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Reims, it is always to the Beaujolais hills that I return when I grow weary of the splendors of our globalized iPod Age and yearn for a less self-important, less technologically correct form of human intercourse. Am I the only one who feels a need to flee the artifice of it all and seek out an earlier, simpler time when my cell phone didn’t communicate with my refrigerator, and where I could enjoy a glass of wine without being held to a doctoral discourse? Whatever the case, it is the land of the Beaujolais that constitutes my best cure for the blues. You get your transcendence where you can find it.
    Because there is so much more to Beaujolais than just the wine. To begin with, the country itself is soothingly, heart-stoppingly beautiful, far more so than Burgundy, Bordeaux or the Champagne area. All three of these regions make very fine wines, but their landscape and architecture are as boring as flat Perrier water for the most part. The Beaujolais is in glorious, gorgeous contrast to this. It is what a storybook illustration would look like if you sought to depict ideal wine country: a dramatic collection of steep hillsides springing up from the plain and shouldering against one another, forested when the Romans arrived but covered today in an undulant carpet of vines. At the high ground to the west in the direction of Roanne and the Loire is the “Green Beaujolais,” a land of cow and sheep pastures, deeply carved escarpments, canyons and pine forests that suddenly give way to a vine-friendly, mineral-rich subsoil of granite, gneiss, clay and limestone, where the vines grow in perfect geometric formation, as neat as cabbages in a curate’s garden. Little ribbons of roads—they keep them narrow, lest they eat up too much valuable vine-growing space—wind around the hillsides like seams on a baseball, then dip down into the shaded vales where the villages sit, clustered around the inevitable church steeple.
    The villages themselves are masterpieces of rural architecture. In jewels like Bully and Oingt in the southern Pierres Dorées (golden stone) area, the houses are positively aglow with an ochre effulgence, thanks to the iron oxide permeating the locally quarried limestone. Farther north, in the equally beautiful white wine country around Leynes, the building stone reflects the veined, pinkish hue of potter’s clay. Between these two extremes, on the hills where the great shiftings of the Tertiary Period littered the ground with crushed granite, the wine is the best and the houses have a bluish tint—in the Beaujolais, you can read the composition of the soil from the facades of the buildings. Nothing is better than this architectural tagging to illustrate the concept of the terroir, the localized pockets of rock, soil and minerals distributed throughout the countryside. People built with the materials they took from the ground where they had settled, and it is this ground, this terroir , that determines the character of the local wines. A Beaujolais-Villages is different from a simple Beaujolais, and a Morgon from a Saint-Amour for the same reason that a Puligny-Montrachet differs from a Bâtard-Montrachet up in Burgundy: the composition of the soil—the terroir— is different, and whatever tricks of vinification are used, it is always the terroir that shines through in the bouquet and the taste of the finished product.
    “The poorer the soil, the richer the wine,” vignerons like to say, and it’s not just a casual phrase. Burgundy’s most divine white wines, the Montrachet family, come from a terroir whose name means “a place where nothing grows.” Wine grapes can’t deliver the goods in the rich, creamy loam that grains love, but give them a pauper’s bed of rocky, pebbly, flinty or even sandy soil, and their clever rootlets will insinuate themselves down through the tiniest cracks and fissures to suck mineral nourishment from the niggardly stone and send it up to headquarters, where the grapes are