Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (27 page)

Modern treatments including pesticides and ultra-heat-treating of soil had failed to kill phylloxera to someone at the mayort said., which still thrived. That explained the continuing need to use American rootstock. Nature has equipped the wild American vine with a flavor phylloxera abhors.

The view from the ridge of Burgundy’s great rolling vineyards and the Saône Valley east of them filled me with the irrational desire to fly. Flight would’ve been the natural reaction of locals afflicted by phylloxera, whose female offspring in alternating generations sprouted wings and flew from vine to vine before going to ground, where they sapped the grapevine roots. I realized, standing at the Virgin’s feet, that a brief history of phylloxera would have to include more than the pest’s scientific identity card. It would beg a description of the insect’s eating habits and of the collateral damage it had done. Did phylloxera prefer Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, the main grape varieties of Burgundy? Or did it, as many authorities seemed to think, have a proclivity for Syrah, Grenache, and the other vines of the Rhône Valley? Perhaps it found the Cabernets and Merlot of the Bordelais region even more attractive?

Nowhere had the question of varietal preference been answered definitively. With self-lacerating satisfaction, every winegrowing community in Europe seemed to proclaim itself the most devastated of all, its vines the pest’s favorite. Only a handful of isolated, undistinguished areas with sandy or volcanic soil had been spared, and were therefore unable to join in the lament.

Naturally there was much more to phylloxera than biology. The wrecking of Europe’s vineyards ruined economies and spurred mass population shifts, as bankrupt peasants, wine wholesalers, and retailers packed their corkscrews and tramped to the cities. Whole swaths of southwestern France were de-vined and replanted with truffle-bearing oak trees, for instance. That had given rise to an abundance of melanosporum fungi, alias black Périgord truffles, truffles that global warming and sudden drought were now destroying. Cattle took over vineyards in other areas, like the Charolais region of southern Burgundy, which we’d be crossing in a week or so. Everywhere vines grew, superstition triumphed and cast-iron Virgin Mary statues like this one appeared, heavenly guardians against the aphid. A pestilence-driven Catholic Revival spread on the insect’s wings. Devotional pilgrimages to blue-and-white Madonnas perched among the vines had become obligatory, or so claimed the history books I’d read.

I looked up again. On the base of the rusty Virgin could be read the words “Forty-day indulgence for all who invoke the image of Mary.”

“Hail,” I said, removing my billed cap. “I’m not sure what the effect will be, since you’re programmed to fight aphids, but if you’re out there, Mary, please do something about my knees and eyes and my wife’s tooth, and help bring peace to the world while you’re at it.”

Alison put her camera away. “It only works if you believe.”

“Does it?”

“That’s what’s said. The leap of faith. Intentionality. It’s like a placebo effect.”

“Tell phylloxera.”

As we trudged south on the ridge through musty boxwood, pine, and sweet-smelling wild plum, following yet another ancient, rutted road, I couldn’t help wondering what the phylloxera pilgrims wore. Did they have heavy leather boots and woolen capes, three-cornered hats, breeches and gaiters? Did they carry long staffs to steady themselves and ward off wolves? I tried to imagine what it was like walking cross-country back then, in the 1800s, without good maps and signage, let alone caf while studying Political Science at 9HChés, hotels, and B&Bs. In open countryside, phylloxera pilgrims found their way forward from crossroads to crossroads, because each was marked by a crucifix visible from afar. Or they navigated from steeple to village steeple. There were no asphalted roads, a good thing. I now knew from experience that for a hiker’s knees and feet, surfaces of asphalt, cement, and stone were tremendously tiring. Even with the cushioned, rubber-soled boots I was wearing, my knees and back had been killing me, ever since I’d slipped in the Gorges de la Canche. But I dared not complain. We had hundreds of miles to go.

“If Mary won’t help, maybe Marianne will,” I said. “Do you think Napoléon called a conclave or a revolutionary council meeting to work out how to transfer the Virgin Mary’s powers to Marianne?”

“You’re being sardonic.”

“I’m joking,” I said, “sort of.”

It’s a fact, contested by some, that Marianne is the secular reinterpretation of the Virgin Mary. But this was no joking matter for most French, who were either Catholic and therefore insulted by what amounted to blasphemy, or were Bonapartists and therefore insulted for having their symbol associated with Catholicism.

With this no-win series of thoughts in mind, I took notice of our path and the rocky, eroded bluffs underfoot. The origin of the term
côte
had suddenly become clear. It was the French bastardization of
costa
, “coast,” which in Latin and Italian means both rib and coastline. The escarpments of the Côte de Beaune and the land at their base were like a ribbed coastline, an ideal terrain for grape-growing and little else. Out of the lunar wilderness sprouted patchy fields of bright green grain. We paused to run our eyes over the landscape and wonder why anyone was trying to grow wheat here. In answer, the familiar word sprang to mind.

“Subsidies,” Alison said before I could.

“Rock farms. No yield. The government pays. It’s a boondoggle for winemakers no longer able to compete.”

“There goes the rest of my molar,” she groaned, cradling her jaw and extracting a hunk of ivory.

I braced myself for the ache that would soon follow us and clobber her.

About an hour later, we each did a double-take while entering Auxey-Duresses. It looked surprisingly like Pommard and Volnay, and we worried for a moment that we’d returned on our tracks. But no: here was a café-restaurant called La Cremaillère on the main highway. An affable woman carrying a tray strode back and forth between the smoky dining room and the quiet bar area where we sat, sipping our espressos.

“A dentist?” she asked. She paused to shake her head. It was as if I’d asked to see a Martian. “You’ll have to go back to Beaune,” she said. “No dentists left around here.” She handed us the telephone book and a cordless phone and, with a nod and grunt, expressed sympathy for Alison’s bad luck. She also seemed to want to communicate to us the central tragedy of post-phylloxera village life, by defining the meaning of
désertification
. As she spoke the word, the title of that celebrated 1940s book on dessicated rural France sprang to mind,
Paris et le désert francais
.

It was Saturday, and by now afternoon. Unsurprisingly, half a dozen attempts failed to raise a dentist in the villages on our path. We thanked the waitress, paid up and stepped onto Auxey-Duresses’ main street. “ to someone at the mayort said.Back to Beaune?” I asked. Alison shook her head. “Onward!”

POLISH SNAILS AND LEAPING RATS

Meursault is easy to pronounce as long as you don’t look at the way it’s spelled. Happily, the chalky white town doesn’t look the way the name sounds. Too robust and sprawling to be a village, its long, dusty main street led us into a vaguely triangular main square where a fountain splashed. Over one side of the square towered the town hall, which appeared to have been grafted onto a medieval tower, no doubt rebuilt by Viollet-le-Duc in the mid-1800s. Near it, soaring into the sky was the dunce-cap belfry of an outsized church, by the look of it, late do-it-yourself Gothic many times remodeled. Specialty food shops, a pharmacy, bakery, restaurants, and hotels completed the picture puzzle. Visitors animated the outdoor terrace of l’Hôtel du Centre, our overnight address. After unharnessing ourselves and dusting each other down, we sat in the sun and waited. And waited. Refreshments proved long in coming. We had enough time to dry our sweaty garments in the breeze and read up on local history.

Alison had unearthed a guidebook in the hotel lobby. She cleared her parched throat. The town hall had been erected in 1337, she informed me. The church was from the 1480s onward. But Meursault was older. The town straddles the pre-Gallic, Gallic, and Roman salt and tin roads from the Saône Valley to Bibracte. We were seated in the center of what had been an Aedui stronghold, upgraded to a Roman encampment during the Empire, and reconfigured in Late Antiquity by monks and feudal lords.

By the time the hotel’s only waiter had hobbled over, taken our order, and returned with tepid beverages, Alison—apparently unfazed by toothache—had paced us through several thousand years of history. According to the menu propped up on our table, the hotel’s owners were named Xavier and Martine Foret. Monsieur Foret slid his brush-over aside and brightened when we told him we were overnight guests and had also reserved dinner. Forty years of waiting tables, greeting, accounting, stepping, fetching, and smiling had clearly taken their toll. Like most proud Frenchmen, Foret’s facial muscles were easily strained.

“You ask me why it is called Meursault?” Foret repeated my question at considerable volume. Either I was an idiot or ignorant, for everyone knew that Meursault was derived from a corruption of “rat” and “leap”—
muris saltus
. “In Latin, of course,” he added.

“Of course,” I said.

“The Rat’s Leap—
le saut du rat
—is what we call the geological cleavage between the Côte de Beaune up there and the land of Meursault over here.” He waved.

“Thank you for the clarification,” I said. “I’ll refrain from asking you for the etymology of Puligny-Montrachet. And I’ll wrestle to the floor anyone who tells me that
murus altus
actually means ‘high wall’ in Latin, or points out that
saltus
also means forested slope or woodsy pastureland. And of course I’ll also happily duel with those who tell me that there are several other variations on the theme of ‘Meursault’ in parts of the country with a wholly different geological configuration.”

“Smart-alec,” Alison said, as Foret retreated, scowling. “Just because you studied Latin.”

I pointed to the guidebook. “Read that. Are we men, or parrots? Don’t answer.”

Our thirst slaked, we glanced to someone at the mayort said. at the clock on the belfry and realized there were nearly three hours to wait until dinner. Half that time disappeared between showers and naps, leaving us approximately ninety minutes to walk a few more miles. With vespers tolling, it seemed obvious where Alison would head first. I caught up with her among the pews. Candles flickered and sun streamed down through bull’s-eye windows. I recalled the figure fifty-seven meters—about 180 feet—for the belfry’s height. The nave was less uplifting, and seemed constituted by cellars joined together and held up by Gothic arches. The builders had perhaps learned their trade in the winery business.

Pleasantly tired, I leaned my forehead on the waxed rail of a wooden pew and tried to think great thoughts. My eyes would not stay shut, however. I’d noticed half a dozen family names written with a felt pen on signs propped on the pews around us, names such as Patriarche, DeSousa, Rossignol, Simonin, Gente, and Capella. They didn’t sound much like Aedui names. More likely, their owners had come north from Rome and other winegrowing parts of the Empire those many centuries ago, when an amphora bought you a strong Gallic slave.

High walls of bleached limestone ran into the vineyards south of the church. As we explored them on our stroll, Alison reminded me that local grapegrowers had been unearthing pottery and burial monuments here for many years. Some of the vineyards we peered into seemed like walled gardens, the pale stones radiating the warmth of the afternoon sun. Several of the more prized white wines of the world came from here, but the fact seemed less daunting than I’d anticipated. Perhaps our morning’s walk through so many prime vineyards had been a salutory reminder that we were, after all, talking about dirt, vines, and fermented fruit juice. “Bone white,” I murmured, recalling a ditty I’d read in a wine encyclopedia once upon a time. “Bone as in Beaune, white as in white wine,” I explained. “The best whites come from the Côte de Beaune. Dark as night. Nuit’s delight.
Nuit
means night, right? So the best reds come from the Côte de Nuits. Something like that.”

“Why do you bother to remember such things?”

In answer, I pushed open the door to the Hôtel du Centre’s dining room and shrugged. “Words pester me, like phylloxera. I suppose you’d rather I memorized Nietzsche?”

This was not a gratuitous remark. The Nietzschean eternal return seemed less about spiraling repetitions of history than food. Nietzsche also said, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” At table again, armed with clamps and slender two-pronged forks, we waited for the snails to arrive. “It does take a while to herd them from the kitchen,” I quipped. The dining room was filled with cheerful, rotund, middle-aged Germans and Britons. They drank beer, cappuccino, and wine with seeming indifference to the order or pairing of drink and food, and several roared with beery laughter.

Fully fleshed and with a pinkish complexion, a young woman named Aurélie introduced herself, smiling wide around plump eyes as she served our escargots in the shell. They bobbed in butter, flecked with golden chunks of sautéed garlic. “Dozens,” I said. “No wonder it took so long.”

“Dozens and dozens,” Aurélie teased. By her estimation, she served seven hundred snails each week. I paused before digging in. The escargot is the symbol of Burgundy, and worthy of respect. Seven hundred per week made 36,400 snails per year at the Hôtel du Centre, I calculated. Multiply that by the hundreds of restaurants in Burgundy—the tens of thousands in France?mime=image/jpg" class="svg1" alt="image"/>dCh—and you reached numbers even Google would have trouble turning into advertising revenue. What chance did a snail stand? Much footwork would be needed to survive. If you worked into the equation factors such as death and injury due to chemical poisoning and climate change—snails need constant moisture, and recent droughts were decimating them—the results weren’t hard to guess.