The Juice (22 page)

Sem d’Angerville was a painter and an engraver who studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before inheriting the estate from an uncle. Along with the manor house, it included some of the best vineyards in Volnay, notably the Clos des Ducs, a dramatically sloping, southeast-facing plot enclosed within an ancient stone wall and blessed with a spring mid-slope, providing hydric relief in drought years such as 2003, when his grandson took
over. (If you can find the 2003, buy it.) Clos des Ducs is one of the benchmark Burgundies, more powerful than the typical Volnay but more delicate than, say, a Chambertin, and is capable of aging and improving for decades. (A 1964 that Guillaume opened for me was sensational.) The other desert-island wine of the appellation would be Lafarge’s Clos des Chênes, from a midslope vineyard on the south side of the village, although there are many other excellent vineyards, and producers, in Volnay.

Hubert de Montille will be familiar to viewers of the film
Mondovino
as the crusty defender of old-school traditions and the scourge of alleged American critical influence on French wine making. His Volnays were indeed classical to the point of being austere, requiring decades to reveal their shy charms. Montille still totters around the village but finally turned over the reins to his son Étienne in 2001, and the latter has made these wines much more accessible without, so far as I can tell, resorting to any technological harlotry. The Premier Cru Taillepieds is the domaine’s signature wine.

The other big marquee in Volnay is Domaine de la Pousse d’Or, which made a name for itself in the last century under the leadership of Gérard Potel, who was the third driver in the car pool that transported young Guillaume and Frédéric, along with his own daughter, Agathe, to school in Beaune. Potel’s first vintage from the vineyard called Bousse d’Or, the 1964, is one of Burgundy’s modern legends. After his sudden death in 1997 the domaine went through a shaky period of experimentation, but it has recently recovered its form.

The 2009 vintage was a great one in Volnay, and throughout Burgundy, a real French kiss of a year, in which all but the top wines will be approachable and even wildly flirtatious on release, unlike the similarly heralded 2005, which at the moment is wearing a chastity belt. Even the basic Village wines—the ones labeled
simply Volnay—are delicious, ripe, and complex. The 2008 isn’t quite as come-hither, although many connoisseurs love this vintage, and many winemakers feel that these wines, while slightly less ripe, are more nuanced and more reflective of their specific sites of origin, which is what we pay for in Burgundy.

Carved in stone above the doorway at Château de Savigny, and elsewhere in the little town of Savigny-lès-Beaune, is the motto “Les vins de Savigny sont nourrissants, théologiques et morbifuges.” I’m not certain what it means for a wine to be “theological”; “nourishing” seems like a comparatively safe and mundane claim. As for that last adjective, the Burgundy expert Jasper Morris suggests “it means either disease chasing or perhaps death defying.” Whatever it means, it’s a pretty grand claim for a wine that hasn’t had much hype in the years since that inscription was first chiseled in the seventeenth century. Savigny-lès-Beaune is one of the less celebrated appellations of Burgundy, in part because the village is off the beaten path, located several kilometers from Route 74, the north-south artery of the Côte d’Or. This obscurity makes for some great values.

Directly across the street from the Château de Savigny, now an airplane and motorcycle museum, is the winery of Domaine Simon Bize, housed in a sprawling shed, presided over by fifty-something Patrick Bize, the diminutive, laconic fourth-generation proprietor. His great-grandfather founded the domaine in 1880, one of three consecutive Simon Bizes, and he inherited it, somewhat reluctantly, in 1972. “I didn’t even like wine,” he told me, “and I didn’t want to work in the vineyards or the cellar.” Fortunately, he grew to love his birthright, especially the vineyard work. He seems to know every vine on his patchwork, nearly fifty-acre domaine.

For many years, the Bize Savignys have been an insider’s secret
for budget-conscious connoisseurs. Patrick isn’t prone to hype—he doesn’t say much of anything as he hands me samples of his 2009s from tank and cask, or later when we drink some older wines in front of a roaring fire in his office. When pressed about the 2009 vintage, about which most critics and winemakers are rapturous, he ventures only that “it’s a good vintage.”

Bize doesn’t do anything cutting-edge in the winery—vinification being pretty traditional and straightforward—but his yields are always well below those allowed by the authorities, which makes for wines with more concentration, and he’s willing to pick later than his neighbors and risk losing his crop to ensure ripeness. That wasn’t really a problem in the warm 2009 vintage, where even the basic Village wines from less-favored exposures got more than enough rays to ripen, and even Patrick’s less conscientious neighbors managed to produce some pretty voluptuous juice. That said, even in a hot vintage Patrick’s wines can be forbidding in their youth—especially the Premiers Crus—and generally need a few years of bottle age after release.

Traditionally, Savigny was known to produce a light and delicate red wine, and it cultivated this image to the point of blending white grapes in with the reds when the wines were too robust, according to the importer Peter Wasserman. In recent years, the reds have gained weight, in keeping with contemporary tastes, and white grapes, grown on the mostly limestone-rich sites, are vinified separately to create some tasty Burgundy and Savigny Blancs—not so surprising when you consider the proximity of the hill of Corton just north of the appellation, source of the majestic Corton-Charlemagne.

Another overachiever in the neighborhood is Domaine Pavelot, now run by Hugues Pavelot with plenty of help from his father, Jean-Marc, genial giants who tower above their neighbors and outperform most of them. Hugues, who did a stage in Australia before returning home, is the fourth generation of Pavelots to tend
vines in Savigny. The Pavelots’ Dominode is often considered the first among the many Premiers Crus, although Bize’s Vergelesses, from a rocky, well-exposed vineyard at the north end of Savigny, vies with it for supremacy in the appellation.

The humble image of Savigny-lès-Beaune is slightly compromised by the presence of Domaine Chandon de Briailles, an eighteenth-century limestone manor house set within a small park laid out by the great landscape designer André Le Nôtre, who created the gardens of Versailles. Since 1834, the domaine has belonged to the noble de Nicolay family, but for much of the twentieth century it was neglected until Nadine de Nicolay moved down from Paris in 1984 to take charge. (She has since been joined by her children, Claude and François.) Knowing virtually nothing about viticulture or wine making, Nadine learned on the job, converting to organic and eventually biodynamic farming and transforming an undistinguished estate into a very good one. Although the domaine is probably best known for its Grand Cru Cortons, from the appellation just north of Savigny, it also makes several excellent Savigny-lès-Beaunes, including the Premier Cru Fourneaux and Lavières and a lighter Village red, all for less than the average Russian River Pinot Noir.

Savigny reds and whites represent very good value; while prices up and down the Côte d’Or took a big jump in 2009, you can find very good Village-level Savigny for $30, and the best Premiers Crus can be had for less than $60. There is, however, one notable exception to this rule. Those who feel uncomfortable drinking relatively inexpensive Burgundy will be happy to know that the renowned Domaine Leroy, based in Vosne-Romanée and owned by the dynamic, chic, and controversial Madame Bize-Leroy, makes a Savigny-lès-Beaune Les Narbantons that retails for several hundred dollars. It’s a very good wine, made from extremely low-yielding old vines. I recently tasted the 2006 and was impressed with what Bize-Leroy had achieved in a very difficult vintage, although
some critics argue that the powerful, concentrated house style overrides nuances of the
terroir
. At the very least, I’d say it isn’t exactly a typical Savigny-lès-Beaune, but I certainly wouldn’t turn my nose up if someone offered to pour me a glass.

Typically, Savigny is more Sunday-night-with-roast-chicken than let’s-impress-the-client, which is not to say that it’s simple. The better Savigny reds, particularly the Premiers Crus, can be extremely complex, and they can age and improve for years, even decades. The transplanted New Yorker Becky Wasserman, also known as the godmother of Burgundy, told me a story about entertaining a client at a restaurant in Bouilland, a few miles up the road from Savigny. The client had ordered a 1979 Jayer Vosne-Romanée Cros-Parantoux, a legendary wine from the most celebrated maker of the past century. Patrick Bize shambled over to their table and poured two glasses of something from a magnum for Wasserman and her client. “It just bloomed in the glass, and the bouquet became more and more heady,” Wasserman said. “The Jayer retreated. I finally asked Patrick what it was—a magnum of 1929 Bize, never moved from the cellar.”

“What I love about Burgundy is the authenticity,” says Daniel Johnnes, the hyperactive, diminutive dean of American Burgundy geeks, over an omelet at Balthazar in SoHo. “You meet a Burgundy grower, they’re farmers, they spend half the day on their tractors. You shake their hands and they are calloused. When you meet a château owner in Bordeaux, his hands are smooth and he’s wearing a foulard.” As generalizations go, this one is pretty accurate and helps explain how special this region is for Johnnes, a self-professed “working guy” whose family were union organizers and whose father took him to protest marches in the sixties.

Two days after our lunch, he welcomed more than thirty Burgundian winemakers to New York for the tenth La Paulée de New York, and more than a few of them looked as if they’d just climbed off a tractor. Not the least interesting aspect of the event was the reverence with which these French farmers were received by several hundred of America’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens, more than a few of whom travel in private jets and chauffeured Maybachs, and all of whom had paid twelve hundred bucks for dinner.

Johnnes modeled his New York celebration on La Paulée de Meursault, which was founded in 1923 when the vigneron Jules Lafon gathered his neighbors for a fall feast to celebrate the harvest. (Jules’s grandson Dominique was on hand for the 2010 New York Paulée—one of the most cosmopolitan vignerons in the group.) Johnnes first fell in love with French food and wine when he lived in France as a student in the seventies. Originally,
he studied cooking but eventually turned his attention to wine, becoming sommelier at Drew Nieporent’s Montrachet, in what was then the wasteland of Tribeca. With its mix of casual downtown ambience and sophisticated cuisine, the restaurant helped reshape the concept of fine dining in Manhattan, and Johnnes had a significant impact on the emerging American wine scene. The list was devoted to Burgundy, and Johnnes began traveling to the source, the fabled Côte d’Or. In 1989 he invited a few of his favorite Burgundy makers to New York. “It was kind of wild. Most of them had never been to the States,” he says. “I think two of them had never been on a plane.” He continued to invite Burgundian vignerons to meet American oenophiles at Montrachet, and in 2000 he launched his New York tribute to La Paulée de Meursault, an event that has become an institution in the wine world, the annual American gathering of Burgundy nuts.

Actually, “nuts” might be overly kind. You have to be more than a little mad, and more than a bit of a masochist, to love Burgundy. Johnnes, with his infallible good cheer and his deep reserves of common sense, is probably the exception, although even he compares the search for great Burgundy to the quest for the holy grail. It’s a fickle and unreliable lover, its mood and complexion seeming to change from one bottle to the next. Burgundy is like the girl with the curl in the nursery rhyme. When she’s good, she’s very, very good, and when she’s bad, she’s horrid. Case in point, the La Paulée collectors’ dinner, an intimate $3,750-a-head feast that preceded the main event and featured wines dating back to 1966, none of which cost less than four figures per bottle and many of which were no fun to drink. The evening, which I attended thanks to the generosity of a friend—and her husband’s illness—reminded me of the old Richard Pryor joke that cocaine is God’s way of telling you you have too much money. The same might be said of old Grand Cru Burgundy. What’s even crazier is that most of the participants weren’t even shocked—Burgnuts being used to having
their hearts trampled on, a price they’re happy to pay for the moments of rapture and ecstasy.

The tenth annual La Paulée de New York had many satellite events, seminars, tastings, and even an auction, but the main event was the Saturday night dinner, a bacchanal the likes of which my liver hoped not to experience again for at least another week or two. The meal itself, presided over by the great Daniel Boulud, who has been La Paulée’s head chef from the start and since 2005 has employed Johnnes as his wine director, would have brought an appreciative tear to the eye of Diamond Jim Brady. It’s a thoroughly hedonistic experience and a thoroughly communal one. Collectors bring their best and oldest bottles of Burgundy to share with their tablemates. I brought a 1990 Rouget Echézeaux and a 1993 Anne Gros Richebourg—which in most company would’ve been superstars—but I frankly felt like a piker, given some of the other offerings. Early on a jeroboam of 1992 Leflaive Bâtard-Montrachet, a 1992 Coche-Dury Meursault-Perrières, and a magnum of 1985 Ramonet Montrachet appeared at our table. I knew I must be intoxicated to the point of hallucination when I found myself looking at three jeroboams (each the equivalent of four regular bottles) of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti La Tâche from the sixties in front of me—1964, 1966, and 1969, collectively worth more than a brand-new Range Rover. No, they were indisputably real, unlike the magnum of 1989 La Tâche, which was almost certainly a fake, one of more than a few. Like celebrities, great Burgundies breed impostors.