Why a Brouilly? Why a no chicken?

by David Benjamin

“Groucho: I say, here is a little peninsula, and here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland.
“Chico: All right, why a duck?
“Groucho: I’m not playing ‘Ask Me Another,’ I say that’s a viaduct.
“Chico: All right! Why a duck?… Why a no chicken?
“Groucho: Well, I don’t know why a no chicken; I’m a stranger here myself. All I know is that it’s a viaduct. You try to cross over there a chicken and you’ll find out why a duck…”
— from The Cocoanuts

PARIS — Brouilly is a little duchy within a tiny winemaking region of France called Beaujolais, which lies just west of the Saône River roughly between the towns of Macon and Villefranche sur Saône, just north of the city of Lyon. Brouilly is one of the ten “crus” or unique local viniculture varieties of Beaujolais, among which are also Moulin-a-Vent, Saint-Amour, Chiroubles and the lovely, flirtatious Julienas.

Despite the constraints of its turf, which is divided by the River Ardière, bordered on the north by the Régnié domaine and surrounded by the table-wine vineyards of Beaujolais ordinaire and the slightly more distinguished Beaujolais-Village, the grape-growers of Brouilly pump out a volume of wine that puts, for example, its neighbors Morgon and Chenas to shame. Brouilly is one of the reliable and pleasingly consistent crus available abundantly throughout France. It has a line on the carte de vin in almost every Paris restaurant, café, brasserie, bistro and corner tabac.

For Hotlips, my spouse, and I, Brouilly is a default choice when the wine list is too long, too snooty and expensive, or indifferently composed. We know we can count on Brouilly. Which is why, at one of our first lunches in Paris after the long pandemic hiatus, I ordered it. We were at the Café Viaduc, on avenue Daumesnil, a slightly upscale brasserie in an up-and-coming retail district.
Every time I go there, I ache to make reference to Groucho and Chico hatching real estate schemes in Cocoanut Manor. But my audience is always too young, too French or too cinematically deprived. Sigh.

Our waitress, a millennial with a retro haircut reminiscent of Bette Davis, asked me (in French) what to drink and I, non-conversational in French but well drilled with this particular word, announced crisply, “Brouilly, s’il vous plait!”

She was befuddled.

She looked alarmed.

She had not understand.

The waitress — let’s call her Simone — mouthed more than actually uttered the interrogative syllable, “Quoi?” meaning, in English, “What the hell did you just say, tourist boy?”

Mind you, “Brouilly” is no walk in the park for the English-taught tongue, especially one trained in the American dialect. The word requires, immediately after the “B,” a French “r,” a letter that does not simply leap forth from the speaker’s cheeks the way it does in English. The French “r” is a soft growl born in the fronds of the epiglottis and enticed toward the tongue, tickling the uvula on its way and grating the air gently, like a young girl’s fingers on beechbark.

It’s a tough letter to do, but I’m good at it, unlike my Spanish “r,” which is supposed to rattle and roll percussively, but just lays there on its backside and turns into a half-ass “d.”

Okay then. I trusted that my “r” had been adequate to the challenge of ordering the wine. Where then, in the remaining “ouilly,” had I screwed up? My trouble probably was not the “ou,” because the same double-vowel combination occurs often in English in, for example, words like “through,” “bayou” and “Harry Houdini.”

I might’ve hit the wall, however — but I doubted it — in the word’s denouement, during which the “i,” pronounced as a hard “e” (“ee”), must be half-swallowed but made distinct before segueing pell-mell to the last three letters. The grand finale of “Brouilly” — the “-lly” part — has a double “l” similar to the same pairing in Spanish. It is pronounced as an English “y.” Finish with a French “y” rendered as an English hard “e” (“ee”), and you get a “yee” preceded in lightning order by an “ee.” “Ee-yee.”

All put together, what I was trying to tell the young and somewhat put-upon Simone (we were a party of six), was — rendered phonetically, but remembering the deep-throated and faintly erotic French “r” — “Brew-ee-yee.”

Well, no! Not quite. Listen to a French waiter (not Simone, but a combat-happy pro at, say, Le Grand Colbert) and what you’ll hear — if you tape him and play it back repeatedly and slowly in a police audio lab — is more like “Broy-uh-yee” with a subtle but hardly insistent emphasis on the first syllable and an almost inaudible “uh.” Usually, my version falls between these two pronunciations. Significantly, however, either variation, at your typical Parisian bar à vins, has for years faithfully proven comprehensible from my lips to the serveur’s fussy ear.

So, what’s goin’ on here? Suddenly, lunch at the Café Viaduc and the dewy Simone answers my well-schooled order with a knitted brow and a fluttering gaze of confusion.

Felicitously, unlike Simone, I’ve been up this alley before. It is a timeless phenomenon among Paris restaurant staff, especially those who are youthful, hasty and/or subliminally xenophobic, to assume that foreign-speaking customers bring with them absolutely no knowledge of — nor any interest in speaking — the French language.

This is not a groundless assumption. Since before Ben Franklin came to Paris and drank the Comte de Mirabeau under the table, French waiters have had been coping with Yanks who harbor the conviction that English, spoken really loud with clenched fists and flying saliva, is perfectly good French.

Hence, when a waiter queries an obviously American-speaking patron about a matter as cognitively demanding and profoundly French as the choice of wine to be eaten with a salade de chèvre chaud (with which any Beaujolais is appropriate), he or she expects either a burst of shouting or a look of deep Nebraska ignorance tinged with foreign hostility. Simone did not, in her wildest waitress dreams, expect from me — nor was she able to hear — the word “Brouilly,” or any French word, competently pronounced.

Simone expected gibberish. I offered her the lilting tones of Yves Montand and Serge Gainsbourg. Simone heard gibberish.

Sigh.

I said it again, slowly, with a question mark: “Brouilly?”

And there it was. The light went on in Simone’s eyes. She said, “Oh! Brouilly!” mimicking my twice-told pronunciation all the way down to the feathery first-syllable stress.

As Simone bustled off in search of a corkscrew, I turned to our beloved friend, Anne-Françoise, who — at great risk to her Frenchness — speaks and writes English and associates shamelessly with the non-French. I looked into Anne-Françoise’s twinkling eyes and knew.

She had understood — my dilemma as well as my pronunciation.