Nurse the Hate: French Wine Blitzkrieg Part 1, Chablis

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As I had threatened, I made my triumphant landing at Burgundy.  The realization of a two-year quest, the point of this trip was not pleasure but rather the righting of the great wrong of my debacle at the EU border in London's regional Chatwick Airport in 2017.  My approach was full on Blitzkrieg. There is no time to waver. There is no time to hesitate. The key is constant motion and very tight schedules to maximize exposure to the areas I had immersed myself in via wine textbooks over the last three years. My decades of band touring have made trips like this possible.  Very tight schedules with razor thin windows of “free” time.  Carefully plotted out daily itineraries all focused out on the idea that this might be my only shot at ever seeing this region of the world.

I could dive into some really technical wine crap here that would bore the shit out of 98% of you reading this.  I’m going to give you a break and not get into viticulture methods, fermentation temperatures, percentages of new oak aging or anything that assholes like me sometimes ask about in group tours of wineries that make all the other people on the tour think “Why won’t this guy shut the fuck up?”  Instead I will try to make this interesting to ordinary human beings.  The initial strike on the Burgundy Blitzkrieg came in Chablis, a remote northern village that not that many tourists trouble themselves to visit.

 

Chablis is a small village that sits on the edge of where it was traditionally possible to ripen grapes. Climate change, which old white guy Republicans with their heads in the sand are certain isn’t happening, has in fact made ripening the Chardonnay a non-issue in the last ten years.  By the way, if you want to know if climate change is a real thing, ask a farmer.  They don’t care about politics.  They just respond to what their fields are doing.  Chablis used to struggle to ripen grapes and would pick in early October.  Now they pick in late August.  Fact. 

Every textbook I had read made a point about how the best vineyards are in a natural “sun bowl” of this curved hill on the banks of the Serein River.  The fabled Grand Cru vineyards of Chablis have for hundreds of years produced the most sought after wines from this region from this grand vista.  Photographs would show the sweeping landscape arching up from the banks of this mighty waterway.  Imagine my surprise when in reality this is a really big hill that is a good half mile away from something we would probably call a “creek”.  There are no paddle boats majestically churning up and down the River Serein.  There were two leathery French guys smoking cigarettes trying to pull what looked like either a 12 inch carp or maybe a white bass from the creek.  They stared at me when I walked past with a dumbfounded look on my face that must have said, “That’s it?  That’s the fucking river everyone is so concerned about?”  I could have jumped across part of it.  I definitely could have waded across the deepest part in shorts without worrying about getting my shirt wet.  Grand Cru vineyards like Vaudesir and Blanchot are about the size of a big yard in a Midwestern McMansion neighborhood.  Now I understand why some of those wines are so expensive.  Supply is tiny.

Chablis is a word American cheap ass wine companies previously used to suggest their white wine is the same as this benchmark French region.  It wasn’t.  It was whatever white grapes they crammed into a vat.  Chablis is chardonnay from this particular area around this village.  The traditional style of Chablis is a nervous tension, sort of an electric citrus. It’s as if you can taste the struggle against the climate combined with the chalky soils. An afternoon was devoted to trying to discern the subtlest differences in vineyards across the wide portfolios of William Fevre and Albert Bichot. It is like mixing a record and trying to figure out if you should nudge the ride cymbal up or down in the final mix. There are tiny subtleties that no normal person will ever notice or attempt to notice. While Chablis aficionados will wax on about the differences of the Le Clos and Bougros grand cru vineyards (spaced about 11 feet apart), 99.5% of people will drink it and say “Mmmm... lemony!”.

All a normal human needs to know about Chablis wine is it is broken down into four basic types. Petite Chablis is sort of shitty simple citrus tasting wine that is made from grapes planted in mostly dodgy areas. I wouldn’t buy it if I were you.  It's cheap, like $12 a bottle but even then the risk/reward ratio isn’t there. If it’s just called Chablis, this is reliably pleasant citrus and mineral tasting wine that any rational person would want to drink on a warm day of their patio.  These can be some of the best white wine deals in France.  The next level up is the Premier Cru wine.  There are 40 little patches of vines in this classification, and they have more intensity of flavor than the regular Chablis.  They need a little time to open up, so as a rule of thumb five years in the basement is a good idea.  The Grand Cru represents about 2% of all Chablis and comes from the seven little vineyards on the banks of the mighty Serein.  These are wines mostly for rich English/American/German guys and Asian tourists to pay too much for so they can get “the best”.  When you taste these wines now, they don’t taste nearly as good as the Premier Cru and regular Chablis as they are screwed down tight.  They need a decade, two decades to unwind slowly in the bottle.  All the grand cru I tasted in Chablis will probably outlive me.  Almost all of these wines are probably opened too soon by showoffs that don't know what they've got.

So what’s Chablis like?  In the tasting room of Albert Bichot an impossibly cute French girl was dismissively pouring the portfolio of wines and making no pretense in giving a single fuck. As I was noting the more floral notes of the Fourchame, she sniffed and said “of course”. It was as if EVERYONE knew Fourchame vineyard wines have that quality. She could not have been any more French.  The women there have a confidence that suggests not only are you stupid because you are a man, you are even more stupid because you are an American man that doesn’t speak French.  I immediately wanted to jettison out of my current life and move in with her as some sort of cuckolded wine slave. I would spend my time devoted to attempting to please her every sexual desire without any reciprocation. She would disdainfully look down at my face buried between her legs as I sensuously paid tribute to her every crevice.  I would cast my eyes up to her for a look of bliss on her face and instead see her expressionlessly say “you make me sick” as she sipped a premier cru Chablis. It would be a good life of high acid wines and complete submission. Ah, what could have been...

The town of Chablis is very small and old.  It’s at best described as a “sleepy” town.  There are “caves”, or places to taste Chablis, from producers all over the little town.  There are two things to do in Chablis.  1. Drink Chablis.  2.  Eat.  (I highly recommend Hostellerie del Clos, which has the cheese cart that sets the standard for all cheese carts.  I almost wept.)  By six pm the town feels deserted.  I’ll bet that when France won the World Cup the extent of the excitement was when Claude the Town Drunk yelled “oui!” to himself at the mostly empty small café in the center of town when the clock ticked down to zero.  It was impossible to find a place to get an espresso at 8am.  I wouldn’t bet on getting a great slice of pizza.  This is the exact opposite of Las Vegas.  This is the kind of place an older English couple travels to on vacation and falls in love with the romance of the beautifully decaying buildings and slow pace of life.  They buy a small place in town with the dream of a quiet country life.  Then about two weeks in, bored out of their skulls, the husband announces, “Honey?  Pack the shit.  We’re getting the fuck out of here.”  It remains an excellent one-night visit destination however and the wines are fucking killer.