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The Rivals

THE FRATERNITY OF ST VINCENT

Père Menestrier, curé of Puligny, preached to an unusually large congregation on the morning of Sunday, 22 January, 1989. Grandly ensconced in the choir stalls, the dignitaries of Chassagne and Puligny stared at each other across the chancel while the lesser mortals of both villages crowded the pews and overflowed into the aisles. Everyone had come to church to celebrate the Feast of St Vincent, patron of winegrowers, and everyone had come to the same church (for the first time in living memory) because that of Chassagne was closed for repairs. This temporary rapprochement between the rival villages was signified by the presence in front of the altar of two up-ended wine barrels, one supporting the brightly painted figure of St Bernard, staring upwards in ecstasy at the elaborate little canopy suspended above his head, the other bearing the unadorned oak statue of St Vincent, head modestly bowed and a bunch of grapes clutched in his sturdy hand. The exultant St Bernard represented the wine-growers' confrérie of Puligny; St Vincent that of Chassagne. Between the two saints and closer to the altar was a little tower of freshly baked brioche rings, crowned by a posy of flowers, and beside it was a bottle of wine.

The saints and the tower of brioches had arrived at the church half an hour earlier, borne shoulder-high with banners, to the clamour of celebratory bells. The procession had started from the cellars of Bernard Clerc, on the Place des Marronniers, where everyone had gathered for a glass of wine at ten-thirty and for the cheese gougères which accompany all Burgundian festivities. It was a bright winter morning, one of those days which encourage a certain amount of stamping of the feet and puffing of steamy breath into the crisp invigorating air. Bernard Clerc, the morning's host, had the expression of an anxious bloodhound as he shepherded the carloads of vignerons from Chassagne to park around the square, but everyone else seemed in brisk good spirits, greeting one another with the amiability of familiar antagonists.

The young men carried the banners, the brioches and the saints, the old followed with their badges of office and the rest clustered behind in a noisy and ragged procession which gathered adherents from the side streets as it headed past the cross which marks the site of the old horse pond, past the post office, past half-open cellars and shuttered houses and emerged in the tiny square in front of the parish church of Notre Dame de l'Assomption.

The saints and the tower of brioches, borne shoulder-high.

The village choir, led by the strong voice of old Jean Pascal, greeted the arrival of the confréries with a series of cheerful modern hymns, asking forgiveness, promising to do better, thanking God for the benefits of the earth. The congregation responded with several rousing choruses of Alleluia.

Then the priest began his sermon, taking as his text a verse from the Gospel of St John: 'I am the vine, you the branches.' He reminded his audience that this was not only the Feast of St Vincent but the Sunday of ecumenical unity, dedicated to those separated by different faiths. In that spirit he welcomed to the church for this historic occasion the villagers of both Puligny and Chassagne.

It was a wry and appropriate comment on a rare moment of truce in the long-standing rivalry, bordering on aversion, which has for so long divided these neighbouring communities. As a fat little girl in the front row of the congregation sat whispering to her neighbour, Père Menestrier talked of 'the long civilisation of the vine', of 'solidarity' between those who work together (expressed in the two societies of St Bernard and St Vincent, gathered in this church to celebrate the latter's feast day) and about bringing a sense of morality, purpose and Christianity into the daily work in vineyards and cellars. The vignerons sat with an air of rigid self-importance as their métier was thus extolled and they nodded approvingly when the priest referred to the miracle of the feast at Cana, when Jesus changed water into 'good wine, of excellent quality'. Reminding the congregation that Puligny was twinned with the German village of Johannisberg, thus bringing together and reconciling two nations formerly at war, Père Menestrier returned pointedly to the theme of fraternity, before leading the assembly in a joint recitation of the Creed.

Then he blessed the brioches which were to be shared at the feast to follow, hoping they would be a sign of shared friendship, and consecrated the bread and wine for communion to the accompaniment of a chorus of Hosannahs. The congregation's attention on higher things was briefly interrupted by the sound of clinking and shuffling as everyone reached into their pockets to find money for the collection, but serenity and goodwill were restored with the gesture of friendship: a handshake between the men, a kiss on the cheek among the women. A wobbling fanfare on the trumpet accompanied the communion.

At the conclusion of the mass, the priest read the parish notices, gave thanks to those who had helped with this celebration and announced that Monsieur Amiot invited his confrères of Chassagne to enjoy a glass of wine in his cellars before their feast at the village hall and that Bernard Clerc extended a similar invitation to his confrères of Puligny. The choir sang a hymn of friendship and rejoicing as the congregation poured out of the church, eager for a cigarette and a gossip before the two villages divided for their respective celebrations.

The saints were carried in procession back to the Place des Marronniers, where St Bernard was installed on an up-ended barrel in the cellars of Domaine Clerc, as the centrepiece of a party which began with wine and gougères and continued in one form or another for the rest of the day and much of the night. St Vincent was packed with less ceremony into the boot of a car and the men of Chassagne set off up the hill, without a backward glance at their neighbours.

The inhabitants of both villages have long ago decided that solidarity, reconciliation, fraternity and neighbourly goodwill begin, like charity, at home. And they stick to their principles.

FAMILY FEUDS

In the tiny village of Bouzeron, a few kilometres south of Puligny, there are two cafés on adjacent corners of the Place. For reasons which have long since been forgotten by most of their regulars, there was a period of many years when the proprietors of these cafés were not on speaking terms and those who were habitués of one establishment would not be seen dead in the other. Thus was the village divided.

Similar minor differences, so long established as to have grown into instinctive rivalry, separate neighbouring villages in the Côte d'Or. The children of Volnay have traditionally hurled stones at the prosperous 'pommards', and the métayers of Nuits St-Georges have a deep-seated aversion to the proud proprietors of Vosne-Romanée. So too with Puligny and Chassagne. Yoked by their resounding surname, the villages are divided by generations (perhaps centuries) of mutual distrust. 'They're like twins, they hate each other,' claims Aubert de Villaine, whose family estate, the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, makes one of the greatest wines of Montrachet.

Cain and Abel almost, the dark and the light. Chassagne seems to clasp to itself the bitter memory of the time when it was destroyed by the Swiss mercenaries of Louis XI and the inhabitants were burnt in their houses, in vengeance on their lord, Jean de Chalons, Prince d'Orange, who had dared to defy the crown. The nickname 'les mâchurés' (the blackened ones) reminds scholars of those ashes, but the children of Puligny have always taken it to mean 'the unwashed' and taunted their neighbours whenever their hillside well ran dry. The brats from Chassagne, looking down to the lush pastures of their rivals far below, spat back the word 'cochons' in unambiguous contempt.

Puligny, by contrast, survived placidly in the plain; its occasional catastrophes being those of the region as a whole, without the singularity which regularly reinforced the communal vigour of Chassagne. Unlike its rival on the hill, whose stony slopes gave sustenance to nothing but the vine, Puligny enjoyed relative economic equilibrium, based on an agriculture which depended almost as much on cereals and cattle as it did on wine. When times were good, Puligny prospered; when times were hard (a succession of bad vintages or the periodic plagues of the vine), it survived. After the phylloxera the vignerons at least had their pigs.

As the great white wines of Burgundy became more fashionable (and outstripped the reds in price), the vineyards of Puligny were much coveted by outsiders. Rich négociants from Beaune and prosperous producers from Meursault arrived after every funeral to tempt the heirs with a good price, and within the village itself the big domaines gobbled up the smaller ones. Today forty per cent of Puligny's vineyards are owned by outsiders and the old community of peasant proprietors has been replaced by a divided society. Several domaines have prospered mightily in recent years, particularly those which sell their wine in bottle. Larger numbers of much smaller growers (selling by contract to the négoces) have experienced a less...