ratings out of 100 for wine (it is said that a positive or negative rating after a Parker tasting can add or subtract up to £5 million from the value of a wine). Infuriated by the complexity and class-ridden structures of the French wine system, Parker set out in the late 1970s as an oenophile Lone Ranger, the only person with the bottle to face the mighty Gallic wine establishment. He once said: ‘What I’ve brought is a democratic view. I don’t give a shit that your family goes back to pre-Revolution and you’ve got more wealth than I could imagine. If this wine’s no good, I’m gonna say so’.52 He also decreed that Penfolds Grange, Australia’s most famous wine, ‘has replaced Bordeaux’s Pétrus as the world’s most exotic and concentrated wine.’ His 100-point rating system for wine was a boon for wealthy clients, who wanted the best but didn’t have time to figure out what that was. The chances are, if a Texan millionaire tells you he has a ‘93 Bordeaux’, he’s talking Parker points, not vintage.*

  * In the 2004 French documentary film Mondovino – a lyrical elegy to small French wine producers and a vitriolic attack against the forces of globalization – Parker is pictured grinning in front of a massive, neon-lit advertisement for Burger King. Mondovino was one of the very few documentary films ever to be nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

  And a new threat to French viticulture is approaching from further afield. The Chinese thirst for French wine, in particular Bordeaux, seems insatiable: China is now the number one buyer of Bordeaux wines.53 However, the Chinese are not content just to drink wines from the Gironde – they seem to want to produce them, too. Over the past five years, around twenty Bordeaux wine châteaux have been bought by the Chinese; and in 2012, ripples were sent through the French wine-making world when a Chinese buyer acquired an ancient estate in Burgundy, the Château de Gevrey-Chambertin, for €8 million. (One of the reasons why the Chinese purchase in Burgundy caused such a storm was because it was some €6 million above the original asking price for the estate, and a consortium of local French winemakers had already unsuccessfully tried to bid to keep the vineyard in the French family.)

  I have never drunk a drop of alcohol in my life. In France! And the French still elected me president.

  NICOLAS SARKOZY, 23RD PRESIDENT OF FRANCE (2007–12)

  What is the future of French wine? At the moment, it would appear to be murky rather than rosé. But it’s promising that the notion of terroir is increasingly taking root around the world, with a return to wines that taste of the sun and soil, as opposed to a chemistry lab. The wine from that family-run château in Bordeaux might be more spit and miss than the identikit throughput from a 40,000-acre estate in the Napa Valley, but at least you can be sure that God (and not some micro-oxygenating manipulator) made the ingredients. But don’t, for goodness’ sake, fall for one of the most time-honoured excuses of the French waiter for a below-par bottle of wine – yes it is corked, and no it’s not the terroir.

  Myth Evaluation: False. French people over 65 drink wine with every meal; French people under 65 prefer Evian, Badoit or fruit juice.

  THE FRENCH DON’T GET DRUNK

  It is not necessary to be drunk in order to be immortal.

  VICTOR HUGO, LES MISÉRABLES (1862)

  ‘An Englishman is a drunkard,’ according to an old Spanish saying. Most Europeans would echo that view. From boozy Brits terrorizing Alpine ski resorts on rowdy stag weekends to the violence of English football hooligans, the image of the Englishman abroad has become synonymous with alcoholic excess. Nor is the association between the English and drunkenness anything new. In the mid-nineteenth century, the French poet Paul Verlaine, arriving in London to scratch a living as a French teacher, recalled the city as a reeling centre of drunken, proselytizing hypocrisy:

  ‘London, black as crows and noisy as ducks, prudish with all the vices in evidence, everlastingly drunk, in spite of ludicrous laws about drunkenness, immense, though it is really in essence just a collection of scandal-mongering boroughs, vying with each other, ugly and flat, without any monuments except interminable docks.’54

  THE ART OF DRINKING WITHOUT GETTING DRUNK (skip)

  Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) was a leading French gastronome and food writer. His masterpiece, La Physiologie du goût (‘The Physiology of Taste’), a collection of essays and bon-mots relating
to the pleasures of the table, has been continuously in print since 1825 (see here), and has become a classic of gastronomic literature. Brillat-Savarin was a well-travelled man, with idiosyncratic views on the peoples he visited. He dismissed the Swiss as ‘eminently civilized, but fools because they have no time for pleasure’. Other nations fared even worse: he thought the English were ‘snobs with no appreciation for the finer things in life’, and found the Americans to be ‘charming barbarians’.

  Together with Alexandre Grimod de la Reynière, Brillat-Savarin is credited with founding the genre of the food essay. A character featured in the Physiologie is the bibulous General Bisson, who like the mythical Frenchman appears to imbibe great quantities of wine, without ever actually showing signs of inebriation:

  ‘General Bisson... drank eight bottles of wine at dinner every day, and... never appeared the worse for it. He had a glass larger than usual and emptied it oftener. He did not care for that though, for after having swallowed six ounces of fluids he could jest and give his orders as if he had only swallowed a thimbleful.’

  Naturally, the French pride themselves on not getting drunk in the way the English do. The French, so the saying goes (and as they themselves like to believe), drink in a civilized fashion, en famille at lunch and at dinner. They do not binge-drink on a Friday night in pubs and clubs and end up vomiting on the pavement, like the British or the Irish. As the French philosopher Roland Barthes remarked, ever-observant until he was knocked down by a laundry van in the streets of Paris: ‘Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philtre, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.’55