The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture (14 page)

Burgundy has always had its loyalists, of course, and they've tended to be fanatically partisan. Indeed, among a small, well-heeled segment of the wine-drinking public, Burgundy has long enjoyed cultish devotion; like surfers roaming the globe in search of the perfect wave, Burgundy devotees spend countless hours and jaw-dropping amounts of cash chasing the elusive, infatuating “Burgundy high.” While usually not obnoxious about it, these Burgundy aficionados believe that they possess particularly refined palates and have found a “higher truth” in wine.

And just as there are Burg fanatics, so there are equally impassioned Burg-phobes. These are drinkers who have no patience for Burgundy's Byzantine complexity and who find the wines too light, too dainty for their taste. They generally view the Burgundy crowd as masochists and cranks. The leading Burgundy basher has always been Robert Parker. Over the years he has lavished high scores on many Burgundies, but they are not his preferred style, and he was never Burgundy's preferred critic. Indeed, he eventually became persona non grata there and had to hire an assistant to cover the region. The experience left him nursing a grudge: he seems to go out of his way to bait the Burgundy faithful. If a Burgundy vintage falls short in his view, he tends to dismiss it in sweeping, contemptuous terms, something he almost never does with feebler years in, say, Bordeaux or the Rhône.

But when it comes to Burgundy—and this is perhaps the most telling sign of his waning influence—Parker is spitting into the wind these days. That's because Burgundy has lately become the touchstone for many wine enthusiasts. It is often said in wine circles that all roads lead to Burgundy, and never has that been truer than now, when more and more wine enthusiasts seem to be falling under Burgundy's spell. One reason is the growing popularity of Pinot Noir. While fine Pinots are being produced in California, Oregon, and New Zealand, the finest ones still come from Burgundy, and it is fair to say that once turned on to the pleasures of Chambolle-Musigny and Volnay, most Pinot enthusiasts never turn back. And there are a lot of Pinot enthusiasts these days. In 1986 the acclaimed British wine writer Jancis Robinson published a book called
Vines, Grapes, and Wines
in which she observed that “to the great majority of conscious wine-drinking palates in the world today, top quality red wine is Cabernet Sauvignon.” I don't think she could make the same claim today, or at least such an unequivocal one. Even before the Great Recession, many American collectors were turning away from Bordeaux and Napa and embracing Burgundy, a development that was part of the broader Pinot Noir boom—a boom that has endured even through the downturn. Does anyone care these days if some hot new Cabernet project is launched in Napa? Not as far as I can tell. An exciting new source of Pinot, however, is sure to generate buzz. For many consumers, Pinot, and especially Pinot in its Burgundian incarnation, is now the gold standard of red wine grapes, and this is surely one big reason that Burgundy has eclipsed Bordeaux.

But Burgundy wouldn't be basking in so much affection these days were it not for the fact that the region has been in the throes of a quality revolution over the past two decades. Parker's attitude toward Burgundy was formed in the 1970s and '80s (and one could argue that it has remained firmly anchored in the past); back then, the quality was spotty, and you'd have to wade through a number of thin, acidic, ungenerous wines to get to that one gem. That is emphatically no longer the case; sensational wines are literally falling off the vines these days in Burgundy.

One reason for the turn in fortune is the improved weather. Climate change poses a long-term threat to Burgundy, but for now it is a boon. In the past twenty years, there has really been only one truly bad vintage, 1994. Every other year has produced at least good wines, and a number of years—1996, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2009, 2010—have yielded outstanding ones. But the weather is just one factor; better farming is another. The best producers in Burgundy these days—and there are a number of superb ones—are fanatically meticulous farmers. The axiom that great wines are made in the vineyard, not the cellar? Those are truly the words that Burgundy now lives by, and the combination of high-quality fruit and skilled winemaking is yielding consistently excellent wines. It is truly a golden age of Burgundian winemaking, and this is another reason so many people are gravitating toward Burgundy.

But there's a third reason, too, and I think it goes some way to explaining why Burgundy has eclipsed Bordeaux in the hearts and minds of so many: the cultural differences between Burgundy and Bordeaux. Burgundy, with its unpretentious farming culture, represents what we want wine to be; Bordeaux, ever more corporatized and commodified, represents what we don't want it to become. True, Bordeaux has always been the most commercial of wine regions, with a brisk international trade in its wines for centuries. However, the commercialism has been ratcheted up dramatically in recent years. Lots of modest family-run wineries exist on the periphery of Bordeaux, but the limelight belongs to the big-name châteaus. The global wealth boom of the 1990s and early 2000s helped send demand and prices for the most sought-after wines spiraling and also brought an influx of new investors. In his aptly titled book
What Price Bordeaux?
, Benjamin Lewin notes that over the past two decades, wealthy industrialists and big companies have been the fastest-growing category of château owner and today account for roughly one-third of all the classified growths. Lewin says these individuals and entities generally view wine less as a beverage than as a brand, less a source of pleasure than a source of revenue or long-term capital gains.

Burgundy has always been a world apart from Bordeaux. While the Bordelais classified their wines by price, the Burgundians did it on the basis of
terroir
—on what they believed to be the intrinsic quality of each vineyard, as revealed over the centuries. Burgundy's
grand cru
and
premier cru
designations, which were formally introduced in the 1930s, are aesthetic judgments, not commercial benchmarks. Bordeaux has historically been quite affluent and cosmopolitan, a magnet for rich outsiders, foreigners as well as people from other parts of France. In Burgundy, prosperity is a recent phenomenon; up until the 1980s, it was a fairly hardscrabble place (which could explain the lack of rapacious pricing: growers who remember the lean times would rather forgo a few extra euros than risk losing customers—a depression mentality, you could say). It has traditionally been a very insular one, too, composed almost entirely of small, multigenerational family farms. In his book
Bordeaux/Burgundy: A Vintage Rivalry
, Jean-Robert Pitte nicely summarized the atmospheric distinctions:

Exaggerating only slightly, it is fair to say that in Bordeaux they have university degrees, speak English (and sometimes another foreign language), read the daily financial news, travel frequently to Paris and abroad, dress in the style of English gentlemen farmers, and play tennis or even polo; in short, their manners are sophisticated. Most of their counterparts in Burgundy, by contrast, have no higher education, dress in a rustic or sporty way, in any case without any concern for fashion or affectation, and proudly display their peasant manners. The former spend their time mainly in the office and rely on employees to do the work of the vineyard and the cellar; the latter, even when they have assistance or hired staff, take pleasure in getting out of the office and rolling up their sleeves.

These differences seem more pronounced of late. While Bordeaux is increasingly corporate, its proprietors further removed than ever from the winemaking process, the overwhelming majority of Burgundian estates are still mom-and-pop operations, and the region's agrarian way of life has become even more entrenched. In fact, over the past forty years or so, Burgundy has moved in the direction of greater artisanship. Up until the early 1970s, more than 90 percent of all Burgundies on the market were
négociant
bottlings.
Négociants
are large merchant houses, such as Louis Jadot and Louis Latour, that buy unfinished wines or grapes from growers throughout Burgundy and bottle the finished products under their own labels (some of them also have vineyards of their own). Some of Burgundy's most venerated names—Romanée-Conti, Rousseau, d'Angerville—started bottling their own wines in the early twentieth century, but they were a very distinct minority. For the overwhelming majority of winemakers and vineyard owners in Burgundy, it made much more sense to sell their grapes or unfinished wines to the
négociants
, as their wines wouldn't have sold for enough money to justify the added costs associated with bottling or the added risk of having to sell their wines directly to consumers. That equation began to change in the early 1970s, and it has now changed completely. While the
négociants
are still around and are actually thriving these days, estate bottling is now the norm among quality producers in Burgundy and is really a prerequisite to being taken seriously as a producer.

So Burgundy has gone in the direction of greater smallness in recent decades. In contrast to Bordeaux, winery owners in Burgundy almost always do the winemaking themselves, and these days the amount of time that a vintner spends in the fields is seen as a measure of his or her commitment to quality. The idea that great wines are made in the vineyard is now Burgundy's mantra, and its best producers work their vines with a fastidiousness that would put their fathers and grandfathers to shame. With Burgundy, you are not drinking a luxury label owned by a guy in a Brioni suit but rather a wine made by a farmer dressed in boots, and for me and many others this authenticity, the sense that the wines are somehow closer to the earth, is also part of Burgundy's attraction relative to Bordeaux.

Above all, I suspect that Burgundy's growing allure and Bordeaux's corresponding decline is a statement about what people value in their glass. The wines we feel most passionate about are those that offer not only compelling aromas and flavors but a little romance and soul, too. It is hard to discern these qualities in most Bordeaux nowadays; however good the wines may taste, they have become so bound up in prices, scores, and luxury marketing that the romance and soul have been drained out of them. For me, and I think for an increasing number of wine drinkers, what appeals about Burgundy is not only the excellence of the wines but the charm and character of the place itself.

W
HAT'S
K
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A
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URGUNDIES?

Burgundy is not an unambiguous success story. While this may be a golden age for the region's red wines, it is a very different story with the white wines. Beginning with the 1995 vintage, large numbers of white Burgundies have fallen victim to premature oxidation; wines that should still taste young and full of promise are turning up dead in the bottle. They have the color of apple juice, smell like Sherry, and are undrinkable. I have a fairly extensive white Burgundy collection, and almost without fail now, the wines I have from the period 1996 through 2002 are kaput—and 2002 is by no means the last year affected by the “premox” problem. In fact, the problem is so bad that a lot of collectors no longer buy white Burgundies, or they choose to drink them very young in order to mitigate the risk.