Breakfast in Burgundy, page 23
In previous years, the door key was turned apprehensively, wondering if any works had been completed since our last visit; today Stéphane will have been there before us to turn on water and heating and check that all is well. I drop the luggage and dart to the cellar to agonize over what will be drunk on this visit. The bounty of many trips to the Caveau Municipal in Chassagne and elsewhere makes the choice difficult: Dugat, Ramonet, Vincent, Lafarge, Confuron, Javillier, Girardin, Colin-Morey, Muzard, Fourrier, Bellene, Bavard, Moreau, Morey, Colin, de la Crée . . . Each carries its own message; the trick is to find one that fits the mood. I usually make a quick choice, hesitate, change my mind half a dozen times, and invariably revert to the original choice.
“Wine is magic, the only thing you consume that you can leave to your children. I sometimes drink my grandfather’s wine, it’s like a message from him.” So said Marie-Andrée Nauleau-Mugneret when I visited during harvest. Those two sentences capture the essence of Burgundy, how it speaks across the years, carrying the message of its birth year. Each bottle is a unique memory of time, people, and place. And it is not fixed; it evolves and develops, gaining complexity, before beginning a slow decline into feebleness.
Each vintage is hallmarked by the weather, and that message echoes down the years until the last bottle is drunk. The wine is almost a readout of rain and sunshine, frost and hail, and nothing else has such an influence on it. As it changes in the bottle the weather’s mark softens, allowing the voice of the vineyard and the hand of the winemaker to emerge. When everything is right the result is akin to alchemy.
A great burgundy leaves you lost for words. It is beyond the power of superlatives to nail it to the page, and whenever I come across such a wine in a formal tasting I scribble “not for spitting” before putting down pencil and paper to enjoy it. Nothing resists easy categorization like burgundy, and anybody who tries to pigeonhole it and reduce it to a series of trite comments and spuriously attractive ratings is on a fool’s errand. It is far more complex, and hence rewarding, than that.
Burgundy appeals both to head and heart; you cannot keep it at arm’s length and try to be unaffected—that is a waste of time and wine. You have to buy into it, and doing so will bring enchantment and frustration, like any love affair. Don’t fall into the trap of tasting simply by numbers—someday we will build a robot that can do it better than us. Embrace it, be exultant, be frustrated, but don’t sit there being cool-headed and objective while sagely opining: “Mmm . . . I’ll give this one 95 out of 100, or perhaps 97 with a fair wind at its back.” That is to miss the point altogether. It is not like looking at a painting, standing back and admiring the brushwork and the light and shade; you can do all that, but at some stage ya gotta jump in!
Examining the trees while ignoring the wood is not recommended. I call this “tick the box” tasting, where every component is identified, observed, and noted. Every gram of residual sugar, every percentage point of alcohol, every detail of fermentation, every month in barrel, every racking, every fining, every filtration, and every second of aftertaste. Everything, that is, except the wine itself. The result is a pixelated vision of the wine, full of knowledge but devoid of joy and understanding.
Burgundy must be enjoyed by the senses first, the intellect second. Only then can you hope to unlock its secrets. Cart before horse barely describes doing it the other way around. The desiccated tasting note is like pinning a butterfly to a board to enjoy its beauty. It’s sterile and uninvolved, allowing the observer to poke and prod and examine without reaction or interaction. This approach to wine leads to a lack of engagement, with no interest in the back story, the people and the place, only a faux objective, arms-length observation. I prefer to interact, not observe. And it’s not much fun for the butterfly.
Such an approach results in a search for too-perfect wine, a desire always to spot the minute fault, like the concertgoer who harps on about the one bad note while ignoring the overall performance. This in turn prompts winemakers to chase after some spurious notion of perfection. It reminds me of the time I sat in on a violin lesson given by the celebrated teacher Mauricio Fuks. After listening to a student for 15 minutes, he congratulated her on playing all the notes perfectly—then pointed out she had forgotten to play the music.
That approach to music masks the message, and it is the same with wine. It is no use making it with an eye to winning a prize or to follow a whim of fashion; the winemaker must enhance the message from the vineyard and the grape, like gold is refined or diamonds polished. Wines that play all the notes are not great wines; they may be perfectly acceptable, but they are ‘flat’ and one-dimensional. Generally, they understand this in Burgundy, though recent problems with premature oxidation in the white wines may have resulted from a desire to make “perfect,” squeaky-clean wines that drank beautifully from day one but which fell over at age five because they hadn’t been given the stuffing for the long haul.
Premature oxidation, or premox, has been the bane of white burgundy since the turn of this century. I call it the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and it was first spotted around 2000 in wines from the 1995 and ’96 vintages. Friends who travelled to Burgundy in 1998 and tasted the 1996s loved them, and bought them by the caseload on their return home, but as they started to drink them they wondered if they were the same wines they had tasted. The same bafflement was being experienced by burgundy lovers around the world, and at first it was put down to the odd bad bottle.
News of such a malaise spreads more slowly than the normal vintage assessments, published when the wines are first released. These are scrutinized before buying decisions are made, and 1996 was flagged as a good vintage, lodging in the collective conscience as such. Gradually, however, more and more people reported disappointment with the wines. Reports of alarming signs of age and deterioration multiplied: a honey-gold color that should have been vivid yellow; a sweet, heavy aroma of caramel and marzipan, like cheap perfume, that should have been fresh and lively; a morbid flavor, flat and featureless, when it should have been intense and juicy.
Since then a storm of debate has raged, but with no obvious villain the talk has tended to go around in circles without reaching a definitive conclusion. A combination of causes is most likely and many have been suggested: faulty corks, the introduction of new presses, less use of sulphur, riper grapes, a different lubricant on the corks, and, harder to quantify, a change of mind-set in the mid-’90s, manifested in a desire to make purer, less manipulated wine that, crucially, tasted excellent when first offered for sale. Almost every producer has been affected, including the most celebrated, and it is too early to say if the problem has been solved. A few years ago I vented my frustration in a column entitled A Typical Tale of Woe:
“After careful consideration, a case of something special, perhaps a premier cru Puligny, is purchased and consigned to the cellar. A couple of years later the first bottle is opened and found to be very dull, but the victim, knowing how much it cost, goes through a palaver of self-deception: the dull aroma might blow off, the wine will open up with time, it’s going through a dumb phase, double decanting might help . . . Every possible straw is clutched at, as the memory of the wine’s price looms larger, but complete collapse eventually follows and sees the hapless wine lover slumped in his seat, possessed by inexpressible rage.”
We may not be out of the woods yet—the problem takes five years to emerge—but heads have been removed from the sand and the issue acknowledged, which was not the case when it first appeared. Today, there are encouraging signs that the problem is being tackled, though apologies and refunds have been thin on the ground. For now, the safest advice is to drink your white burgundies at three or four years old; they have never been better. A lot of older bottles have gone into my stockpot. They were the child prodigies of the wine world who never fulfilled their potential.
If the message was muddled by premox it was obliterated by Rudy Kurniawan. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but when somebody fakes prestigious wines to cash in on their value, more sinister forces are at work. Kurniawan chose this career path and for a time everything he touched turned to gold. Starting early this century he made a name for himself in US wine circles, buying and selling extraordinary quantities of the most celebrated wines. For years he was everybody’s darling, a source of many of the most sought-after wines, and in good quantity too. Few smelled a rat.
The deception began to unravel in April 2008 at a wine auction in New York. Several lots of old bottles from Domaine Ponsot in Morey-Saint-Denis were up for sale, but there was a hitch. Laurent Ponsot, current proprietor, was there to say they never made the wines, that the “1929” Clos-de-la-Roche couldn’t be genuine because the domaine only started to bottle that wine in 1934. The “Ponsot” wines were withdrawn, leading to the collapse of perhaps the greatest wine fraud ever.
The FBI came calling, and a search of Kurniawan’s house turned up an amazing array of blue-chip wine labels, capsules, corks, old bottles, and more, including a hand-operated corking machine. The wheels turned, and as of Summer 2014, he languished in prison awaiting sentencing. End of story.
Or perhaps not. Once arrested, Kurniawan was turned into a pantomime villain, with all the blame heaped on him and little attention paid to the shocking gullibility, and perhaps tacit complicity, on the part of others that made his deception possible. Part of the problem is that so many people want to believe all ancient bottles are genuine. Rational standards of judgement go out the window, allowing the fraudsters free rein, and if that doesn’t change Kurniawan’s successors will have a clear run in years to come. His conviction has closed the door for the moment, but it is not locked. The film about his deception, now in production, will make interesting viewing.
If this tale has a hero it is Laurent Ponsot, who devoted time and resources to uncovering fake wines and who helped the FBI to do so. As a winemaker Ponsot does things his way, and his wines can be idiosyncratic, none more so than the Morey-Saint-Denis, Monts Luisants premier cru blanc, which is made from Aligoté. In 2011 I was treated to a bottle of the 1990, which was superb, amazingly youthful, and well able to follow a stunning bottle of Domaine Leflaive Chevalier-Montrachet 1992.
Ponsot’s Monts Luisants is an anomaly, a blip in the received wisdom that all the great whites are made from Chardonnay. Most of them are, but it is the blips and idiosyncrasies, the quirks and foibles that make Burgundy so compelling. That, and everything else: the land, the history, the people, the food, the culture and especially the wine, because it travels as a messenger across the globe and down the decades, an essence of grape and people and place. Despite the seething frustrations of a dodgy bottle, or a job not completed in the house, I still get a surge of excitement every time we drive past the Vous êtes en Bourgogne motorway sign, thumping the wheel in case Fionnuala hadn’t noticed.
There may be more wheel thumping if all goes well with the UNESCO application, for we can expect road signs highlighting the Golden Slope’s elevation to join the likes of the Pyramids of Egypt, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Statue of Liberty. Natural potential harnessed by human intervention is the essence of Burgundy, though the monks of old were hardly thinking of creating world heritage when they set about identifying the climats and enclosing their prized vineyards, les clos, with stone walls.
The bewildering fragmentation of vineyard ownership since the Revolution adds further complication to the hillside jumble of climats and clos. Wine lovers are intrigued and enchanted, though sometimes baffled, by this complicated tapestry. There are two routes towards understanding: the acceptance that you will never understand it completely (it would lose its charm if you did) and a visit to the region.
Which must be planned carefully. Yes, you may have travelled thousands of miles to get there, but trying to pack in too much is self-defeating. Only after we bought our house did I realize how much could be gleaned from an aimless dawdle in the vineyards. Charging around domaine after domaine from dawn to dusk is understandable, but a glance at their websites might be as instructive. There’s no time for reflection and no chance of picking up the message. You must take time to smell the roses.
Explore the vineyards as slowly as time permits, on foot or bicycle. Bring a map and place your feet on the ground where the monks stood 1,000 years ago. Exploration without purpose never ceases for me, marching off in whatever direction I fancy, towards a distant goal that is never reached because of diversions along the way, turning and circling and doubling back as whim dictates.
Sometimes there is a purpose, like the time I set out by bicycle to explore the Les Evocelles vineyard, part of which is planted en foule by Domaine de la Vougeraie. En foule (in a crowd) is an ancient system that sees the vines jammed into the vineyard like sardines. The rigid symmetry of the modern meter-by-meter planting in exact rows with 10,000 vines per hectare dissolves into a muddle of much greater density. Today’s vines are trained and trimmed, cared for and cosseted, supported on wires supported on stakes, and looking from a distance like the strings of a giant corset holding the hillside trim. By comparison en foule looks wild.
It was easy to spot Les Evocelles as I cycled north, its broad swathes of green standing out from the regimented lines surrounding it. Easily seen, but harder to reach. Up and up I cycled. Road gave way to track, which stopped at a blank retaining wall. I shouldered the bike and clambered over and into a vineyard, rolled it uphill to another wall and was halfway over that when a deer came out of the vines to investigate the commotion. We both froze. Startled deer stared at startled Irishman and darted away before I could introduce myself, or grab a photo. That was the highlight. Once I got to the vineyard I mooched about for a bit, took a “selfie,” found a nearby road that I had missed earlier, and enjoyed a freewheel most of the way to Morey-Saint-Denis, where I popped into the silent church for a snoop.
I love investigating the barely used yet well-maintained churches, even quieter than the villages themselves, calm within calm. I know nothing of church architecture; I simply revel in the serenity, the escape from the daily bawl. Chambolle-Musigny, the next village along from Morey, boasts a late Gothic church with impressive frescoes, though if you have children they will be more interested in the hollow-trunked lime tree nearby. I have yet to make it into the fortress-like church in Pommard, which is always locked, like our own in Santenay, whose interior is pale and pristine. Chassagne’s is more ornate and the side door is often open.
The basilica of Notre-Dame in Beaune is a grander affair and is seldom silent, so on my last visit I ducked out a side door, along a short cloister and into a tiny side chapel barely wider than an airplane, then out into brilliant sunshine in a little garden, alone save for the sound of a tenor practicing. The music soared out of an upstairs window as he sang in “full-throated ease,” unaware of his audience and invisible to me, so I loitered, an aural peeping Tom, until he finished, and then drifted off.
A wander around the back streets of Beaune is always fruitful, and I am forever amazed how quiet they are while the crowds throng the Hospices de Beaune, just a few hundred yards away. On a gable wall between Rue Rousseau des Landes and Rue des Tonneliers a mural painted by Patrick Bidaux in 1996 catches newcomers by surprise with its lifelike depiction of a film set. It celebrated the 30th anniversary of the filming of La Grande Vadrouille, a comedy about two Frenchmen helping three British airmen avoid capture during the Second World War, and it remains one of the most successful French films ever.
It is also remembered with a tiny plaque on the railings of the Meursault marie, or town hall, an imposing building, tall and gaunt and topped with a blaze of polychrome roof tiles in yellow, green, and black, an uncommon combination. Along with the church of Saint Nicolas it stands sentinel on the small hill at the center of the town, which allows both to be seen for miles around. I love the approach from Volnay, where the road takes you up almost to Monthelie, so that you are looking down on Meursault, before you shimmy left and drop down into a town of solid mansions and substantial white wines.
Reds only have a toehold in Meursault, and they run to rustic, seldom able to carry the message for more than a decade, let alone a half-century. For that you need something like the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Grands Échézeaux 1959 served to us by Aubert de Villaine over dinner with his wife Pamela. The wine was frail and the message faint, but there was still a whiff of opulence, bright eyes in a lined face. It hadn’t come, as I assumed, from the domaine’s cellar, or even his own. It had been bequeathed to him by a doctor in California.
As we sipped and savored I thought back, as ever, to the time the wine was made: at the height of the Cold War, as the space race was beginning. It was drunk when both were memories and Commander Hadfield sang “Space Oddity” from the International Space Station. It was more than just a beverage; the wine had a story to tell of people and place, a message.
I am saving my last bottle of 1969 Ramonet rouge to salute the memory of Neil Armstrong. I was sitting in the garden under the canopy in 2012 when I got the news he had died, and I was badly shaken. A young boy’s hero is invincible, immortal, ageless. Not subject to life’s normal constraints.
I well remember the murky picture and the crackled sound as Armstrong set foot on the moon and uttered the one-small-step words. I had watched, fascinated, a few days earlier as the three astronauts were propelled moonward upon a column of thunder and many years later went to hear Armstrong speak in Dublin. He dispelled all the hokum about being “difficult” and confirmed there were no green men on the moon: “I looked behind every rock.”
That last bottle will be opened at an appropriate time with appreciative friends and, hoping it is a clear night, we will raise our glasses to his memory and, as his family asked: “. . . the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.” We’ll do that.
