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essence—no more complications, no more fancy silverware or china, no more truffles, no more lobster. From now on I’m doing my food— Beaujolais food—so knock me back down to one star in your guide. Bemused and amused, Naegellen shrugged, complied and congratulated her on preserving an endangered national patrimony. Far from losing her customers, Chantal’s turnabout made Le Cep even more famous, and it is now one of France’s most prosperous one-star restaurants, as acclaimed abroad as it is within the country. About half of Chantal’s customers are foreign gourmets who trek to Fleurie in search of the honest rural cooking that is fast disappearing from menus everywhere, in favor of the internationalist fusion style of the currently fashionable Mishmash Cuisine. Chantal pushes her gastronomic audacity to the point of serving coq au vin and even, upon occasion, boeuf bourguignon , if you can imagine anything as démodé as that, along with consecrated regional specialties like sautéed frogs’ legs, genuine Burgundy snails in the shell with butter, parsley and chopped (not crushed) garlic, roast squab, gratin dauphinois and Charolais steak with a potent red wine sauce whose punch she sweetens and attenuates by incorporating an unctuous puree of sweet onions. On the plate, it is about as close to perfection as our mortal condition allows.
    Marguerite Chabert wasn’t one to chop garlic or cook onions. Her thing was just Fleurie—the red wine of Fleurie. In 1946 she became the first and only female ever elected president of a French cave coopérative , one of the winemakers’ co-ops that are particularly active in the Beaujolais, where eighteen of them produce some 30 percent of the region’s wine. A tall, flamboyant, tomboy bachelor lady who lived on the rue des Vendanges (Harvest Street) next to the church, Marguerite dominated the town with her extravagant hats and the overpowering personality of a born persuader. While her brother ran the family charcuterie where papa had invented the famous andouillette, it was she who took over the usually male roles of managing both Fleurie’s co-op and the twenty acres of vines that the Chaberts held in vigneronnage. Joshing, chivvying and backslapping every politician, administrator, journalist or potential buyer who could possibly do some good for the town and its vignerons, she reigned over a nearly continuous economic boom until her death in 1992.
    But it was in 1960 that she had her finest hour. It had been a strange year for the Beaujolais. It rained and rained and rained, swelling the grapes to a size that did no one any good; the excess water made their juice diluted and weak, never a good start for any vinification campaign. Through harvesting, fermenting and pressing, the rains drummed relentlessly on, and as everyone had feared, the young wine proved to be of mediocre quality. But there was a great deal of it, more than any other year in memory—more, in fact, than the tanks and vats of the co-op could hold. Faced with an acute lack of storage space even as more grapes were coming in for vinifying, Marguerite took swift executive action by organizing a convoy of tanker trucks and commandeering Fleurie’s brand-new municipal cistern. Three hundred thousand liters of still-fermenting Beaujolais Nouveau flowed into the big concrete reservoir that September, and the harvest was saved. It would be nice to be able to report that Fleurie’s population brushed their teeth and washed their faces in red wine for a couple of weeks that year, but a sense of humor can be carried only so far: Marguerite instructed the co-op’s workers to shut down the main valve to the municipal water supply.
    “Well, it wasn’t a very good year, anyway,” a philosophical André Bacot, ninety, told me with a little shrug, recalling the glory days when he was the co-op’s cellar master under Marguerite. “But her system worked just fine, you know. When the wine was sold, no one could