Their sons and daughters, obliged to help with the pruning and picking, would often choose to become pharmacists and engineers rather than work in all weather for such uncertain rewards and so modest a life. But their sons and daughters, sometimes raised in cities, loved the summers they spent in their grandparents’ vineyards, and as the wine—growers of the hour have taken their place with the chefs du moment on the covers of magazines, they now see a life with vines as stylish and rather dashing. So when one generation, comfortably settled well away from the tribulations of agriculture, shows little interest in taking over the family vineyard, the next is frequently keen to take its place. Educated—usually they’ve had professional, technical, or business training—and often with experience in sales or administration, they know a thing or two about marketing and raising capital. Twenty, or even 15, years ago, there would have been little in a new and as yet unknown appellation like Saint-Véran to hold the imagination of ambitious young men and women, let alone draw them back from the opportunities of Paris and Lyon. But the modem and fax machine have redrawn the parameters of the winegrowers’ world and allowed them to be masters of their own fate.
Gilles Morat, now a Saint-Véran grower, left his village when he was 20 to follow a career in electronics. Yet when his father retired several years ago, he seized the chance to return. “I was successful in my work,” he told me, “and I enjoyed it. But when my second child was born, I realized I was spending too much time away from my family, constantly on the road, constantly under pressure. I never thought I would want to come back to take on my father’s vineyard. But I am now so totally engrossed in it, it’s as if the 15 years of my other life hadn’t happened.”
When he first returned, Morat spent a year at the lycée viticole of Davayé mastering the theory of what his father had simply absorbed while working at his own father’s side. It was essential for Morat to go back to school: A diploma of professional competence or its equivalent is a requirement in France to qualify for the generous assistance provided to young farmers by the state, including the guarantees for low-interest loans to reequip outdated cellars and to extend holdings if and when land is available. These days a good third of the student body at the Davayé lycée—a hundred or more—are men and women with professional qualifications in other fields taking special courses in enology and viticulture while getting involved in properties for which they had neither intended nor expected to assume responsibility.
It’s a sign of the dramatic changes at Saint-Véran. Thirty years ago the growers had no direct access to the market. The wine they produced—already by that time most of it white—was sold in bulk at the going rate for Mâcon Blanc. It disappeared into the blends of local négociants, so the quality and character were of little account. The grower was paid on the basis of volume and alcohol degree; therefore, every experiment, development, and change in the vineyards in the decades after World War II had but one objective: to increase yields. It was the establishment of the Saint-Véran appellation that turned things around by giving the wine an identity, a name by which its quality could be recognized and remembered. The growers invested in replacing old equipment and in replanting.
“We reverted with passion to the traditional methods of our grandfathers, as if they were something new and extraordinary,” Jean-Luc Terrier of the Domaine des Deux Roches told me. “Here we are, making our own compost again instead of using chemical fertilizers. And far from boosting yields, we prune severely and then go out into the vineyards again in summer to thin the fruit for perfect ripeness and better quality. We’ve found our way back to what had worked for us before. It has been our salvation.”
Gilles Morat was able to add a bit of land to his father’s holding and has a sharecropping arrangement on a few acres more. As yet, there’s very little space for barrels in his winery—though equipped with as much polished steel as a dairy, it’s not much bigger than a suburban garage. But his tank-fermented wine, long and supple, starts with an enticing burst of fruit on nose and palate that defies criticism. Though Morat is constrained by his circumstances, there are Saint-Véran growers who quite deliberately use no wood at all.
Richard Martin of the Domaine de la Croix Senaillet, for example, ferments his grapes in separate lots in small, enamel-lined tanks and never puts them into barrels. He pointed at the crumbled mass of limestone in his vineyard and said, “That’s what makes our wines smell and taste of fruit and flowers. Saint-Véran is not just a superior Mâcon or a lesser Pouilly-Fuissé. It has a character of its own. My job is to preserve it.
“When friends my age took over family properties where the wine had always been made in tank,” he said, “many of them promptly introduced barrels. I did the opposite. My father had used barrels, even though he sold most of his wine in bulk. I got rid of all the wood. I sell 80 to 90 percent of my production in bottle, and I want my wine to show as much fruit and freshness as possible.”
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