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basking in the sun. Another favorite maxim speaks the same truth: to make the best wine, the vine has to suffer. So does the winemaker: Beaujolais old-timers still remember the days when their fathers and grandfathers had recourse to blasting powder for loosening up the stony ground to plant vines where their picks couldn’t penetrate.
    It was with this kind of heads-down, single-minded labor that generation upon generation of peasants turned the angular hills of the Beaujolais into the beautifully tended garden that the area is today. Set yourself up on high ground anywhere in the region and you are greeted by the same ocean of green: terrestrial wave upon wave of vine-planted hillsides, many of them so steep that no tractor could possibly work there, and where a man can just barely stand erect to tend the plants by hand.
    The best viewpoint, though, is from the crest of Mont Genas, towering above the blessed town of Fleurie. Twice blessed: first by the wonderfully subtle wine produced there, and then again by the Madonna whose statue stands benevolently over the chapel that the locals built at the summit of Mont Genas in 1857 to beg divine protection for their vines against the violent flash storms and hailstones that the physiognomy of the Beaujolais seems to encourage. Due east, yonder far past the Saône, an alert eye can make out Mont Blanc’s white flank, but closer to hand, down in the village, some more mundane wonders of the Beaujolais await the interested visitor. There is the municipal water tower that Marguerite Chabert filled with wine in 1960; there is the charcuterie (pork butcher’s shop) founded by her father, François, who, upon returning from the trenches of World War I, invented the andouillette Beaujolaise as we know it today, the very one that I wolfed down in Juliénas on that memorable night in the early seventies when I got my comeuppance at Château de la Chaize; and there is Le Cep, for my book—that is to say right here, where I’m in control of things—one of the finest restaurants anyone could hope to discover, where Chantal Chagny (bless her, too, while we’re at it) stubbornly continues to fly in the face of fashion by serving the marvelous classics of French country cooking with nary a kiwi, a drop of coconut milk or a dash of wasabi.
    The Beaujolais has a long tradition of breeding strong women, and both Marguerite and Chantal could be statufied right now as exemplars of that population’s character: as strong-willed and uncompromising as they are singular. Marguerite would be somewhat stony up there on her pedestal, because she is long gone now, but her old friend, the (sixtyish) Chantal, is as present and redoubtable as ever in the Le Cep’s dining room, at the cash desk and behind every cook, commis and chef de partie in her kitchen, making sure that the guys do it her way, and do it right.
    Chantal it was who made history by becoming the first chef to voluntarily demote herself in the Michelin, the holy of holies among French restaurant guides. She had opened her little bistro in 1969, single-handedly cooking, serving and washing the dishes for a ridiculously cheap menu (the equivalent of $2) that included appetizer, main course, cheese and dessert. She did it so well that in 1973 Michelin accorded her a star. After she brought in Gérard Cortembert, a talented young chef who became her companion, a second star arrived in due course, and the reputation of Le Cep went worldwide. Unhappily, Cortembert’s heart gave out in 1990, and Chantal was faced with the choice of maintaining his sophisticated menu or returning to the simpler home-style regional cooking that she had practiced when she was alone.
    Dressed in the black widow’s weeds that she has worn ever since Cortembert’s death, she went to Paris, strode into Michelin’s inner sanctum behind the Invalides and collared Bernard Naegellen, the guide’s all-powerful boss. I’m changing my cooking style, she said, in