The Purple Harvest Comes In

THE morning fog lifted. All along the Cote d'Or, the gorgeous Golden Slope of vineyards that tints eastern France for 30 miles, the autumn sun beamed warm rays on the deserted towns. Except for a pair of black-clad grandmothers gossiping on the cobblestones and a couple of overalled, rubber-booted winegrowers closing a deal over a jug of Burgundy in the Cafe de la Cote d'Or, everybody in Nuits-St. Georges (pop. 3,600)-men, women and children, the schoolmaster and even the cure-was out harvesting the new vintage in the heart of France's Burgundy.

"To speak of Burgundy," say the French, "is to speak of wine." The bulk of Burgundy's wine flows to the tables of Lyon, Paris and the world from the high-yielding southern slopes of Beaujolais. But the best of Burgundy, the lordly, full-bodied, velvet reds that made Rabelais shout "How good of God to give us of this juice!", the wines that George Meredith called "the best that man can drink," come only from a 12,000-acre belt of tiny plots stretching in either direction from Nuits-St. Georges along the Golden Slope.

There last week, as fast as they could fill their boat-shaped baskets with the honeycombs of tiny black Pinot grapes, the harvesters spilled them into mule-drawn carts. At Montrachet -whose wine, said Dumas, "ought to be drunk kneeling, with head bared"-around Beaune, at Meursault, Romanee-Conti, Vougeot and Gevrey-Chambertin-each hillside as famous in France as any of Napoleon's battlefields, it was the same. Off went the grapes, the best first, to be pressed in cellars at the foot of each small field. From the vats within these reeking temples of Bacchus rose the sibilance of juice astir in natural ferment. Once again began the special miracle which the mysteries of soil, sun, slopes and ancestral skills have annually brought to pass in Burgundy since the Romans first planted grapes on the Golden Slope. Andre Noblet, red-faced cellar-master of the Romanee-Conti vineyards, whose 4 1/2 acres produce the world's most prized red wine ($11.57 a bottle for the 1953), sniffed, sampled and thanked heaven for at least three weeks of sunshine after the coldest summer in decades. Said Andre: "1956 is likely to be a small year-but almost half the wine's quality is in the work, and we shall nurse ours as we would our children."

Of the finest wines, produced from severely pruned vines, there can never be great quantities. The sad fact was, however, that a vine-killing winter and a rainy, grape-thwarting summer had turned 1956 into a bad year for all western Europe's winegrowers-a disastrous one for Bordeaux and West Germany, a poor one in both quantity and quality for Burgundy. The government has 'already given Burgundy producers permission to strengthen some of their poorer grades by chaptalization. a doctoring process devised by one Jean Chaptal for adding sugar during fermentation to build up a wine's alcoholic content.

Out of the Myths. Like almost everything else about this rich old province, the vines of Burgundy are rooted deep in the past. It is a past rich in ducal derring-do, chivalry, pomp and power. No part of France holds more monuments from its past than Burgundy, but Burgundians today demonstrate little pride of past or place. Unlike other French provinces, such as Brittany and Provence, modern Burgundy has no fast boundaries, no ironclad geography. Even inhabitants disagree as to where boundaries are. who are Burgundians. Those in Beaujolais prefer to call themselves Caladois; the people of Bellegarde insist that they belong to the Jura rather than Burgundy; the men of Beaune and Dijon, the two best known communities of the province, scornfully insist that only those who live in the Cote-d'Or department rate as "real" Burgundians. Roughly, though, the province measures some 9,000 sq. mi., is the home of some 1,250,000 people-5% of France in area. 3% in population.

Industrially, Burgundy is not much (though its Schneider steel works at Le Creusot are one of the nation's largest, and its plastic plants around Bellegarde are a major industry). Its rolling green countryside is dedicated chiefly to the good life. The wines its 95,570 registered producers make are chiefly perfected to wash down good food. Its farmers turn out France's best beef (boeuf du Charolais), fanciest chickens (poulets de Bresse), and butter, cheese, fish, snails of renown. Modern Burgundy may have given France no great ministers or marshals, but it produced the country's most famous gourmet. Brillat-Savarin, born, fittingly enough, in the town of Belley. Without extremes of poverty or wealth, it is one part of France plagued neither by an alarmingly depopulated countryside nor by a burgeoning industrial proletariat. It elects 24 of France's 627 parliamentary Deputies. Eleven of them are independent peasants and Conservatives, seven Socialists, six Communists.

Truth is. not much has changed since Stendhal, touring the region in 1837, found Burgundy's one great merit: "Nobody talks politics here, a quarrelsome subject. Everybody at table is occupied in comparing the qualities and charms of different wines." Last week some descendant of the men Stendhal chatted with savored a sample just drawn from a cask of Romanee-Conti 1954, and said: "This is just beginning to talk." Moving deeper into the cellar, he tried a 1949, spoke gravely of its "masculinite," then groped on for another bottle. Worldly worries-elections, Algeria, the Suez crisis, the H-bomb-seemed far. far away.

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