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 ?Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé? and in a few short weeks, over seven million bottles are sold and drunk. Although often scorned by the wine world?s snob set, the annual delivery of each year?s new Beaujolais wine brings a welcome ray of sunshine to a morose November from New York to Tokyo. The surprising Cinderella tale behind the success of Beaujolais Nouveau captures not just the story of a wine but also the history of a fascinating region. At the heart of this fairy tale is the peasant wine grower named Georges Duboeuf, whose rise as the undisputed king of Beaujolais reads like a combination of suspenseful biography and luscious armchair travel.

I?ll Drink to That transports us to the unique corner of France where medieval history still echoes and where the smallholder peasants who made Beaujolais wines on their farms battled against the contempt of the entrenched Burgundy and Bordeaux establishment. With two bottles of wine in his bike?s saddlebag, young Duboeuf set out to revolutionize the stodgy wine business, becoming the richest and most famous individual wine dealer in France. But this is more than one man?s success story. As The Perfectionist used Bernard Loiseau to tell the layered history of French haute cuisine, here Chelminski uses Duboeuf?s story to paint the portrait of the often endearing, sometimes maddening but always interesting inhabitants of a little-known corner of France, offering at the same time a witty, panoramic view of the history of French winemaking.

Customer Review: 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 Mâcon 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.

Dubouef comes from a family that lived in the Mâconnais for centuries, and started out very small, and as an incredibly hard worker, not only broke the old merchant class, but became the leading merchant in Beaujolais -- it is a mark of great distinction for a grower when his wines are accepted to carry his brand.

He now controls more than 10 per cent of the wine produced in the region, with considerable interests outside it. Duboeuf originally studied physical education in Paris, returning to Pouilly-Fuissé in 1953. He started selling to restaurants in the region, and subsequently became a contract bottler.

As Jancis Robinson writes: "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 Romanèche-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 Mâconnais, 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 does an excellent job of bringing Dubouef to life in these pages, and and he focuses on Beaujolais nouveau -- Dubouef didn't invent it, but Dubouef certainly promoted it effectively. (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.")

Chelminski does a very good job of describing the wines generally, especially the 2006 vintage, and these sections will help me taste Beaujolais with more understanding in the future.

I found the book persuasive and compelling on the region and on how to approach tasting the wines from the region. However, Chelminski writes that he has been a very good friend of Dubouef for many years, and that raises some doubts about his objectivity. Nonetheless, the biographical part of the book makes a very good read despite my doubts.

All in all, this is an excellent book about a region that many winelovers know very little about.

Customer Review: 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

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