A Votre Sant

From the Golden Slope of Burgundy to the chateaux of Bordeaux, 1959 will be remembered not as the year of De Gaulle and Algeria but as the year of the Great Wine. Thousands of winemakers have already pronounced this year's vintage "transcendent, magnificent." Mile. Genevieve Clin, manager of the famed Romanee-Conti vineyards, her vines laden with small, almost black bunches of grapes dimpled by the sun and heavy with sugar, said as the harvest began: ''When you look at the bunches, you only see the fruit. You don't see the wood any more."

Since the crippling frost of 1956 destroyed the vines of tens of thousands of acres, the French wine industry has staggered under the blows of poor quality and decreased quantity. The quality of this year's vintage is matched only by its quality. Jean Latour, producer of the rare white Burgundy, Croton-Charlemagne. says that in this century there has never been a year as abundant or as good. In the Romanee-Conti vineyards, the wine-men say that God waited until Archbishop Roncalli (who blessed the fields after the war, when he was papal nuncio in France) became Pope before answering his plea for a splendid crop.

High Pressure. Meteorologists have a more prosaic explanation. There have been almost twice as many hours of sunshine this year in France as in normal years, apparently because of a high-pressure area in the Canary Islands that pushed the normal summer storms southward. Thus the northern vineyards enjoyed a season of incomparable warmth, free of the violent hailstorms that slash the vines and bruise the grapes. At the same time there has been enough moisture in the ground to keep the vines fresh. "The leaves are still green as we pick," says one grower. "This means a glycerine content that will give the vintage an exceptional body." Another factor is that the four substandard harvests before this year's harvest had the effect of resting the vines. This summer they surged forward "to make up for lost time."

First pressings show the grapes to have a potential 14% alcohol content (1% to 2 1/2% higher than normal) and low acidity. At the same time, the full ripening of the skins guarantees enough tannin to give the wine full color and long life. Though cautious growers say that 1959's "character" cannot be judged for twelve months, others proclaim loudly that the wine will have the velvet taste of a superlative year. Because of the health of the harvest, France's winemakers foresee substantially increased exports and possibly lower prices. The U.S., which annually takes 5% of France's export production, will find prices down although the quality will be up.

Boozing Wine. The sun that warmed France played no favorites, also shed its benign rays on Germany's Rhine and Moselle vineyards. The head of the Wurzburg Wine Producers Association said: "I would not even be surprised if my grandchildren or their children called this wine the wine of the millennium." Said a less historically minded producer: "This will be real saufwein (boozing wine)." The Germans rate wine quality by the degree of sugar content in the grapes before fermentation. By this standard, the predicted sugar content of the 1959 harvest will make German wines, like those of France, the best produced so far in this century.

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