Picoler...

Paris is a Moveable Quaff (Part 1)

I am fond of the French word picoler, which means to consume alcoholic beverages excessively.

It has served me well on many occasions.

Yesterday, for example.

Seven hours of which were spent at a degustation of German wines hosted by Chambre Noire, Paris’s most exuberant and anarchic champions of natural wines, and the subject of a future Hexagon podcast.

This morning, while researching the subject of this week’s podcast, and nursing what the French call a “mouth of wood”, I made a felicitous discovery: picoler is not a gallicization of “to get pickled”, but comes from Piccolo, which is the name that Parisians once gave to a red grape variety planted in the Paris region, especially in and around the north-western suburb of Argenteuil, after the phylloxera pest wiped out the existing vines.

Those vines – which produced Gamay, Pinot Noir, Fromental, Chasselas and other grapes – had once been abundant.

The Romans were the first to grow grapes in the area, probably around the 4th century BCE. By the 17th and 18th centuries, vines covered roughly 3,000 hectares, making Argenteuil the largest wine-producing commune in France. By the time of the French Revolution, the entire Paris region, which today we call Ile-de-France, had between 42,000 and 45,000 hectares of vines, making it the biggest wine-producing vignoble in France, if not the world.

Before de Maupassant’s day, the wines of Argenteuil were considered quite quaffable. A chronicler in the 13th century went so far as to declare them “worthy of the King of France.”

By the mid-19th century, however, the pursuit of quantity had become more important than quality. The reason: on weekends, Parisians flocked to Argenteuil, and elsewhere west of the city, to get drunk.

Some came to fish, or picnic in the fields, but most came to dance and get picolated onboard guinguette barges on the Seine.

Argenteuil was convenient, only 15 minutes by train from Gare de l’Ouest. The main appeal, however, was the price of the wine. Taverns and cabarets in the suburbs paid no state taxes, meaning wine was a third to a quarter cheaper than it was in Paris.

The guinguettes also had a novel approach to “Happy Hour”: you paid money upfront, and then had 60 minutes to drink yourself into a stupor.

According to the 1750 Dictionnaire de la langue française, the “brand-new” term guinguette “comes from apparently from what is sold in these cabarets: a sour light local green wine, that is called Ginguet, such as found around Paris.”

In Argenteuil, however, the onboard plonk was more likely Piccolo rouge, as what’s in the bottles and glasses in this painting by Renoir (done just downriver in Chatou in 1881) confirms:

Renoir was one of many Impressionist painters jumping on those weekend trains. Monet liked it so much that he moved there, from London, at the end of 1871, first into a houseboat, and then into a posh new house right next to the new Argenteuil rail station—convenient for luring out collectors and getting new works to his art dealer quickly.

In all, Monet lived in Argenteuil for six years, during which he produced some 250 paintings, and was paid frequent visits by the likes of Renoir, Manet, Pissaro, Morisot, Renoir, Caillebotte, Seurat and Sisley.

What attracted the Impressionists to Argenteuil and its environs were the bucolic landscapes, the pretty sailboats on the river, the rollicking cabarets and the rustic charms of small-town life, but also how this was beginning to mix, somewhat darkly, with smoke-belching industrialization.

Monet’s Promenade at Argenteuil is a good example of this. As is Caillebotte’s Factories at Argenteuil.

The vineyards of Argenteuil, like those throughout the Ile de France, were quickly disappearing. As were Argenteuil’s equally famous figs and asparagus, both of which still carry the name “d’Argenteuil”, even though they haven’t grown in the region for more than a century.

Factories, plaster works, gypsum quarries and iron foundries ate up Argenteuil’s surrounding farmland. By the 1860s, the town’s population had doubled. It now had had lacemaking studios, fine crystal and clock-making shops, a gas works and a tannery, several distilleries, a sawmill, a mineral water plant, a chemical works, and a cardboard box manufacturer.

In 1869, a spill at the new rubber factory in the town of Bezons just to the south wiped out all the fish.

And pylloxera wiped out all the vines.

Parisians still flocked to Argenteuil on weekends, especially during the 1870 war (the occupying Prussians, who only drank beer, prohibited wine in the capital).

To fuel the guinguettes and the regattas, Piccolo was planted. With disastrous results.

Piccolo is actually Gamay, a red-skinned grape with white juice that makes wonderful wines around the world, most notably in Beaujolais and the Loire.

However, Gamay, which likes alkaline soils, was not a great match for the terroir of Argenteuil. The wine was acidic, harsh and insipid, borderline inbuvable – undrinkable. The locals called it Cramponne-toi-au-bord-de-la-table – “Hold-on-tight-to-the-edge-of-the-table” and the term piccolo became a pejorative term for bad wine.

By the time I arrived, 30 years ago, that term had been replaced by pinard, aka le gros rouge qui tâche – “the heavy red that stains.” And the once-famous vignoble d’Ile de France was more or less moribund.

But all that is changing, which leads me, finally, to the subject of this week’s podcast, Guillaume d’Angerville, one of Burgundy’s most reputed winemakers, who, with Yannick Alléno and Laurent Berrurier has planted 1.5 hectares of vines 30km outside of Paris.

Guillaume is in conversation with my old friend Geoffrey Finch, the founder of the association Taste and Paris Wine Walks, and the author of the upcoming book, Paris: New Wines, New Wines, and the documentary of the same name, co-directed by the Oscar-winning Laurent Chalet.

This is just the first in a series on the subject. Next week’s podcast, however, is about something happening in another suburb north of Paris, Aubervilliers, which is the new home of France’s most ambitious artist space: POUSH.

Santé!