Special offer
Spectator Wine Club
Auberon Waugh
For the last offer of the year we are back to my old particular stamping ground of fine and expensive old burgundies, this time raiding the cellars of Berry Bros rather than Avery's. There are two good reasons for choosing Berry Bros for the final offer. The first is that their distribution is ex- tremely efficient, and they should be able to deliver Christmas orders without fail so long as you get them off in time. The se- cond reason is that I have discovered some really beautiful old burgundy among the bottles from their sometimes maligned sup- plier Doudet-Naudin. Few other wine mer- chants carry large stocks of old burgundy, but a comparison will show that Berry Bros are very reasonable even at their list prices. With a bit of argy-bargy from the Wine Club, I think I can claim one stupendous bargain and the rest all very good value in- deed, even if I would be unlikely to buy the last two myself, being, to my eternal shame, too poor or possibly too mean. In fact we have moved up-market with a vengeance this time and the really poor will simply have to grind their teeth and suck stones, wishing they had ordered some of the amaz- ing Wente Zinfandel at £3 a bottle from Oc- tober's offer.
All the wines this time are extremely good, and although the more expensive ones are even better it must be a matter of individual judgment whether there is really £6.34 difference between the 1971 Berry Bros-bottled Charmes-Chambertin grand cru at £9.86 and the 1961 French-bottled Beaune Clos du Roy premier cru at £16.20. It I were rich enough 1 would certainly think so, and to hear the yells of delight from my tasting panel as expensive burgun- dy was succeeded by even more expensive burgundy you might suppose there was no question about it. But it was the 1971 Charmes-Chambertin which set them yell- ing in the first place (having booed out two extraordinarily cheap '72s and another Charmes-Chambertin of '70) and I persist in believing that this is the best bargain we are likely to see in old burgundy for a very long time indeed.
Perhaps I had better introduce it by its smell. Burgundians will recognise it im- mediately as a smell which sometimes at- taches to very grand, very old burgundy and nothing else. It is a dusty, slightly sewery smell which I, at any rate, find delicious (knowing what it presages) but non-Burgundians sometimes find disconcerting. My wife, who is no Burgun- dian, characterises it as the smell of a railway station in a book by Zola. The French, for no very good reason that I have discovered, call it violets. The taste which
follows is rich, powerful, deep, with enor- mous fruit and just that touch of dirt in it to make one think one is doing something rather naughty in drinking it. I find myself drooling at the memory. It is an absolutely splendid wine which tastes exactly as the best and most expensive old burgundy always used to taste before the pooftahs took over and insisted on sticking foreign labels on everything.
The next, available only in magnums, should, on paper, be the best of the lot. French-bottled by Doudet-Naudin, the Aloxe Corton Les Boutieres 1969 has a more conventional pinot nose and a slightly cleaner taste. Doudet-Naudin came in for vicious attack in Anthony Hanson's Burgundy (Faber 1982): 'He claims to make his wines by the ancient methods, and I dare say they have given pleasure to thousands. But if this is how the ancients did it, I am all for progress.'
I am not, of course, suggesting that Han- son is a pooftah, but I suspect that he does not like burgundy very much. Hugh Johnson in his brilliant 'Companion' (Mit- chell Beazley £14.95) is more specific about the house of Doudet-Naudin, associating it
with "old-fashioned", very 'dark- coloured, concentrated, almost "jammy" wines which have had a great following in Britain in the past.... But they last, and 20-year-old bottles can be really velvety and full of character.'
Which must explain why the Doudet- bottled village Aloxe Corton of 1964, and Beaune Clos du Roy of 1961 — both of which should, on form, be showing their age — are even better than the Les Boutieres 1969, which should be at its peak. Oddly enough, in describing this premier cru vineyard Hanson writes about Les Boutieres, Johnson about La Coutiere something I can't really explain, unless we are all drunk. But they are magnificent wines, and the 1961 Clos du Roy is truly a revelation for those who can afford it. Per- sonally, feeling mean and poor and vaguely anal, I will stick to the Berry Bros-bottled Charmes-Chambertin 1971, marvelling to find such a wine at under £10. The new Berry Bros catalogue puts it at £12, and I fear even that offer is unrepeatable.
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