Season 1 : Eating Europe

Episode 8

39 minutes – Burgundy France

Following on from the food episode, this time we are talking about the wine in Burgundy. From Pinot Noire to Chardonnay and my favourite Aligoté. We talk about wine tastings in Beaune, what to expect and what you might take away from it. Why a charity auction is so important to the wine world, and what to ask a sommilier.

We went to:

Wine tasting at Patriarche et Fils

Wine tasting at Clos du Moulin aux Moines

Dinner with wine by the glass at Restaurant: Loiseau des Vignes

Transcript of The European Compass: A Food and Travel Podcast: Episode 8

Episode 8 transcript | The European Compass, Eating Europe series

Welcome to the European Compass Podcast, the podcast where we explore the heart of Europe through its food, its markets and the stories behind every dish. I’m your host Julia Doust, and if you’ve ever planned a trip around a meal then you’re in the right place. Let’s dig in.

So today we are talking about Burgundy, and specifically what I drank in Burgundy. If you listened to the last episode, that was about the food that I ate in Burgundy. Today we’re going to be talking about what I drank, and obviously that’s going to focus on wine. This is Burgundy after all.

So I’m going to start with just a little reminder: I am not a wine expert. I am not a trained sommelier. I do not know all the intricate details in and out of these wines. However, I am an amateur of wine in the French sense of the word, which means that I enjoy wine. It’s one of my hobbies. I drink wine on a regular basis. It’s something I do spend my money on, and it’s something I do seek out when I travel. So that’s the basis we’re coming from here. We’re not coming from a basis of I know everything about wine and I’m going to teach you. We’re coming from the basis of what is Burgundy actually like to visit for someone who likes wine but isn’t an expert. Because I think that’s most people. There is a certain type of person that knows all the intricate details of what makes one wine different to another, and all the details about which estate and which vineyard does what. That’s not where I’m coming from. What I’m coming from is: what is Burgundy like as a wine lover, as someone who enjoys a drink, quite happy to find out a bit more about what’s there, but without going into any sort of technical detail. So that’s where we are.

So Burgundy is on the eastern side of France, which is the opposite side of France to where I live. I live on the west coast. It runs down from above Dijon down to just above Lyon, and the wine part of that concentrates around Beaune. It concentrates on the strip south of Dijon going down through Beaune, except for Chablis. Chablis sits above Dijon. It sits in its own little island, not a real island, but in terms of if you look on a map of Burgundy wines, you’ll see a sort of eye shape. You’ll have the main strip, which really is quite a corridor of wine-producing regions in Burgundy, and then you’ll have the dot as though it’s the dot of the eye, and that’s Chablis.

I didn’t go to Chablis on this trip, so we’re not really going to be talking about Chablis. But just to know that it is part of Burgundy, and it is a little bit apart. So if you’re visiting Beaune, for example, and you think, oh, I’ll just pop to Chablis for the day, you can do it, but it’s not right next door. It does involve a bit of a drive. I think it’s probably a two, maybe even more, hours drive from Beaune. So it’s not as close as all the other vineyards that are in the area.

First Stop: Avallon and the Vézelay Wines

I started my trip actually in Avallon, which is to the northern part, not a little bit closer to Chablis, but we didn’t go to Chablis. Avallon is near another wine-producing area called Vézelay. Now, Vézelay is not that well known. It’s not a big producing area. I’m not even sure the wine gets exported particularly, so you might not have heard of it. I didn’t really know it as a specific wine.

We had some Vézelay wine. It was the first wine I had in the area, because we were staying at the Hôtel de la Poste in Avallon, and the owner there has his own vineyards in Vézelay. I would describe it as being like a Chablis. It’s a Chardonnay, as is most of the white wine in this area, and we’ll get on to that later. It’s very nice. It’s possibly not as sophisticated as a Chablis, but it’s certainly very pleasant and very easy drinking. I didn’t get to taste any other Vézelays, so I really can’t say whether this was a particularly good example. I have to confess I didn’t note the year, because we were in a cocktail bar and I was busy interviewing someone, so I didn’t get to check. But it was a starting point for what was to come.

Beaune: The Wine Town

And then we went to Beaune. Now, Beaune as a town is very wine-focused. Wine is why Beaune exists. Everything there focuses around the wine and the wine industry. It’s just the whole town. It’s not a big town. It’s a nice town. I would say charming without being extraordinary, but if you’re a wine lover, this is the place to be.

And what you’ll find in Beaune is that every restaurant menu, in terms of the wine menu, comes in a great big book. This is not just a list of five reds and five whites. This is an entire book of different wines. We went to several restaurants and they were all the same. They all had this great big book, and what we came to learn in Beaune is that they are very passionate about their wine, but also very particular about the different vineyards it came from and the different conditions the wine was grown in. And it is actually a little bit intimidating. It gets to the stage where you’re like, I just quite like a nice drink, and you can’t act like that in Burgundy.

So that’s the first thing to know from my point of view: it’s OK to admit that you don’t know, and that you would like help. They’re quite happy to help and quite happy to describe. But what they will do is describe in great detail about which particular parcel this wine came from, which year, and what made it good.

Two Tips Before You Start Tasting

So we started, and I recommend anyone who goes to Burgundy does this: we started by going on a wine tasting. There are lots of wine tastings available, lots of companies that offer them, and we chose to go to Patriarche et Fils. Patriarche et Fils are a wine négociant, which means they don’t make wine. They buy wine in, age it and bottle it, but they don’t grow the wine themselves. And Patriarche et Fils is one of the oldest established négociants in Beaune. One of their particularities is the extent of their underground cellars. A wine cellar in France is a cave, spelt cave. Their caves go underground and they have 5 km of underground cellars. 5 km full of wine: some still in barrels, some bottled, some being aged, some being stored because the value goes up as you store it.

You can go and visit. It’s about €25 for the visit, and that includes the tasting. What they call a visite libre, which just means you’re not guided as you walk through. You go down, walk through these corridors in the cellar, and you don’t walk all five kilometres. The walk is about 500 metres. You get to see some of the barrels, some of the way the bottles are kept, some of the environment in terms of temperatures. The advantage of keeping wine in these cellars is that the temperature and the humidity, both of which are important, are stable year round. Whether it’s winter or summer, whether it’s really hot outside or freezing cold, the cellar temperature stays pretty even. And that’s why the wine is stored there.

About three quarters of the way along you get to taste the wines with a sommelier. Not just one sommelier: there were three or four dealing with different groups, so it’s small groups and you’re getting some individual attention. We were originally supposed to taste five wines, two whites and three reds, and we ended up with an extra red because we were talking to the sommelier and he wanted to explain a particular point to us.

Tip number two is to go to the tourist office. The tourist office in Beaune have a little exhibition in the back room. It’s free, and it’s really well done. It explains all the differences between the geography, with a big map in the middle showing the different villages and different towns along the Côte d’Or, which is the strip of land where the slopes come down and the wine is grown. There’s also discussion about the different history behind the wine in the area, then detail about how the climate can change the wines, how the grapes are grown and the different parts of the winemaking process. It’s not a big exhibition like the one I went to in Porto, which was a massive museum about all the different types of wine, but it’s a really good place to start in Burgundy because it’s so specific to the region.

The Cépage: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and the Climat

The first thing they explain at the tasting is about the grape variety, which is called cépage in French. In Burgundy the main varieties are Chardonnay for the white and Pinot Noir for the red. There is a small amount of aligoté grown as well, and we’ll talk about that later. There is some Gamay grown too. The Gamay gets mixed into some of the lower classes of wine but is not allowed in the Appellation Contrôlée for the main wines in Burgundy. So your Côte de Beaune, your Côte de Nuits, they don’t allow Gamay. It is 100% Pinot Noir.

And they talk about something called Climat. UNESCO have recognised French wine as a cultural heritage, and particularly the Climats de Bourgogne. By Climat they don’t just mean climate. They are talking about the terroir: the different types of soil, the different exposition, whether or not a particular parcel gets sun or wind or frost, and yes, the climate as well, but also the knowledge of the wine growers and how that can affect the wine. All of these things come together and make what they call the Climat. So when you see signs saying Climats de Bourgogne, that’s what they’re talking about. They’re not just talking about the weather. They’re talking about all the individual factors that go into making Burgundy wine its particular character.

Now I must say that Chardonnay in general is not my wine of choice. I find Chardonnays tend towards a sort of honey, soft flavour, and I like white wine that’s crisp. I like citrus and apple flavours. But the particularity about Chardonnay when it’s grown in Burgundy is that you can’t say I like Chardonnay or I don’t like Chardonnay or Chardonnay tastes like this, because wine here can taste very different from one vineyard to the next, even when there’s only a few metres between them. Take the same cépage: all Chardonnay. Take it from one vineyard that’s lower down and gets the sun all day long, and take it just a little bit higher up where the soil changes and there’s a little bit more granite, and you’re going to get a different flavour. And actually the difference is quite startling.

That’s one of the things a wine tasting can give you. Usually if we order a bottle of wine, we drink that bottle. We don’t taste different wines next to each other. What was really good about this trip was being able to taste different wines side by side and being able to spot the differences. And you really can spot it when someone says to you, this wine was made in a particularly sunny year, or this one had more rainfall, or this one grows higher up. I have no doubt that trained sommeliers can tell the tiny differences between each different parcel. I’m not at that stage yet, but I could tell the differences, and that was really nice to know.

Pinot Noir: The Elegant Red

So we’ve got Chardonnay for the white, and Pinot Noir for the red. The thing about Pinot Noir is that it isn’t your big, powerful wine. This is not Bordeaux. Bordeaux tends towards the big, powerful, fruity wines. Burgundy isn’t really like that. Burgundy is softer, more elegant, more complex, but lighter. I would maybe describe them as a lunchtime wine rather than an evening wine. Now a lot of people are going to disagree with me there, I have no doubt about that, but for me I like a more powerful red in the evening. I like something with a bit of umph.

And that was one of the things we discussed with the sommeliers: which wine would they recommend? Because if you are someone that prefers a little bit more power in your wine, you do need to tell the sommeliers that in Burgundy. A lot of the Burgundy wine is much lighter.

From talking to the sommeliers we realised: I was with my daughter on this trip, and we learnt that she prefers the lighter, fruitier wine and I prefer the deeper, more powerful wines. So we learnt that I should be looking for wines harvested in a difficult year for the growers: years where there were droughts, high temperatures, years where the vines were under stress because of a late frost. Whereas if you’re looking for a lighter wine, you should go for wines harvested in a year with more rainfall progressively through the summer.

The summer is where the important differences between the grapes happen. In the spring the important thing is whether or not there’s a late frost, which can kill the leaves just as they’re coming out of their bud. Once they’re out about three weeks, they’re no longer at risk from frost. But if the leaves come out before the last frost, there’s a problem. One of the issues they’re having with climate change is that warmer temperatures are arriving earlier in the year, but the last frosts aren’t necessarily arriving earlier too. So you’re getting a warmer spell which brings the leaves on, and then the frost comes and kills them. Burgundy sits at one of the northernmost places where you can grow red wine, and this is why they’re fighting against the frost and the climate. And apparently it’s one of the reasons why Burgundy makes good wine: because they have to fight to make it. By fighting, they’re putting the vines under stress, and a stressed vine makes a better grape.

The Loiseau des Vignes: 32 Wines by the Glass

The first place we went to after the wine tasting was the Loiseau des Vignes, which I talked about last week. That’s where I had my oeufs en meurette. They are quite particular in that they have this very big wine list like everybody else, but they also have 32 wines that you can have by the glass. Most restaurants in Burgundy and in France in general have two or three wines available by the glass. That’s it. This restaurant has 32 different wines open, kept by a special method to make sure they don’t spoil.

So we talked to the waitress. It wasn’t a sommelier, it was a waitress, but all the waitstaff here know about wine, because this is the wine area and that’s what they’re there for. We said to her: I need a wine from a difficult year with a bit more character, and my daughter wants something more fresh and fruity. Straight away she said, OK, yes, you want this one and you want that one. So they gave us exactly the right wine. Mine was a 2021 from Nuits-Saint-Georges. Nice. Not the best wine I had in Burgundy, but very nice.

Part of my problem is that, as I said, these wines are a little bit light for me. So any wine I had here, whilst it was going to be the best wine I had in the area, it wasn’t necessarily going to be my favourite wine. I had wine that was more to my taste when I was in Portugal. I even had wine that was more to my taste when I was in Hungary, because I prefer something with more flavour. And that’s going to upset a lot of people who say that Burgundy wine is the best wine in the world. But as the sommelier said, wine is a matter of taste. Everybody’s got different tastes about which wine they like. So I have no shame whatsoever in saying that for me, Burgundy wine is not the best wine in the world. I have no doubt that it has more complexity, and there’s lots more to learn about it, and I’m certainly very happy to drink Burgundy wine. But it will never be my favourite.

I will certainly go back to the Loiseau des Vignes, and I would certainly listen to their suggestions.

Aligoté: The Underrated White

So we’ve talked about Chardonnay being the main grape. Because I prefer the sharper, crisper wines, I actually prefer a Burgundy aligoté. Aligoté is the type of grape, it’s a cépage, but it’s sold unusually for French wines, because French wines normally don’t have the name of the grape variety on the label. It’s not necessary. The French don’t think that is what’s important. What’s important is the terroir, where it’s grown and the conditions it’s been grown in. So you don’t go out and buy a bottle of Chardonnay, you go out and buy a Chablis. But unusually, the Burgundy aligoté is sold with aligoté on the label. I think that’s probably because so much of Burgundy wine is Chardonnay, and because the Appellation Contrôlée requires Chardonnay for a white Côte de Beaune. There is a different system of controls for the aligoté wines, and so in order to make it absolutely clear, they’re labelled as aligoté.

Aligoté wine is treated a little bit like the poor man’s wine. I remember talking on an internet forum about wine, about the fact that I was going to Burgundy for the red wine, and someone sarcastically said, oh, who’s going to tell her that they make white wine there too? And I replied, don’t worry, I know. Burgundy aligoté is one of my favourite wines. And the sniff you get back. Because oh my goodness, no, you’re going to the place where the best Chardonnays in the world are made, and you can’t talk about aligoté. Some sort of poor cousin. No, no, you have to go to the rich wines. But I don’t particularly like the rich wines. I much prefer the aligoté.

The aligoté is a crisp wine. It’s clean. It’s got apple and citrus, a little bit like a Sauvignon Blanc but almost even more so. Really crisp and lovely. But it is treated as a bit of a poor relation. In general in the area it’s grown to serve as Blanc Cassis or Kir. Now we talked about that in the last episode: how Canon Kir, who was a Resistance fighter and became mayor of Dijon, became the reason the drink was named Kir, and how the white wine used for Blanc Cassis is aligoté. That’s pretty much what it’s used for in the area. Everybody else drinks Chardonnay.

Except that I found some growers who are changing this. This is starting to change. People are starting to realise that aligoté is a popular wine and that there are subtleties to it. I think one of the reasons for that is that Chardonnay, and particularly the Burgundy Chardonnays, benefit from aging. The aligoté wines can be drunk fresher, younger. They’re more of a party wine, and they fit into the more modern, younger vibe that people are going for these days. The wine growers have realised this and are starting to experiment more with aligoté.

The Clos du Moulin aux Moines

So we looked for a vineyard that specialised in aligoté, and we ended up at a place called the Clos du Moulin aux Moines. The clos is a walled vineyard, a vineyard that has a stone wall around it, and Moulin aux Moines means the mill of the monks. So this was an old monastery where the monks used to make wine.

We went there and specifically requested a tasting. We hadn’t booked, which we should have done. So if you want to visit the vineyards and do some tastings: book ahead. Either on their website or by phone. They will speak some English if they’re used to having visitors in for tastings. But book in advance, because quite often the same people that give you the tastings are also working in the fields. If they’re busy in the fields, they’re not going to be there for you. And if you go at a time of year that’s particularly busy, like harvest time, it’s going to be more difficult to get tastings. The summer is actually quite a good time, because they’re not so busy.

We got lucky here. Lovely people. We talked about the wine, explained why we were there. He apologised and said he didn’t actually have any aligoté for me to taste, and said: if you like that, will you allow me to try and persuade you towards a Chardonnay? I’m always open for persuasion.

So he got out some of his Chardonnay, and then he showed me a map. This is a perfect example of how seriously the wine business is taken here. They don’t just want you to know this wine’s good, this wine’s bad. They want you to know exactly where this wine came from. Not in terms of the town, not in terms of the part of the town, but from exactly which part of which field.

So he gets out this map and shows us photographs of this particular parcel. Now the parcels here, this is important to notice: when I’m talking about a parcel, I mean the part of land that that particular grower, that particular estate, owns. Burgundy is a little different to Bordeaux. In Bordeaux you have châteaux, and they own all the land around them, big estates with lots of vineyards. Burgundy doesn’t work like that. Because of various Napoleonic rules on inheritance and the way the Burgundy wine plots were split up, people often own just one bit of a vineyard, one parcel, one part of a field. Or they’ll own a small vineyard, but the next small vineyard is owned by someone else. Some of these wine growers will own little parcels like this in various different towns, and they will make three or four different wines from these specific parcels.

So he said to me: if you like a crisp wine rather than the normal sort of honey golden Chardonnays, try the Chardonnay that came from this particular field. He showed the photographs of the vineyard. He said, this is where we have our aligoté, these vines here on this side, these three rows are aligoté. That’s where all our aligoté comes from. And then these three rows here are Chardonnay, grown in the same vineyard, a clos, a walled vineyard. They grow in the same conditions as the aligoté, and because of that, this particular Chardonnay has some of those aspects that I like in an aligoté: the crispness, the apple and citrus flavour. The honey is still there, but it’s not overpowering the crispness.

And I have to say it was the nicest Chardonnay I’ve ever tasted. So I came home with a few bottles. Absolutely lovely.

He got me to taste a couple of his other Chardonnays, from different plots. Those I didn’t like. I didn’t even finish them, which is very rare. And then he went on, and we hadn’t gone for red, that wasn’t what we were there for, but he said: while you’re here, would you like to try some of the reds? Obviously we did. Their reds tend towards the more fruity, light reds that my daughter likes, so she bought some of the red.

This was a really good example of what you can expect when you go in to talk to the growers. A lot of the tastings have a price against them. The one we did at Patriarche et Fils was €25 including five wines, and that included the cellar tour. We saw other tastings priced around €15. Some were €10. But when you go in and you end up buying wine, generally they don’t charge you.

He was very open: try this, oh maybe you’ll like this instead. Really generous. Lovely guy. And a really nice place. You go in through an archway, there’s a little stream to one side, and there are a lot of tables and chairs outside. We said to him, why are all the tables and chairs out here? And he said: we have a pop-up restaurant in the summer. They get a food truck in to do the cooking, and then you get to drink their wines as part of the meal. You get to taste the wines while eating, which I think is a great idea. At night time with some fairy lights, I think it would be absolutely gorgeous.

So if you’re in the area, the Clos du Moulin aux Moines is worth looking out. I’ll put a link below. And definitely worth checking their pop-up restaurant in the summer.

The Best Wine I Had in Burgundy

So we went on our last night to the Bistro de Beaune. A little bistro in town, doing a Burgundy specialty menu, which I talked about last week. Another of these big wine lists, with lots and lots of wine. They start at around the €30 to €40 mark, but they go on and on. I don’t know what the most expensive wine was, but they certainly have wines for a thousand plus on these lists.

Obviously asking the sommelier which wine he would recommend is a little bit risky in terms of budget, but I was completely open with him. I said: I want something with a bit of power, some real flavour, and I don’t want to go over about €60. And he went: I know exactly the wine for you. Went away, came back, opened it, and he was right.

So this was a red wine from Marsannay. The grower is Jean Faugier, and he makes a Cuvée Saint-Urbain. It was a 2021, I think. Ask the waiters, and ask the sommelier. He was right.

This was, in terms of Burgundy, the one with the most power I’d had. Fruity, heading more towards cherry and blackcurrant rather than raspberry, which I think is the lighter end. Delicious.

I’m not sure that on a regular basis I would pay €60 for it. This particular bottle costs about €30 to buy, to put that into context. For those of you not in France: I can buy a very good Côte du Rhône for €5 to €7. A reasonable Bordeaux of a similar quality might cost €10, perhaps €15. So Burgundy wines are much more expensive than other wines in France. And I do wonder how much of this reputation for being the best wine in the world is linked to it being the most expensive wine. There are lots of reasons behind why it’s the most expensive. I’m not going to get into that here. But just know that if you really like wine and have a limited budget, then Burgundy isn’t necessarily the place to be looking.

I did look up the tasting notes for this particular wine, and one of the things that caught my eye was the serving suggestion: you should drink this wine with a roast chicken, shared amongst friends. Which I think is one of the nicest things you could say about a wine. Drink it amongst friends.

So that was wine in Burgundy. Hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you did, share it with a fellow food traveller, and don’t forget to subscribe for more delicious adventures. Until next time, bon appétit and happy travels.