I'll Drink to That : Beaujolais and the French Peasant Who Made It the World's Most Popular Wine

by Rudolph Chelminski

The remarkable saga of the wine and people of Beaujolais and Georges Duboeuf, the peasant lad who brought both world recognition. Every third week of November, wine shops around the world announce aLe Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivA(c)a and in a few short weeks, over seven million bottles are sold and drunk. Although often scorned by the wine worldas snob set, the annual delivery of each yearas new Beaujolais wine brings a welcome ray of sunshine to...

Customer Reviews

Excellent book

This is a very well written book about the history of beaujolais wine country in France, the peasants who planted the gamay grapes and the man who made the wine famous throughout the world, Georges Dubouef. Highly recommend this book, and the Beaujolais wine.

Revealing alot about a little known wine area

The Beaujolais is both a wine and a place, a little rectangle of vineyard land roughly between the cities of Macon and Lyon, in central France. The old capital of this winemaking area is the town of Beaujeu, and le Beaujolais signifies both the land lying around Beaujeu and the wine that's made there. Le Beaujolais is one of the most beautiful wine regions in the world, rivaled in France only by parts of Alsace, some slopes on the Rhine and bits of the southern coast. The people are funny and welcoming and artisan winemakers in the best sense of the phrase -- altogether a great place to visit for any wine lover. Rudolph Chelminski hasn't written a travel book, exactly, but this book would certainly provide an excellent guide for a winelover visiting this beautiful area. He's visited there for 30 years and his love shines through: "The Beaujolais is like a Hollywood set for an ideal vineyard region." He traces the history of the area, and is especially good on the history since 1945 when the area went from an Appalachian like back water to a sort of middle class respectability. Georges Dubouef was a major factor in breaking the merchants' cartel that kept the growers and winemakers poor; the old socio-economic structure has been significantly changed over that period of time, and Chelminski describes the changes with precision and passion. As Jancis Robinson writes in The Oxford Companion to Wine: "The Beaujolais boom, led by the Beaujolais nouveau craze, is in no small part due to Duboeuf, who pioneered temperature control, stainless steel, and early bottling, leading to a reliable, particularly fruity style of wine. He also encouraged domaine bottling, under the influence of Alexis Lichine, who helped him set up in business. In the 1990s, he worked with 20 co-operatives and over 400 growers, and virtually owned the village of Romaneche-Thorins. His company has an annual production of 24 million bottles, and although the famous floral Duboeuf label goes on bottles containing many styles of wine, it is Beaujolais, and white Maconnais, for which he is best known. More than 4.5 million bottles of his production each year are Beaujolais Nouveau alone. Indeed, the Duboeuf name appears on the label of more than 15 per cent of all the Beaujolais sold anywhere." Chelminski puts down the popularity of the wine in France to the lack of Thanksgiving in France; it's a long, cold slog from the end of summer vacation until Christmas, and "the arrival of the new wine in mid-November is like a little burst of sunshine." All in all, this is an excellent book about a region that many winelovers know very little about. Robert C. Ross 2007 2008

As refreshing a book as a coupe of le nouveau!

Do you want to tell the difference between a wine lover and a wine snob? Hand them a glass of a cru Beaujolais and don't tell them what they're drinking until after they've had a few sips. This book is for the wine lovers: it tells the story of one of the most charming and beautiful corners of the world, the land of the hills of Beaujolais. It tells of the grapes and the grape growers, the wine makers and the negociants, the nobility and the farmers. It is an honest look into the daily life of the peasants of France and the land that they worked, and worked so hard. We learn how little their lives changed over the centuries, even in the years after the second world war. Most importantly, this book tells the story of a driven, determined young man, Georges Duboeuf, who changed the way that wines were bought and sold and who brought the wines of Beaujolais to the world. More than anyone else, he brought wealth, modernity and respect to Beaujolais. This book will dispel many commonly held misconceptions about the wines of Beaujolais, and will give you a greater appreciation for the small miracle that you hold in your hand every time you take a drink of wine. I will be giving copies of this book to several of my wine loving friends this Christmas, and I recommend it for your bookshelf. Darrin Siegfried Mâitre Compagnon Les Compagnons du Beaujolais I'll Drink to That: Beaujolais and the French Peasant Who Made It the World's Most Popular Wine http://www.compagnonsdubeaujolaisny.com/index.htm