Burgundy is a wine for chronic romantics – those for whom hope perennially triumphs over experience. If you are a sensible person with a family, a full-time job, and a sound belief in cause and effect, you might want to avoid the Cote d’Or.
- Jay McInerney, A Hedonist in the Cellar
The subject of our first series of themed posts is Burgundy – certainly worthy of a few if not a year’s worth!
Burgundy – a place that has acquired mythic stature amongst wine lovers, a place that is probably associated more strongly with ‘Terroir’ than any other wine region, a place with complex, expensive, and completely beguiling wines.
Velvet, spices, red fruits, summer pudding, seductive, perfume, silky, delicate. Just a few of the terms that often appear in tasting notes of red Burgundies. For the whites: minerally, stony, pure, apricot, taut, racy, and nuanced, nutty, and honeyed (with age).
In one way, Burgundy is simple – there are only two varietals that you have to know: Pinot Noir for the reds, and Chardonnay for the whites. (If you leave out Gamay or Aligote, which for the most part you can ignore, with the exception of Beaujolais). Perhaps it needed one dimension of simplicity because the rest of it can be somewhat complicated. Or perhaps it grew to what it is today because it could focus intensely on getting those two right.
As it turns out, you don’t need to know very much about all the complications to like or even love Burgundy. (And Burgundy does inspire passion — beware!) There are some rules of thumb that if you follow will let you enjoy some great bottles and you can take your time learning. And no, that doesn’t always mean spending a great deal of money, although that is easy to do where Burgundy is concerned.
Fragmented may be the term that best describes Burgundy’s organizational structure. It actually is quite logical once you become familiar with it, but it is without a doubt fragmented. The land is divided not into large estates, as in Bordeaux, but into small parcels. Each piece of the land, along with the wines it yields, has been observed and classified. The monks back in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had the time, wherewithal, and inclination, to painstakingly catalog much of Burgundy, and to observe the quality of the wines coming from each small division of land. As with most other wine classifications, that of Burgundy can be thought of as a pyramid. At the base of the pyramid are the regional wines, the ‘Bourgongne Rouge’ and ‘Bourgogne Blanc’ (along with a few others, but the point is that the grapes from wines that have this classification can come from anywhere in Burgundy). At the next level are the Village or Commune wines – wines that are made from grapes within a particular commune. Then come wines made from grapes from particular vineyards — plots, parcels, sites, or climats – pick the term that appeals most to you.
In addition to the land itself being divided and categorized, Burgundy came under the Napoleonic Law, which directed that land inheritance be shared equally between all children. So, each plot has been further sub-divided with each generation, often resulting in many owners (the oft-quoted example is Clos Vougeout which has over 80 owners). The exceptions to this, where a single vineyard is owned by just one owner or domaine, is called a ‘monopole’.
Because the domaines vary to large degrees in quality, one of the best ways of ensuring that you are going to get a reasonable bottle is to know it comes from a reasonable producer (a domaine or negociant). Where to start? As any trip to a wine store will show, there are many many Burgundy producers.
Stay tuned for the promised rules of thumb.
Tags: Burgundy
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