Love Hate Burgundy

At the risk of showing my age, there used to be a time when me and my very few wine friends (I was what you would call a wine loner) used to take solace in knowing that our dearly beloved Burgundy would never approach the ridiculous prices of Bordeaux. Certainly, there were specific wines (Leroy, DRC, Jayer et al.) which were priced truly out of reach of a young sommelier’s income, but I was still able to consciously forego some comforts and conveniences in life to squirrel away bottles of Rousseau Chambertin, Mugnier Les Amoureuses and Lafon Montrachet. After 2005, that started to change, bumping up again in 2009 and picking up speed halfway through the 2010s as Burgundy experienced a string of fine vintages starting from 2015 onwards. Demand increased every year, coupled with crop-reducing frosts (particularly in the Côte de Beaune) across the early part of the last decade; desirability and pricing started to rise at eye-watering rates.

In this little village, some of the world’s most expensive Chardonnay is made and matured

We have often bemoaned, in private, the shifting landscape of Burgundy pricing, from a restaurant and hospitality perspective, highlighting in particular the conundrum that it creates for young wine professionals. On the one hand, we have tiny quantities of wines widely considered to be benchmarks - pinnacles of possible achievement with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay - wines which every serious winemaker and sommelier should know and understand. Yet, on the other hand, we have made them so incredibly difficult to get that mere bottles are fought over by an increasing number of wealthy collectors and enthusiasts across the globe. Aside from the phenomenal prices being asked now, not only for the legendary few, but entire strata of good producers and good terroirs spanning almost all the wines worth knowing; we also have the issue of access. Being able to get your hands on these precious bottles involves a long and frustrating process of knowing the right people, the right times to ask, and loading the dice in your favour by spending large on other items with specific importers to be offered any of these wines in the first place.

Add to that the layered patchwork of quality tiers and shared ownership between estates and various rental/fruit arrangements and you have the most complex web of individual wine bottlings anywhere in the world. All of this further reinforces the difficulty of securing specific wines as most of these combinations result in very small production of any given producer and site. It is a common experience for a new-ish Burgundy lover or student of wine to finally make it onto the list for one of the region’s long roll call of ‘allocated’ producers, only to discover that their purchases for the year are limited to a handful of bottles of the most basic, entry-level wine, or if they’re lucky, one single highly-priced bottle of something turned down by another buyer who either couldn’t afford it that year or who had read a review giving the wine a score below the average for that particular cuvée. That kind of purchasing behaviour would be worthy of a blog rant of its own, but it does ironically allow a new person onto the tiny lifeboat of rare Burgundy, already crammed full of collectors clutching their precious bottles.

For the incumbents and risen stars, it places an immense pressure to perform, every vintage, and with every cuvée. It also creates the unenviable situation where a producer has to decide whether to follow the price trends and increase the price of her wines to the market (thus fuelling the upward spiral but getting to benefit directly from the region’s rising fortunes) or to stand their ground, keep prices stable and instead allow profiteers, traders and secondary market players to make bank on the rampant auction prices of these rare wines. Either way, the final purchaser is paying a high sum, the only difference being who gets (or deserves) the premiums along the way. For a new entrant, looking to join the pantheon of Burgundian greatness, it is even more daunting - prospective buyers will examine your pedigree and winemaking history closely, looking for multiple data point of confirmation that your wines will be worth investing in, and that is not to mention the nigh-impossible task of securing fruit from good sites or god-forbid, try to purchase actual vineyard land without a sizeable inheritance to lean on. After all, you’re competing against established, highly-sought after producers who are squeezed for wine every vintage and looking for opportunities to secure more stable supply of fruit. Looking back at the many many bottles of Burgundy I opened and tasted as a wine student, it is easy to understand how we got here - a producer like Coche-Dury or Roulot’s entry-level wines are traded in the secondary market at prices not far off the prices for an ostensibly top premier cru or even lesser grand cru from a large, average quality negociant or rustic, under-perfoming producer. As many have said before me, Burgundy is a minefield. Even as recently as the late 90s and early 2000s, it was relatively easy to encounter entirely boring or downright disappointing bottles of Burgundy bearing famous appellations. Thankfully, quality has improved a lot across the board over the past decade so bad bottles are getting less common, but boring is still quite prevalent.

Putting aside the madness of pricing, price trends and the secondary market for now, we return to the hospitality professional and young winemaker who is entering the fine wine end of their relative careers, intent on being the best they can be, but also faced with terminology and references which are entirely out of their reach. Consider for a moment, what we mean when we say that a wine is “Burgundian", or that a particular Pinot Noir possesses “Chambolle-like qualities”. I would hazard a guess that the writer of those words are not referring to one of the thin, slightly rustic, unbalanced and drying examples of Chambolle which constitutes the majority of what is available to someone just trying their luck in an average wine store. Yet, for those without special access, the boring bottle is likely what they’ll end up buying when they embark on a self-guided quest to understand Burgundy by way of tasting. It is no wonder that a miasma of pretension and ‘the emperor’s new clothes’ permeates through the world of wine…. “oh, you bought THAT wine? That’s the wrong wine, you should have bought THIS wine if you wanted to try a good (fill in the blank)"…” Oh, really, well F*@K you very much.

Hopefully without implying any magnanimity, this is one of the main reasons why we started Burgundy Passport in the first place. Now into its fourth year, we have tried to bring together benchmark examples which underpin the conversations relevant to individual styles and villages of Burgundy. During development of the summer programme, it dawned on us that we haven’t actually covered the broadest tier of quality for the region, Bourgogne. Being as broad as it is, it has the widest range of quality possible, from one producer (like Mugneret-Gibourg) producing a Bourgogne rouge from a single parcel of estate-grown fruit which falls within the village of hallowed Vosne-Romanée; to a larger negoce blending wines together from as far afield as Chablis to Beaujolais; to the increasingly confusing mini-tier of Géographique Complémentaire, including sections of the region which are treated as separate appellations of their own, such as the Hautes-Côtes, Auxerre, Côte d’Or; the myriad of Mâcons which technically exist in this tier but are governed by different rules, and of course because it is Burgundy, a clutch of individual vineyards that are allowed to append their names to Bourgogne specifically. (Yes, confusing, I know!)

Despite the alphabet soup that is Bourgogne appellation, there is much worth discovering here and prices at this level are still largely reasonable. Once relegated to house wines or restaurant glass pours, it has gradually become the hotbed for actual drinking by Burgundy lovers as both quality and price has grown (in some cases. tripled) over the past 20 years. (As an example, a good Bourgogne blanc or rouge at today’s pricing would sit on a restaurant list at anything from $18 to $25 a glass - a tier which used to be inhabited by village level or lesser 1er Cru wines previously.) Within this context, Burgundy’s rules and buying tips exist as a microcosm - it is as important to understand the overwhelming impact of the producer, and also the noticeable influence of vintage, at Bourgogne level. But due to the very broad catchment area of Bourgogne, it also allows the treasure-hunter a chance to dig deep and discover just 'where’ a particular Bourgogne comes from. Roulot’s hails from ~2.5ha of 40 year old vines around Meursault, for instance, which makes a big difference in terms of terroir, but also vine age and farming. Comparative tasting at Bourgogne level (with the caveat of having done one’s research first), also gives us the most cost-effective way of experiencing that crucial Burgundy quality of producer-style. Despite ostensibly being all about terroir (with most of the wines made of the same grape for each colour), it is surprising just how much influence a vigneron and winemaker has on the final wine. The earlier one knows this, the better too - just because a particular domaine is coveted by the fine wine community at large does not mean that their specific style is actually to your taste. There is every possibility that you could end up with a string of vintages of hard-to-find wine in your cellar which you don’t actually like (I’ve been there).

One more point about Burgundy, and one which often works against the overall classification system, is that the quality hierarchy only works within set parameters, it is no guarantee of enjoyment. A humble Bourgogne can delivery plenty of joy, and even that elusive Burgundian quality of the ethereal. It is not the exclusive domain of the grands crus. An enduring and formative memory of Burgundy which remains indelibly etched in my mind is enjoying a bottle of Bourgogne rouge 1999 from Leroy (not even a Domaine wine) - the sheer drinkability, exuberance and soaring qualities which Burgundy-lovers seek so zealously in thousand-dollar bottles were present there in that (then-affordable) bottle of humble Bourgogne. And it was not an isolated occurrence; I would encounter surprisingly good bottles of so-called ‘lesser’ wines from good producers with reasonable regularity, yet find those characters missing in more collectible cuvées. This is not to say that the appellation system does not work, but it was designed for another purpose - that of cellaring potential and reliable greatness. It has often been said that a grand cru site will reduce the fluctuations which result from vintage variability and it serves to lessen the impact of a less-fastidious producer, thus allowing them to make at least passably good wine despite their errors. I have found that this is only partly true - a careless or less-skilled producer can certainly make passable wine from a grand cru, but we really shouldn’t be satisfied with passable in a region where there exists an expectation of greatness, and given the exorbitant price of land under vine in a grand cru, it is inexcusable.

Anyway, enough of this long rambling rant - to finish on a positive note (and finally, to justify why I’ve written this long rant), we’ve put together a friendlier class for our first Burgundy Passport of 2022 - an Introduction to Bourgogne. In the strictest sense, it is looking at this wide-ranging appellation of Bourgogne (described earlier), but in a broader sense, it does serve as a great vehicle to acquaint oneself with the important concepts of Burgundy as a whole. See you there!

Stephen