TS Eliot once responded to a question about the two most important changes in his life by saying that "I now prefer Claret to Burgundy and I prefer Inspector Maigret to Arsène Lupin".¹ Whatever one’s tastes in red wine or facetiousness, for the wineloving reader of detective fiction there are many points from which to spring with fellow-feeling to the side of the heavy-drinking Commissaire Maigret. It is perhaps enough to imagine Miss Marple entering the pub in St Mary Mead for a quick pint, vin rouge, or slug of armagnac – as easy to picture Maigret’s humane wisdom breeding insight while he grumpily stares into the depths of a cup of tea. At the utmost, one might imagine Miss Marple surprising and gratifying us when she finds a vital clue in realising (from one delicate, reluctant sip) that the vicar is serving Cyprus sherry rather than the real thing.

There are, certainly, some wine connoisseurs solving fictional English crime. H. Warner Allen's William Clerihew is a wine merchant – of relevance in such tales as "Tokay of the Comet Year"; Lord Peter Wimsey airily evidences much wine expertise, and deploys it in solving, for example, "The Bibulous Business of a Matter of Taste" (and some readers can tolerate the snobbery, it seems).

But (autre pays, autre moeurs is precisely the point) for the subtle, incidental revelation of a genuine wine culture in detective fiction, we need to go to Georges Simenon and his Commissaire Jules Maigret. It must be admitted, however, that Maigret is not a dedicated winelover: he drinks much else besides (and plenty of it), notably beer, Pernod, calvados, and prunelle supplied by his sister-in-law in Alsace. Few chapters, however, pass without him downing a glass or two of usually anonymous vin blanc. He is not, by the standards of his aristocratic English counterpart, a wine connoisseur, but amongst Maigret’s many estimable qualities are his unselfconscious at-homeness in a wine-drinking world and, even more, his unquestioning acceptance of the factor of terroir.

Crime and wine scenes

In Maigret et le Corps sans Tête, the Commissaire goes into a sombre working-class bistrot near the Quai de Valmy (from whose waters various bits of a man’s body have been pulled). He asks for a glass of white wine and compliments the woman who serves him: “‘Your wine is good’”, he says simply.

It was true. Most Parisian bistrots offer a “simple country wine”, but more often than not it is a commercial blend [vin traffiqué] straight from Bercy. This one, by contrast, had an aroma of terroir, which the commissaire tried to identify.

“Sancerre?” he asked.

“No. It’s from a little village near Poitiers.”

That was why it had an aftertaste of flint.²

The Bercy referred to here with disdain was, until the 1960s, the location of the Paris wine trade’s depots. Simenon repaid it for what it was doing to the wines of Parisian bars by showing the personal unattractiveness of one of its merchants – and having him understandably murdered – in Maigret et le Marchand de Vin. Maigret asks the patron of his favourite haunt, the Brasserie Dauphine, about the dead man’s big-selling Vin des Moines (available in red, white and rosé), and is told: “It’s a blend of different wines from the Midi and Algeria. People today prefer a bottle with a label and a more or less grand-sounding name”. Of course, it is not stocked at the Dauphine.

In the tale of the headless corpse, we learn that the keeper of the bistrot goes to the Poitiers vineyards a few times each year to source his good wine (but, sadly for the average standard of wine in Parisian bars, will do so no longer, as it is he who has lost his head). Note, though, Maigret’s splendid lack of concern with the grape variety, and how somehow his getting close to an identification is more interesting and convincing than if he’d got the origin quite right. In fact he probably did identify the implicit variety, as Sauvignon makes one of the succesful varietal wines of the area around Poitiers.

Maigret might even be expected to be particularly sensitive to this grape’s interaction with terroir as he comes from an area producing, as his creator once put it, “a pleasant little white wine” and was certainly no stranger to Sauvignon Blanc. This, incidentally, might partly explain Maigret’s frequently evidenced preference for white wine over red in his bistrot drinking – although there is also a basis for it in Simenon’s careful class delineations: Maigret is consciously a member of the petite bourgeoisie; working-class men in the Parisian bistrots depicted by Simenon generally drink only red wine  – and not beer either.³ Maigret was born, we are told more than once in the vast Simenon oeuvre, not far from Moulins, the capital of the Allier Department in the centre of France. We are not told precisely where his home village of Saint-Fiacre is, but might conjecture that the local wine of his youth was from the tiny viticultural area of  St Pourçain, where Sauvignon is one of the grapes – and Sancerre and Pouilly Fumé were not too far distant, northwards.

In fact, Simenon reinforced Maigret’s connection with the Loire’s great Sauvignon appellations in an interview with an Italian journalist, who later recounted the circumstances of his meeting with the author:

Before I started asking questions, Simenon opened a bottle of fresh white wine. He handed a glass to me and added: “This wine is from the Loire, from the part of the country where Maigret was born”…. The bouquet was slightly smoked, as confirmed by the words printed on the label itself, which I wrote down in my notebook: “Vin de Ladoucelle – Poully-Fumé [sic]”.⁴

(Clearly the interviewer’s knowledge of French wine was limited and, even more culpably, he was an inaccurate transcriber of labels.)

For Maigret, wine is intimately tied up with place, and often with food: like Simenon he is immensely fond of all the pleasures of the table (but the novels do not support the notion that it is only in recent, New Worldish decades that wine-drinking is not inevitably linked to eating). Sometimes the associated place is where the wine is most often drunk, as at the Brasserie Dauphine, where “against a background of aperitifs and spirits, a connoisseur would have discerned the rather sharp scent of the simple wines of the Loire” – the Loire invoked once more (La Colère de Maigret).

Sometimes the place of drinking coincides with the place of origin: in Maigret à l’Ecole, the Parisian Commisaire Maigret volunteers to take on a case in the Charentes simply because of his memories “of oysters and white wine” enjoyed there in the past. Sadly the oysters prove hard to come by on this visit, but Maigret downs a good deal of the wine – probably, in Charentes-Maritime, made from Ugni Blanc, but Sauvignon also lurks in the area. Typically, the description is simple and straightforward: with “greenish glints, it was dry and light” and had a pronounced “goût de terroir”.

Maigret in retirement

Maigret and Mme Maigret retired to Meung-sur-Loire, where they had often spent holidays. The village (a real one) is just west of Orléans, in the Vins de l’Orléanais VDQS, where most wines are from Pinot Meunier, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. We must hope that Maigret found pleasure (and evidence of terroir) in the local wines made from these ambitious grapes. It is a pleasant but hardly convincing coincidence that one of the appellation’s best producers now is Clos de Saint-Fiacre, named after the seventh-century Irish-born saint who also gave his name to the great detective’s birthplace. It would be even pleasanter if St Fiacre were also associated with wine, but he is not, though he is the patron of a startling range of callings and medical conditions, including gardening, haemorrhoids, taxi-driving, syphilis and sterility.

Notes

1. “The fiftieth anniversary report of the Harvard Class of 1910”; quoted epigraphically on the voluminous website devoted to “Simenon and his Inspector Maigret”.

2. Translations in this article are mine. Works by Georges Simenon referred to are all published by Presses de la Cité, Paris: Maigret et le Corps sans Tête (1955), translated into English as Maigret and the Headless Corpse; Maigret et le Marchand de Vin (1970) – Maigret and the Wine Merchant; Maigret à l’Ecole (1954) – Maigret Goes to School; La Colère de Maigret (1963) – Maigret Loses his Temper.

3. In “Maigret’s Paris conserved and distilled”, Lisa Ann Gurr uses a (rather small, unfortunately) selection of the novels and stories to interestingly examine links between drinking and social structure in Maigret’s Paris. In Mary Douglas (ed), Constructive Drinking: Persepectives on Drink from Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

4. Giulio Nascimbeni, “Interview with Georges Simenon, May 1985”. The misspellings of Ladoucette and Pouilly occur also in the Italian original.