The way to Burgundy

It’s noon in Paris and the sun is shining. But instead of sitting down to lunch on a nice little terrace somewhere, I’m charging my phone at a train station, awaiting the next leg of my journey to Burgundy. It’s hard to pinpoint when and where this journey began. It was either at 5am this morning, when I left Walthamstow for the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras; or it was years ago, whenever it first occurred to me that there just might be something to this whole Burgundy thing. I’ve been working in wine for well over a decade now, though Burgundy remains a work in progress.

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I don’t clearly remember my first bottle of Burgundy. It was probably a bog-standard Bourgogne Rouge from the supermarket where I worked; suffice to say I didn’t have one of those Damascene moments. A seed was planted, though. For a long time after that, Burgundy remained this elusive, slippery concept. Something to observe from a distance; something to admire, even. But not really something, or somewhere, for me. Where I zigged, Burgundy seemed to zag.

This changed in 2020 when I joined Berry Bros. & Rudd. Overnight, Burgundy En Primeur became the biggest project of my working year.

There have been lots of little steps on this journey. Some are small but satisfying, like catching an erroneous “Dessous” in a draft tasting note where the author had clearly meant “Dessus”. Others are bigger and bolder, like interviewing some of the most influential vignerons of the last 40 years; or seeing a flock of starlings cut across the vineyards of Volnay for the first time.

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Back in Paris and the SNCF jingle tells me the train has arrived. Armed with an aggressively dry ham-and-cheese roll, I find my seat. The city and its rooftops pass by like a flipbook. Somewhere just outside Paris, the bright sunshine disappears abruptly and is replaced by a damp grey. I’m hoping this is not pathetic fallacy: ahead of me are 10 days of intensive, comprehensive tastings of Burgundy 2023. My colleagues and I have 35 appointments lined up, where we’ll taste 400 wines, give or take. Those colleagues, Adam Bruntlett and Mark Pardoe MW, have an even longer stay, more visits and more wines ahead of them.

Railway repairs mean that we can’t travel directly to Beaune, the heartland of Burgundy. Instead, our destination is Le Creusot, a former mining town near the vineyards of the Côte Chalonnaise. No sooner have we picked up the rental car are we heading to our first tasting. We meet François Bethernet, who works out of the village of Montagny. His neat range of whites are a gentle start. From there we head to Beaune, where we’ll be staying; though before we check in to our accommodation, we pay a visit to Domaine A.-F. Gros, where Caroline Parent-Gros puts us through our paces with a rapid flight of 15 or 20 wines. The schedule starts in earnest tomorrow, with half-day blocks at Benjamin Leroux and Camille Giroud.

A lot happens over the next week and a half. There might be eight or nine different Puligny-Montrachets back-to-back in one cellar and then a whistlestop tour of the entire Côte d’Or in the next. Some are relatively quick in-and-out jobs; others are absolutely not. Appointments start early in the morning and can run late into the evening. Jean-Pierre Guyon will see us only after his working day is done, so we sleepily kill time in a Nuits-St Georges café before rocking up to his door at 5pm, knowing it’ll be 7 or 7.30 before we finish.

Over the course of our visits, we taste about half a dozen different examples of Les Chaumées, a Premier Cru in Chassagne-Montrachet. Each cellar offers a slightly different expression, but all leave me with a sensation best described as drinking electricity. In a good way.

On our day off we walk a seven-mile loop of Gevrey-Chambertin. We hike up beside Clos St Jacques, around the high band of Premiers Crus as far as Brochon and amble through the village itself (the definition of “sleepy”). We dodge cyclists in the flatter communal and regional vineyards, and we head back up through the Grands Crus as far as the Morey-St Denis border. We eat Carrefour sandwiches in the Combe Aux Moine vineyard, a disused quarry now planted with Premier Cru-level Pinot Noir vines. A few days later we taste the 2023 from that very site from barrel at Domaine Faiveley.

I’m observing, but no longer from a distance. It’s active and I’m taking it all in, as much as I can. I’m kept on my toes, challenged, learning. I love it. All the while, though, I can’t help but thinking there’s a cruel irony to Burgundy.

The more you learn about Burgundy, the more you realise just how much there is to learn. How much you’ll never possibly know. You could say the same about wine in general, though I feel it most acutely in Burgundy. There are just so many variables, so many moving parts, that mastery is surely impossible.

Take that walk around Gevrey-Chambertin, for example. Let’s say you repeat the exercise every year, or twice a year, for 10 years. In time, you come to know every nook and cranny of every vineyard along the way. The topography, the very shape of the place; the crunch or squelch of the soil underfoot, the call of a solitary raven overhead, the rustling of wild boar in the woods. The whole lot. You come to know the Premier Cru of Cazetiers so well that you could draw an Ordnance Survey map of it with your eyes closed. But how well do you know the wines? And whose wines, at that? In which vintage? Was there frost or torrential rain that year? A heatwave? Did the grower pick early or late? Too early, too late? Did a grape-supply contract come to an end, did someone renege on a deal, did a landowner sell up?

All these and a million other variables mean that you just couldn’t know it all. And that’s just one vineyard in one village of many in the Côte d’Or. You could spend a lifetime trying to figure out Chassagne-Montrachet and its plethora of people called Gagnard and Colin. And it’s not as if Burgundy stops and starts with the Côte d’Or. Head down to the Mâconnais, that underappreciated source of high-quality Chardonnay. Consider the nuances of Pouilly-Fuissé, even, never mind Pouilly-Vinzelles or St Véran. Our friend François in Montagny would have a thing or two to say about the intricacies of the Côte Chalonnaise, too. And let’s not even start with Chablis.

The possibilities are endless, head-spinning. The sheer complexity of it all could drive you away from Burgundy altogether. Funnily enough, though, this sort of stuff doesn’t stop people from wanting to engage with Burgundy. Far from it. Complexity in Burgundy is not a bug to be overcome; it’s a feature, and a desirable one. One that people will spend time and money on a journey towards understanding.

Ten days on, early afternoon and I’m sitting in an airy room in a building on the outskirts of Nuits-St Georges. Thibault Liger-Belair is holding court. I’ve met and written about Thibault before; I liked him instantly. There is something leonine about him, with a mane of greying hair and a powerful physical presence. If he told you that he’d built his state-of-the-art winery with his bare hands, you’d believe him. But he’s also introspective and softly spoken, elegant even. And he likes to keep busy; this is a guy who makes half a dozen different Moulin-à-Vents, to say nothing of his extensive range from the Côte d’Or.

This is visit 35 of 35 for me and I’ve got another train to catch. Adam is going to drop me back at Le Creusot and, sadly, there just isn’t enough time to taste all of Thibault’s wares before we go. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, what I do taste is little short of profound.

Maybe it’s the exhaustion, or the promise of returning home after time away, but the wines’ purity and intensity make me want to laugh, or cry, or both. We’re hurrying things along, and Thibault kindly skips ahead to his Grands Crus so that I can get a taste before I depart. We get through a couple of Cortons before my phone alarm tells me that time’s up. There’s just time enough for a cursory taste of his Charmes-Chambertin before Adam and I are up and gone, leaving Mark and Thibault to an afternoon of tasting.

I could’ve spent another three hours there with Thibault, and I could spend the rest of my career or my life focusing on Burgundy. That’s the journey, I think. You might get there, or you might think you’ve gotten there, but you never quite do. There’s always a train to catch or another vintage or a million billion other things in the way.

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I’m at Gare du Nord awaiting the second-last Eurostar of the night. It’s delayed; hordes of other travellers stand around or queue haphazardly and there’s some confusion about which trains are and aren’t running. There are no announcements and the station’s overhead displays have stopped working. There’s a false start or two, but eventually the intercom crackles and announces that both trains are running; we’re all going home. A mass of tired people shuffling slowly onto a train. The crowd control is marginally more organised than my brain, which is swirling with memories of wines tasted, conversations, challenged assumptions, meals and much more besides. My phone battery is low and needs charging, but maybe I’ll do a bit of scribbling in the notes app, try to make sense of it.

The journey is not the straight line between Paris and London; it’s not linear at all, in fact. There’s a lot of back and forth, stopping and starting and questioning (of belief, of self and of others). There are delays and cancellations. And ultimately, the journey is personal. Some people have spent their entire lives learning about Burgundy; others are just starting out, beginning to find their way; and for others still, Burgundy is just something nice to drink. The one commonality is that no matter what, there’ll always be something else to learn. Something new, or something old considered anew from a different point of view.

Don’t be discouraged, though. Burgundy is – or at least can be – for you, in whatever way you want to engage with it, wherever you’re coming from and whatever your destination. For my own part, at least, things are coming together piece by piece. There are a lot of pieces, though, so it might take a while.