Chalets, cuckoo clocks and Alpine horns, depicted on a box opened in your London living room, have as sickly a flavour as the chocolates inside. Who would want to visit a place whose national symbols are mired in kitsch, and whose exports kill the taste of wine? Go to Switzerland, however, and you will discover the last surviving enclave of European democracy: a place where people are decent, manners considerate, and the landscape and townscape maintain a semblance of their old simplicity. Those chocolate-box images, returned to their native soil, are not kitsch at all, but the signs of a republican way of life that has maintained its independence against every temptation offered by its neighbours.
The hillsides along Lac Leman are stacked from shore to peak with stone-walled terraces, from which vines push black knuckles through the topsoil like buried soldiers summoned back to defend the land. If the Swiss export their chocolate but not their wine it is because they can't get enough of the wine and are rightly contemptuous of the chocolate. And although just
about everything else in Switzerland is hideously expensive (that,
after all, is the price of an autarkic economy), the wine is cheap, starting at five or six francs a bottle, and seldom exceeding 20 francs even for the best of the self-styled premiers crus.
The soil is more friendly to white than to red varietals, and the local Chasselas grape produces a wine as fresh and full of zest as those made from the Aligote in Burgundy. As for the reds, the indigenous Gamaret fights creditably with the greasy local sausages, and on a recent visit I discovered that the Pinot Noir/Gamaret blend from the Chateau du Crest is as genial an accompaniment to philosophical discussion as any Pinot/Gamay blend from Burgundy.
If there is a vineyard that deserves especial mention, it is that of the Chateau du Crest. A Renaissance vernacular castle built on the ruins of a medieval keep, it stands just outside Geneva, a tribute to the democratic planning process that has enabled Swiss communities to surround and confine their towns with those scenes that look so unconvincing on the chocolate box, but which are the symbol and the proof of settlement.
The chateau is planted with French varietals, and uses modern methods in a concerted attempt to drive back the imports that have, until recently, stifled the local product. Its "Assemblage Blanc", incorporating Chardonnay, Aligote and Pinot Blanc, is a genuine rival to white Burgundy. Although nothing (apart from the French) will persuade me to be disloyal to France, I cannot help rejoicing that, with such estates, the Swiss can now close their western border without losing the only benefit that has ever flowed across it.
