Chapter One
The Little Wine Shop in Cité Berryer

If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night.
—D. H. LAWRENCE

On an autumn day in 1970, two Englishmen were walking around Paris's posh Right Bank near the Rue Royale. Although its glory was in the nineteenth century, luxury still reigns there as an art form in this section made up of the city's First and Eighth arrondissements. The area combines New York City's Park Avenue with Beverly Hills's Rodeo Drive. Within a few blocks are found such restaurants as Maxim's, shops like Hermès and Cartier, and the Ritz, the quintessential ritzy hotel. The Right Bank is a wonderful area for strolling, especially in the fall after most of the tourists have left and the city's pace slows a little. The summer heat is gone, and the chestnut leaves begin to fall.

The two men wandered into Cité Berryer, a street easy to miss because it was only a block long, going from the Rue Royale to the Boissy d'Anglas. Cité Berryer was a slightly seedy shopping arcade that seemed out of place amid all the luxury around it. Built in the nineteenth century, it was named after a then leading, but now long forgotten, politician. Twice a week an open-air, fresh vegetable and fruit market took place there, and fashionable and unfashionable women alike lined up to buy produce for their families. A small wine shop was located next to a locksmith.

As the two men passed the Caves de la Madeleine, a wine shop named after the famous church located two blocks away, one man turned to the other and said, "That is exactly the kind of shop I would like to buy."

Steven Spurrier was a well-to-do son of English landed gentry, who at the age of twenty-nine was still trying to figure out what he was going to do when he grew up. After spending several months living in Provence in southern France, Spurrier had recently moved to Paris, where he and his wife, Bella, resided on a 130-foot barge moored on the River Seine at the Place de la Concorde.

If there was a centerpiece to Spurrier's wandering life, it was wine. In his youth, when other boys were outside playing soccer, he could be found rearranging bottles in the wine cellar at Holbrook Hall, his family's estate in Derbyshire in north-central England. Spurrier worked for a short time for two leading shops in the London wine trade. One of them sent him—at his own expense—on a seven-month study tour of wine through France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal.

As Spurrier and his friend, a British lawyer living in Paris, entered the store, the owner, Madame Fougères, asked if she could help them.

"My friend here would like to buy your shop," said the lawyer with British directness.

The idea was not so crazy. The wine shop had actually been quietly for sale for two years, after the owner's husband had committed suicide. His widow had lost interest in running the business, which involved lots of heavy work lifting cases and pushing around barrels of wine. After a few minutes of conversation, the two Englishmen left.

A few days later, Spurrier returned alone to talk to Madame Fougères about buying the shop. She explained that she had a strong emotional tie to the store because it had been her husband's pride—in fact, his whole life. She was not certain if she would sell it, especially to an Englishman who didn't speak much French, despite his proclaimed interest in her country's most prestigious product. Madame Fougères told Spurrier she doubted he could "carry the torch" for her dead husband. Spurrier then made a proposal. To show he was serious, he would work for her in the store for six months at no pay, doing whatever she asked. It was a deal she could hardly refuse.

So even though he had $250,000 in inheritance money in the bank, Spurrier went to work rolling wine barrels around the store's cellar and delivering cases of wine up six flights in the service stairway of Parisian apartments because delivery people were not supposed to use the elevator. Sometimes a grateful housekeeper gave him a fifty-centimes (ten-cent) tip.

Spurrier learned the Paris wine business from the inside at the same time he was improving his French. When the six months were over, he bought the wine shop for 300,000 francs ($50,000), and on April 1, 1971, moved behind the cash register to be the new owner. Madame Fougères had been very formal up to that point, never even telling him her first name. But after he bought the business, she asked him to call her by her nickname, Timoune.

The Caves de la Madeleine was a typical French wine shop. Its core business was inexpensive vin ordinaire, the wine an average French family drinks with lunch and dinner. Madame Fougères bottled it out of tanks, selling four simple wines by the liter: a red with 11 percent alcohol, a 12 percent red, a white, and a rosé. The day he took over, Spurrier stopped the bottling of vin ordinaire, though it took him a year to sell it all off. Madame Fougères's wholesaler told Spurrier he was crazy and would soon go bankrupt.

The vin ordinaire crowd, however, was not what Spurrier was going after. He wanted the upper part of the market and was soon visiting vineyards all over France to buy quality wines directly from winemakers. He thought his biggest potential market was the Britons and Americans working in Paris, especially in the neighborhood around his shop. The British and U.S. embassies were only a few blocks away, and in the nearby Place Vendôme and Place de la Concorde, IBM and American law firms had offices. As the only wine-store owner in Paris who was a native English speaker, Spurrier wanted to be the wine merchant to that large and generally affluent Anglo-American community. The way to reach them, Spurrier concluded, was through the International Herald Tribune, the daily newspaper of Americans in Paris, which provided a diet of New York Times and Washington Post stories plus a few local articles. Spurrier began running ads in the paper's classified section for the Caves de la Madeleine's promotional events.

Given his upper-class background, Spurrier moved easily in Parisian business and social circles. He cut a dashing figure, wearing three-piece suits and with a glass of wine never far away. His hair was stylishly long, cut in an early Beatles style, and he sported a free-flowing mustache. His slight British upper-class stammer and terribly British style charmed journalists, especially women. In a profile published in the Herald Tribune, reporter Susan Heller Anderson gushingly wrote: "A peach-colored Englishman elegant in teal blue pinstriped suit with waistcoat and creamy linen shirt, he describes in Etonian accents how most Provençal rosés are absolutely filthy."

Jon Winroth was the Herald Tribune's wine writer, and soon after taking over ownership of the wine shop Spurrier set out to meet him. Winroth had grown up in Chicago, where his father was a professor of archaeology. In a rarity of the 1940s and 1950s, Winroth's family served wine regularly with meals. He had come to Paris in 1956 on a Fulbright scholarship to study history, but wine was soon his major interest. He landed a job with the Herald Tribune, writing stories on topics like the year's harvest or some interesting French winery.

Spurrier sent Winroth samples of special wines he was carrying, always enclosing an invitation to stop by the store or give him a call. For months Spurrier heard nothing in reply, so one day he walked the short distance to the Herald Tribune offices on the Rue de Berri. When he arrived, Spurrier got into one of those tiny Paris elevators that can hold two people as long as neither person breathes. Ever so slowly it rose to the third floor. Just as Spurrier was leaving the elevator, a thin young man, also with a mustache, was getting in.

"Can you tell me where Jon Winroth works?" Spurrier asked.

"I'm Jon Winroth," the man replied.

"I'm Steven Spurrier. I own the Caves de la Madeleine wine shop."

"So you're the guy who's been bombarding me with all those samples! I'm heading out to have a glass of wine. Why don't you come along, and we can talk?"

The two men hit it off immediately, talking for more than four hours over several glasses of wine at a table in the back of a nearby café. Spurrier told Winroth about the plans for his business. Sales were good; he was becoming better known and progressing toward his goal of becoming the wine merchant for Anglo-Americans in Paris.

Spurrier also told him about how a small but regular group of Americans came by the shop late in the afternoon after work to talk about wine. He often opened a bottle of wine and gave them some basic tips while they sipped. He'd charge them by the glass, and they seemed delighted to learn a little more about the subject in an atmosphere where they could speak English and wouldn't be laughed at because they couldn't name all of Bordeaux's famous Grands Crus. Winroth told Spurrier that he gave similar wine-tasting seminars in the back rooms of Parisian cafés to American college students on their junior year abroad. The two men mused about some day starting a wine school that would serve both their audiences.

Copyright © 2005 by George M. Taber.