BLOTTO IN BURGUNDY….
“You can swallow if you like, you know” chides Bruno Jaivrand of the Beaune tourist office. “But, if you do, it becomes hard to remember which wine is which after you’ve tasted a dozen or so…” Yesh indeed. But, hunched deep within the cellars of Maison Champy, the oldest of the town’s great wine companies, I’m reluctant to see this particular mouthful go to waste.
The French have always had an essentially scatalogical approach to life, and it’s no more appropriately illustrated than in a display of correct wine tasting etiquette. This reverred excercise offers all the visual and aural appeal of third-world hotel bedroom plumbing: The chest-wound sucking of air through liquid, the Dizzy Gillespie cheek inducing sloosh, the contemplative humming of trapped air in the system, and the measured dribble of expulsion into copper spitoon funnels. Now, I never made it past ‘O’ level spitting but this, I gather, is how it’s done; so here goes… Ah, and a white shirt too; pity.
We’ve come to Beaune in the hope of easing the exposed elbows of comprehension at least some of the way through the vast nettle-bed of complexity that is the Burgundy wine trade in time for the annual Hospices de Beaune wine auction. It’s early June, and the auction’s in November. Time enough, perchance, to learn enough for a considered purchase or two…
The combined efforts of Eurostar and a Lexus 400 conspire to put the Burgundy region well within a relatively relaxed day’s march of London. The Eurostar deserves mention for three reasons: Firstly, it only takes three hours to travel from Waterloo to Paris. Secondly, when in France it travels at a face bending 300kph the whole way. Whereas, in England, it wibbles through Kent at a stout 30mph stopping on a regular basis to encourage you to enjoy ever shifting pastoral views of assorted livestock which the French refuse to eat (a first). And thirdly, you pass through the worlds newest oxymoron; Ashford International. The man who dreamt that station name up deserves a medal.
The Lexus deserves mention for neatly bifurcatring the home and away efforts of the train in its ability to travel from Paris
to Beaune and back at an effortless, and highly illegal, 200kph. Without once getting nicked.
That’s nowhere near top whack though: The 260bhp, 4.0 litre V8 at the sharp end consistently refuses to utter a word under the stresses and strains of day to day driving. You’ll need to be hunting down acceleration figures of 0-60mph in 7.4 seconds and a top speed of 155mph, before anything audible assaults the beautifully soundproofed cabin. The only way to generate serious noise at the speeds we’re managing is to open a window, or crank up a top notch CD system boasting more speakers than the average three living rooms.
Beaune, situated smack in the middle of France some 25 miles south of Dijon, first came into being in around 52BC, when a bunch of Gauls, with a beady, clairvoyant’s eye on the tourist wallet, christened their early efforts with mud and straw Benen, after the Celtic sun god. Since then, the 7th century construction of an almost Barbarian proof city wall, the subsequent adoption of the town by the Dukes of Burgundy as home to their palace and parliament, the burgeoning Beaune based wine trade, and a lousy exchange rate have all conspired to push prices ever higher.
Expensive, then, but beautiful: Don’t be put off by the industrial estate introduction extended you en route from the autoroute. Eventually you’ll hit a one way ring road circumnavigating well preserved ramparts doing their best to look grim and foreboding under Benen’s benign patronage. Here, at every set of traffic lights, you may practice five lane drag racing against the locals. You will lose. The man who doesn’t fear death will, after all, always win. Any subsequent left turn through the fortifications is an instant shot of Prozac though; the old town, a somnambulant haven, takes life at a snooze.
The Hospices of Beaune started life on August 4th, 1443: There’s a small, painless history lesson involved here, so pay attention at the back… The Treaty of Arras in 1435 saw a final reconciliation between Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, and King Charles V11 (the Grumpy, one assumes). With it came the end of the Hundred Years War, and chaos. Open pillaging was the order of the day and the peasants, who’d had enough, hid in fortified towns and chateaux with subsequent neglect to crops. Bring on famine; rats and such.
So, Nicholas Rolin, the Duke’s Chancellor, decided to build a hospital to tend to the starving, diseased peasants, some of whom had naturally grown quite poorly on an exclusively rat derived diet. Odd idea this; you can’t eat hospitals. Nonetheless, build it he did and, as the Hotel Dieu, it still stands today, having seen unninterupted, active service as a hospital until 1971 when something a tad more up to date swung into action just round the corner.
These days, the elegant courtyard of the Hotel Dieu echoes gently to nothing more than the listless squeaking of dozens of little copper weather vane flags perched atop every available roof, dormer and spire, mingled with the mislaid handbag mutterings of sporadic busloads of tottering, blue-rinse biddies on tour.
Back in the rat resurgent good old days, however, the place must have been a far noisier affair: The main ward, still perfectly preserved, has 28 beds. These are cunningly laid out in two long rows of 14, head to toe, parallel to the walls but with enough space behind for ministering nurses to zoom efficiently up and down twixt wall and bed. Curtains on both sides of bed cubicles could either expose patients to visitors, or shield them from other inmates at treatment time. Which, considering treatment in those days consisted almost exclusively of bleeding as a universal cure-all, is considerate.
One end of this vast ward is decked out as a chapel. And, though it must have been a trifle disturbing trying to be seriously ill with the choir practicing your own personnal requiem mass up the sharp end, at least the din would have drowned out the treatment induced yells of the inhabitants. Yells aplenty too, judging by the venemous looking instruments preserved in glass cases hither and thither: Huge syringes with all manner of long, curling accessories; on a strict don’t-need-to-know basis, I quickly gave up trying to mentally match orifice with instrument, and fled.
But it wasn’t just the poor who had free access to the famed Nursing Sisters of Beaune. Local toffs were also wont to pitch up, taking advantage of some first rate brow mopping and a jolly good leak. And grateful gentry, having been bled senseless would, assuming they survived the process, often donate parcels of land to the hospital in thanks. Which is how the Hospices today comes to comprise the Hotel Dieu itself,
the new hospital, and some 57 hectares (over 140 acres) of absolutely prime vineyards.
The first wine auctions took place in 1859, when 189 barrels -standard wine currency, known as ‘pieces’, always oak, each holding 300 bottles worth- went under the hammer. Today, a somewhat bigger affair (759 pieces were sold in 1993 -227,700 bottles), the auctions still take place annually, always on the 3rd Sunday in November. The sale is crucial to Beaune’s wine dominated community; being the first and largest each year, it tends to set the annual price for the entire region’s wines. After the auction, purchased ‘pieces’ may not, by law, be moved more than a 30km radius from Beaune for the next 6 months, until the weather is suitably clement not to upset the contents through either excessive cold or heat.
Thirsty work, history. So were off to Maison Champy, founded in 1720 and the oldest of the great wine companies in Burgundy, for a good, solid drink. Champy’s Catherine Kurdziel whisks us straight down to over a kilometre of winding 15th century cellars. The smell is overpowering; the mouldy warmth of slowly maturing must all pervasive. Wine, wine everywhere and, dammit, not a drop to drink…
The cellars were first created by a monastic order and, vows of silence and hangovers making particularly aposite bedfellows, the clergy pretty much had the monopoly on wine production before the revolution. Indeed, they’re wholly responsible for the nature of today’s Beaune based wines: At the end of the 14th century the Monks of Citeaux told Philip (the good one, remember?) to try the Pinot Noir grape instead of the Gamay, which used to be the norm. He agreed with their prognosis that it was better, and promptly ordered the uprooting of all Gamay grapes in favour of the Pinot Noir.
Talking to Catherine in encouragingly daft Franglais it soon becomes clear that, compared to Bordeaux wines, the Burgundy wine trade is a minefield of complexity. Straightforward, Chateau bottled wine is not the norm here, and about 70% of the annual Burgundy harvest is sold through merchants known as ‘negociants’. Furthermore, said merchants may acquire the wine at an early stage in production (anything from grapes themselves through to ‘pieces’), thus becoming ‘negociants-eleveurs’; having raised the wine through the critical stages of maturation themselves
before bottling. Indeed, even wines bearing a Chateau label may actually come from vineyards owned by a ‘negociant’; Pommard, for example.
It gets worse. The Cote d’Or, with Beaune at its heart, may essentially be split into four regions: To the north, the Cote de Nuits, specialising in Pinot Noir based reds. To the south, the slightly more extensive Cote de Beaune, favouring the production of white wines from the Chardonnay grape. And, to the west of each area respectively, we find the Hautes Cotes de Nuit and Hautes Cotes de Beaune. However, there are, of course, hundreds of individual, variously sized vineyards on the tiered slopes of the Cote d’Or: The French Revolution saw the break up of the big baronial and ecclesiastic domaines into numerous smaller holdings. That trend was later exaggerated by the practice of dividing inheritances, and today, dozens of growers and merchants own variously sized chunks of each individual vineyard.
So, whereas in the Bordeaux area 18,000 growers share 275,000 acres of land, a whopping 30,000 Burgundy growers have to make do with a scant 112,500 acres. What this means to the likes of you and I, bumbling down to the off-license in search of a little light double vision, is that the grapes of absolutely adjacent vines from one corner of just one vineyard may well be ultimately presented to us under different labels, at a different price, with an entirely different taste… On second thoughts, I’ll never sort it all out in time to make my choice at auction; not, that is, without a whole bunch of tasting first.
A short, satisfying, and suitably noisy slurp with Catherine sees us off amongst the vineyards in search of further tastings. We ease the big Lexus, queitly parched, through a sea of immaculately coiffeured vines. Blighty may be caught in the grips of extra sweater weather but here, by mid afternoon, Benen’s handing out a right basting. No problem; the Lexus is loaded with goodies: Full air conditioning with seperate temperature controls for driver and passenger ensure a friction free, his ‘n’ her motoring environment. The same goes for the seating arrangements; leather clad front seats and steering wheel are electrically controlled to offer a wider range of positions than the Karma Sutra. And twin, programmable memory switches keep the cabin cuss free if the wife was the last one behind the wheel. After the fury of the Autoroute, cossetted wafting is now the order of the day.
Aloxe-Corton, Savigny les Beaune, Pommard, Volnay, Meursault, Puligny-Montrachet (hyphens are common since the days when various villages earned the right to append the name of their best wine to that of the locale); every village is awash with billboards offering the motorist the opportunity to become somewhat drunk in charge. Turns out, however, that most ‘caves’ advertised are not cellars at all but merely rooms full of a particular negociant’s produce for sale. But one such kindly soul in Chassagne-Montrachet directs us, with the promise of a benign owner and splendid cellars, up the road to Chateau de la Maltroye.
Here we find Jean-Pierre Cournut, who has given up his career as an aeronautical engineer designing,er, rifle bullets to become the third generation of Cournuts dedicated to wine production. He owns 40 acres of vines spread, naturally, over dozens of different vineyards, producing about 100,000 bottles af wine a year of which, he is proud to tell us, 75% is premier Cru. He explains that of all appellation controlled wine in the region, 65% bears a regional label, 23% that of a commune, 11% is Premier Cru, and just 1% has earned the right to brand itself Grand Cru. And that’s quite enough learning about the stuff. mercifully, he offers us a drink…
We pant off to the cellars, and he dusts off an as yet unlabelled bottle of his own 1992 Chassagne-Montrachet. Excercising superhuman restraint, we manage to asses colour (White. Definitely) and smell (Wine) with him before necking the contents of the glass at an entirely unseemly rate. “This is very fruity, without much acid” explains Jean-Pierre, “more like a desert wine. Can you taste the passion fruit in the finish? Er… “’89 and ’90 are my favourite years though” he continues quickly, knowing a pair of Phillistines when he sees them. “The ’89 is good with a little grilled fish, and the ’90 delicious with Fois Gras”. Committing said pearls to memory, we take our leave for an evening of aimless pottering through acres of verdant vineyard back towards Beaune.
The Cote d’Or isn’t a large area, and I’ll never understand how they squeeze so much wine out of so few grapes. The process certainly seems desperately labour intensive: Mechanical aid takes the form of shoals of diminutive tractors-on-stilts, which tiptoe clear above the vines brandishing sprays and various interchangeable devices like giant barbers clippers for the administering of anything from a light trim to the full
short-back-and-sides. But ensuring a high yield clearly demands incredible attention to detail and the fields are full of walnut-faced labour inching through the undergrowth examining, tweaking and tying every frond. Thirsty work. Which reminds me; further tasing I think…
I can see now, how easily Burgundy could become, and already is, an obsession for so many. But, if you do wish to get involved, my advice is to go to Beaune for a short holiday – six months should just about do it – and taste yourself senseless before filling every available inch of the car for the clink home.