Our Burgundian inheritance
Merlin Holland
GREAT DOMAINES OF BURGUNDY by Remington Norman Kyle Cathie, £30, pp. 286 PULIGNY-MONTRACHET by Simon Loftus Ebuty, £19.99, pp. 256 Only if you are rich or brave should you drink a bottle of 'good' burgundy in a restaurant these days, and if you are neither the only substitutes are a prodi- gious memory and much optimism, for bur- gundy is a true minefield even for those seasoned by its inconstancies. As a lover of the wine, I envy those with a preference for claret. A Château Giscours 1978, if proper- ly kept, will taste much the same in London or New York; you can order it with confidence knowing that if you enjoyed it a year ago you will enjoy it again. But if you order an Echezeaux 1978, where the total production is less than half that of Château Giscours, it could come from any one of 84 growers, each one of whose vines are of different ages and differently tended. Their winemaking skills vary from passable to outstanding and, just to add scope to the `This is no good. All the corn's already flat!' lottery, some will offer bottles from the domaine and some will sell in barrel to negociants; there might be well over 100 different labels all legally entitled to call the contents of their bottles Echezeaux 1978.
But help for the confused is at hand. Remington Norman's Great Domaines of Burgundy is a distillation of 20 years' buying burgundy in the Cote d'Or and mer- cifully is not just another quinquennially updatable volume with vintage-rating scores. He has shortlisted and visited 170 proprietors, from about 600 registered as bottlers in the COte, and has written sensi- tively, informatively and often critically about 111 of them. It is necessarily a sub- jective selection, but qualified as the 'great' domaines I have no quarrels with it. He has been right to exercise severity in his choice, for if the proliferation of domaine bottling in the last 20 years has ensured that more unadulterated burgundy reaches the con- sumer, to the casual cellar visitor the diver- sity has become bewildering and the proportion of excellence to mediocrity smaller than ever.
It is not a work which will give all the answers to buying burgundy but rather one which will help us to understand its com- plexity through all the factors which affect it. Twenty years ago, for example, I should have questioned whether we needed to know that Philippe Leclerc puts all his pre- miers crus into new oak barrels and Jean Trapet only one fifth, but I see now why their wines are undoubtedly different as a result. Then, I should not have enquired about the age of Jean Gros' Clos de Vougeot vines, but learning from this book that they were only replaced in 1986, I should taste the 1990 very critically before buying.
For each grower his methods of pruning, vinification, elevage, and filtering are dis- cussed, and the size of each of his holdings and the age of its vines recorded. There are well-researched chapters on viticulture, the use of oak barrels and appellation laws and the whole is lightened at intervals by anec- dote. I found it utterly absorbing. Its great appeal lies in an ability to present a huge amount of information in a way which characterises the best of reference books; for anyone with even a passing interest in burgundy, it is supremely browsable.
If you purchase a copy you might like to annotate it with two events of some signifi- cance which occurred since the entries closed. Leflaive did acquire his tiny piece of the Montrachet and is set to produce 30 cases a year. The arrogant Lalou Bize- Leroy, who was one of only two people who refused to be interviewed, finally got her come-uppance; she was ousted from the Romanee-Conti board of directors earlier this year in a palace coup.
If Remington Norman looks at burgundy from the outside in, Simon Loftus tries to view it from the inside out, and despite being a foreign visitor to France, I have to say that he largely succeeds. Above all it is refreshing not to have yet another smart- alec view of Provence cluttering up the bookshops. Puligny-Montrachet is not, how- ever, a book for browsing. Read it at a sit- ting, enjoy some of his more atmospheric descriptions of life through the seasons in a wine-growers' village but prepare to be depressed at the extent to which interna- tional fame and sudden wealth are ruining a French rural community. Unlike the Bor- delais, whose properties are larger and whose bourgeois style of life has taken decades to arrive, most Burgundian grow- ers were smallholding peasant farmers until the 1960s. Once they started bypassing the negociants to sell their wine, undreamed-of riches came to them overnight. Loftus's chapters on the non-vigneron community are the most revealing. The bookbinder has since left, saddened by the change in rural mentality which prosperity has brought and, reading between the lines, Loftus shares his regret but expresses himself more diplomatically. There is no longer a café in the village where there used to be three; the last has been converted into a smart hotel, largely for foreign visitors and Beaune businessmen. It is a sad story repeated up and down the C6te d'Or.
The book, though, is not a lopsided account of social change. There are sec- tions on viticulture, winemaking, tasting notes and some astute profiles of growers small and large. I particularly liked the story of Chartron cancelling his village party for lack of foreign journalists, and the battiness of the Ponts et Chaussies who seriously considered supporting the A6 fly- over in the middle of the Montrachet vine- yard. But Loftus could have benefited from the services of a sharp-eyed and intelligent copy editor; the etymologies of ruisseau and Rousseau have nothing in common; confusing the fruit of the marronier with that of the chataignier leads to severe stom- ach-ache; and what a pity we were not told more about the ancient tradition of grappillage and that they couldn't get the spelling right.
The one omission from both these books which would have interested wine-lovers, would have been an attempt to explain soaring prices other than in simplistic terms of supply and demand. I have my own the- ory which starts with the merchants but in both cases that might have been a little too close to home.
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