Come See About Burgundy
References to Burgundy in popular culture are few and far between. Nick Carraway drinks a “corky but impressive claret” in The Great Gatsby. James Bond is a fan of Château Lafite-Rothschild when he’s not downing vodka or vixens. Those of us who led a boring life in post-9/11 America may recall Julian Sark in the zany spy-thriller television show Alias and his particular affinity for Château Pétrus, the world’s greatest Merlot. Bordeaux, it seems, is the tipple of choice when one’s signaling upper-echelon palate.
The Gentlemen, a 2024 Guy Ritchie-Netflix joint, has a particularly memorable scene featuring Burgundy wine. Stanley Johnston (an affably evil Giancarlo Esposito) drinks a 1945 Domaine Romanée-Conti (DRC), one of the greatest wines ever. He then waxes poetic about the 1982 DRC, rhapsodizing on its rarity, purity, and other empyrean qualities. The scene is chortingly stupid. Johnston decants the 1945 DRC through a coffee filter, undoubtedly an infamia. Furthermore, 1982 was a middling, nigh forgettable vintage in Burgundy. It was a warm summer in eastern France. Pinot Noir yields were so plentiful that quality went out with the bathwater. It did not age well in the bottle and is long past whatever “prime” it may have achieved. (It is entirely possible that Ritchie meant the 1982 Bordeaux vintage, which is universally renowned, in which case I trust someone lost their situation in the research department.)
I encounter customers daily who march quickstep to the Burgundy section and stand, hopeful but inscrutable, before the wines. After a brief introduction and conversation about Burgundy, customers will generally purchase one. Burgundy is a lesson in how to market. Writers spill buckets of ink climbing rolling hillsides and looking out at the pastoral richness of the grand crus. They meet and converse with Aubert de Villaine, the éminence grise of DRC. It all seems like sophisticated nonchalance, as if sprezzatura - the art of making the difficult seem mundane - had been bottled for consumption. Why do we misunderstand and revere Burgundy with equal zealotry?
Pinot Noir has always been an emotional grape. Philip II, thirteenth-century king of France, banned Gamay as a “traitorous” grape in Burgundy and told the farmers to plant only Pinot Noir (spoiler alert: they did nothing of the sort). In the fourteenth century, a peasant boy failed to put aside a selection of Pinot Noir for a local noble and was beaten to death in Auxerre (today, the commercial center for Chablis). Modern farmers found that Pinot Noir captured the minutiae of terroir (that untranslatable quality of elemental expression that grapes receive by virtue of where and how they are grown) better than any other grape in Burgundy. Cultivation took off with abandon as farmers sought to create ever more complex and lofty wines.
Based on this tale, you might be excused for thinking that Burgundy has a long history of creating sumptuous vintages brimming with intangible loveliness, grace, and prestige that live on in the bottle for decades. But industrial farming and climate change have done due diligence in destroying the dreams of Burgundy farmers. Phylloxera devastated Burgundy in the early twentieth century. Put to rest any thoughts you may have about ancient vines in ancient cadastral plots. Most grapes in Burgundy are no older than perestroika. (Hence why the 1945 vintage of DRC is so beloved. It is the last to be grown on pre-phylloxera vines. DRC replanted their entire holding between 1945 and 1950).
Farmers used pesticides and fertilizers with impunity in Burgundy from the 1950s to the 1980s. Biodiversity disappeared from the fields, leaving one soil scientist to describe it as having “less life than the Sahara desert sands.” Winemakers surreptitiously added sugar to underripe vintages (unethical) or tartaric acid to overripe vintages (illegal). Others blended vintages together. By the 1990s, California and Oregon had outstripped Burgundy in quality.
Initial cures were worse than the disease. In the 1990s, Burgundian winemakers harvested grapes only when they were abundantly ripe, and added copious amounts of sulfur. The wines were fresh and vigorous in their youth and promptly fell flat in middle age. After a fifth lost decade, Burgundy began to turn around when the growth of biodynamic and organic practices coincided with the beautiful 2005 vintage. By then, however, the damage had been done.
Burgundy has always been a cash-poor region. Beginning in the 1980s, economic realities forced sale of vineyards to magnates and moguls who saw owning a piece of Burgundy as a jewel in a crown rather than a living ecosystem. As land prices rose, so did the price of harvesting, bottling, and shipping. The Parkerization of wine sucked Burgundy across its event horizon. Burgundy became an item of conspicuous consumption beginning in the 1990s. The collectionneur, a customer who buys Burgundy as a trophy because it is rare, valuable, and highly rated by some ass in a prestige-magazine review, has replaced the amateur, a customer who buys for love of wine.
Rather than recommend a trio of Burgundy wines to you, I humbly recommend a different service from The Wine Press: our expertise. Come into our stores and have a conversation about Burgundy with us. Reach out on social media with your questions and comments about this most prestigious yet misunderstood wine. In small but meaningful ways, the new generation of Burgundy winemakers are both honoring and reinventing traditions even as their way of life is transformed in economic and climatic ways. We would love nothing more than to stoke your curiosity about Burgundy as more than just a place to see and be seen. We look forward to seeing you soon.
