The first principle is a principle of exclusion. It will be Crémant de Die, not Clairette. The confusion is common; it is culpable, and the author pushes back with the energy you use to correct a misspelling in your own name.
Clairette is sweet, Crémant is brut, without any liqueur added. If you are not lucky enough to live in the Drôme valley, you can fall back on a Crémant from Burgundy, the word being generic where the appellation is not. But you will lose precisely what gives the deal its value.
The second principle is a principle of foundation. Before the Crémant, before anything else, you must place at the bottom of the glass two indispensable ingredients. A teaspoon, let’s say the equivalent of a teaspoon, of a mixture made of two thirds melonade and one third basil syrup.
The melonade is a melon syrup; several houses produce it, and you can find it without difficulty. The basil syrup is a more recent discovery, and it is what tilts the whole thing toward the herb and the shade. Then fill up to three quarters, let’s say four fifths, with the Crémant. Add ice cubes. A single basil leaf. That’s all, and it is delicious.
The question remains, one that interests the writer more than the drinker, why this one instead of another.
There are about eight hundred cocktails. One tenth is famous—the Negroni, the Manhattan, the Black Russian, a few others—and Le Tellier loves them, defends them, and is happy to prepare them for you. But making another Manhattan isn’t invention. In a field so crowded, originality can no longer come from mere combinations; it must come from the ground. The melon is from Drôme. The basil is from Drôme. The Crémant is from Die. This cocktail isn’t an idea; it’s a department.
That is why it bears a name. Between Montélimar and the Vercors lies a small Protestant town called Dieulefit, which means God did it. Translated into the obligatory bar language, you get God Did It. The Tellier circled around it, then stepped back. Said quickly, English slips toward a college-boy joke, and one did not want that for a drink born on a land of Huguenots. So it will be Lord Did It. The Lord rather than God, the version kept, sober and dry, exactly like a Crémant.
It would be a mistake to treat the affair as a vacation whim.
Le Tellier is currently reissuing in Folio his very first book, Sonate de bar, which appeared with Seghers in 1991 and was later republished by Castor Astral. The title is a wordplay that assumes, to work, a few rudiments of German. The book gathered together stories published at the end of the eighties in L’Événement on Thursdays, in Bernard Chapuis’s column. A quarter of a page, exactly two thousand characters, two and a half minutes of reading aloud.
Each time a new tale, each time a story of a cocktail, each time the same setting. A bar run by a certain Jay, whose real name was J.H.M., called as such because it wasn’t clear whether his name was Jimmy or John. A waitress, Rose Singer, an homage to Isaac Bashevis Singer. A pianist, Archie, in memory of Archie Shepp. Around these three moved strangers, and it is they who carried the fiction. Some stories were dedicated to a mathematician, to Hugo Pratt… All of this stemmed from a bar in San Francisco where the author had been twenty in the eighties and learned the craft before learning the other. The book has often been staged in the theatre, which makes sense, for nothing suits a monologue better than a man who prepares drinks for the front row.
The Lord Did It does not figure in the collection. It was born too late, on a summer afternoon in Drôme. It will have to be added by hand on the title page. And then, as typographers used to say, it will be Rue Michel, in other words, it will balance the accounts. The president of Oulipo invented the Lord Did It: three Drôme ingredients, a pun, a touch of combinatorics. “That’s all, and it’s very good.”