Nurse the Hate: French Wine Blitzkrieg Part 2, the Cote de Nuits

The Cote d’Or is about two and half hours south of Chablis.  It is considerably less time if you drove like I did blissfully unaware of the French traffic cam system of enforcing speeding.  The town of Beaune divides the Burgundy region between the northern Cote de Nuits and the southern Cote de Beaune.  It’s an excellent place to set up base camp, which I did at the absolutely fabulous Hotel Le Cep.  I’m a guy that has stayed in a lot of very nice hotels.  I will go on record as saying that the Hotel Le Cep is probably one of my favorite of all time.  I will likely take up residence at this hotel in the near future where I will pen my bittersweet memoirs and drink myself to death in their unbelievable wine cellar.  I plan on shuffling out of my preferred room, the Meursault, in only my bathrobe and monogrammed Le Cep slippers, where I will walk down to the salon and say things such as “Oh my dear!  Please forgive me as my robe has blown open yet again.  I hope you have not been unsettled to see this unbridled manhood at such an early hour.  Tsk tsk my love.  No worry.  Now tell me… Have you seen Claude?  I believe he has my morning preparation.  Have him send a basket of croissants up to my lady friend sleeping in the room Meursault.  Au revoir my sweet....”

Beaune is a picture postcard town with plenty of refurbished 15^th Century buildings.  It looks exactly like the picture that comes up when you Google "France" after you scroll past the Eiffel Tower pics.  There are plenty of places to buy overpriced antiques, poorly considered fashion options and insanely expensive Burgundy wine.  As far as I could tell, everyone was either eating, drinking or trying to figure out where they were going to eat and drink next.  This is Burgundy and it’s what you do.  You don’t come here to water ski.  

There are many places to taste wines of varying quality.  I had a deja vu experience where I had a flight of white wines poured to me by a smiling strawberry blonde woman in her late 20s.  She was very cheerful and dutifully told me about how the Pouilly-Fuisse was made from chardonnay, which was typical of that area.  I was distracted, staring at a small bumblebee ring she wore, thinking “should you let her ramble on or maybe throw in some soil composition facts and Maconnais trivia just so she knows that she doesn’t have to talk to you like an elementary school tourist?”.  She seemed really happy with her talking points, so I let her keep going.  She smiled and talked about how one day she wanted to go to a hotel in the Nordic area that was an igloo.  I was thinking as I sipped a decent Puligny Montrachet that I hoped she gets there some day. 

A quick primer on the wines of Burgundy.  This is all you need to know to be dangerous.  The white wines are 100% chardonnay.  The red wines are 100% pinot noir.  They are considered to be the absolute benchmarks for both types of wines.  Chardonnay can grow almost anywhere, but this is the place where it exhibits the most purity and balance.  The pinot noir is even more special.  Pinot is a pain in the ass to farm and really only grows well in a few places such as Burgundy, parts of New Zealand, areas of Sonoma County, and in the Willamette Valley near Portland. It’s a very finicky grape.  There are other good bottlings sprinkled around the planet, but if you like pinot noir, the Cote d’Nuits in Burgundy is your Mecca. 

Burgundy wines confuse the shit out of most people, but they are actually easy when you get the rules down.  The label shows a hierarchy or geographic location.  The French in their “of course” dismissive way assume EVERYONE knows red wine from Burgundy is pinot noir.  As the location of the vineyard source becomes more specific, the basic thought is that the quality increases.  So you can purchase a wine from the Burgundy region (meaning grapes from anywhere in Burgundy), the Cote d’Nuits, the commune of Vosne-Romanee, or the specific vineyard of Romanee Conti.  The basic red wine from Burgundy will set you back about $15.  The Romanee Conti about $25,000.  It is all about supply and demand.

Another added layer of complexity is knowing who made the wine.  Due to French inheritance law, all the children get equal portions of the estate.  Let’s say your father owns a small vineyard, about the size of a decent sized back yard.  When he dies, you get the same size portion of the land as your sister and your brother.  You have always been into making wine and farming grapes with your Dad, so you make great wine.  Your sister isn’t into it, so she leases her part of the land out to your old neighbor instead of you just to jam you up.  That guy now makes his own wine from your Dad’s yard.  Meanwhile your fuck up younger brother smokes a lot of weed, sleeps in, listens to lots of Sabbath and makes some shitty wine with his friend Nay-Nay. 

Now at the wine store there are three bottles for sale.  Your kick ass wine called “My Wine from Dad’s Vineyard in the town of Pommard in Burgundy France” is proudly on the top shelf.  It is sitting next to “The guy next door’s version of your Dad’s old vineyard in the town of Pommard in Burgundy France”.  Unfortunately for both of you is that the third bottle is “Fuck Up Brother’s wine from Dad’s vineyard”.  They are all priced about the same and look similar so the consumer has to either know that your brother is a fuck up or somehow remember your wine which he had once at a restaurant from those three really complicated sounding bottles.  If not, the guy drops $65 on your fuck up brother’s wine by mistake and then thinks “Dad’s vineyard sucks.  I’m never getting wine from that vineyard again.”.  There’s a million people with tiny little vineyard holdings in Burgundy.  Some make great wine and some are the fuck up brother.

There are some very good large firms making wine there that you will see and can have confidence in like Louis Jadot and Domaine Drouhin.  They make wines spanning from “Burgundy white” to “Montrachet Grand Cru” at corresponding price points.  I tasted through a decent number of bottlings at both places and found the Drouhin to have a delicate grace and house style that shone through, despite a few higher points overall from Jadot.  You can buy a bottle from either producer and show up at someone’s house unafraid of looking like a dope.

The wines made in Burgundy are in great demand.  They are expensive, some astronomically so.  They used to be very expensive and now can be insane thanks to the Chinese rush to market for the finest wines.  Too many people want too few bottles.  This is why not everyone can drink La Tache at $22.  It wasn’t until I drove out to the tiny town of Vosne Romanee that I really got it.  I drove up the “Road of Grand Crus” which is a straight shot that connects all the legendary Burgundy Villages so well known to aficionados from wine labels.  Aloxe Corton sits proudly on a hill surrounded by vines.  Little villages pass in a blink.  I rolled through the town of Cote d’Nuits with its shabby charm to get to my ultimate destination.  The vineyards are a quilt of tranquil green. 

Vosne Romanee is the absolute epicenter for the finest pinot noir on the planet.  It is not a point of debate.  It’s just the way that it is.  They have the absolute perfect soil, climate and combination of intangibles to make pinot noir magical.  It doesn’t look like much.  The town is tiny and remarkably sleepy.  A tired looking old woman swept her doorstep with a cheap plastic broom.  Two teenage girls sat on the church steps and ignored me.  Small claustrophobic alleys lazily slope between run down two story residences.  I could hear TVs insistent chatter behind closed shutters.  I walked the slight incline on a dirt road to get to the legendary vineyards.  I wanted to smell the air, feel the ground underfoot, and actually get a sense of what the place was like that had been written about in such reverential terms for hundreds of years. 

The most striking thing is that despite knowing the legendary vineyards would be small, I have to say one thing.  They are really small!  I knew they would be small parcels of land, but damn…  It is amazing that any bottles of some of these wines are ever seen by the naked eye anywhere.  Based on the size of those vineyards, a bottle of Romanee Conti should be like a unicorn, something you know what it looks like in theory but have never actually seen with your own eyes.  I think I could throw a football across the vineyard, and I’m not exactly possessing a cannon of an arm.  Standing there all by myself on a Sunday morning with the sound of bees buzzing and birds chirping is something I will always remember.  This was, in essence, the realization of the quest I had taken on to get here.  But let’s be honest.  It was also just a guy standing in a farm.  There isn’t much to see.  The significance is all in the knowledge of the past of this tiny spot.  I can’t imagine how many bored wives have been standing here looking at their watch asking “What are you looking at?  It’s a bunch of vines just like all the others.  Can we go?”.   

I was lost in thought at lunch that day when I made a tragic social faux pas, a breach of ettiqette so severe that vengeance was served with swift precision.  I forgot to say “Bon Jour” when I walked into a restaurant.  It is custom when you walk into a French place of business to say “Bon Jour!” in an uplifting tone.  Then the person in the store replies with an equally optimistic “Bon Jour!”.  It’s actually a nice custom, but easy to forget.  So when I walked into the small bistro and the waiter said “Bon Jour!”, I responded with “Table?”.  His face turned to an instant hard expression.  He stopped all movement and looked into my eyes in an almost menacing fashion.  “Bon.  Jour.”.  Oh fuck.  “Ohh… Ah… Yes…  Bon Jour!  Bon Jour!”.  He frowned at me and waved me towards an open table, focused on providing the absolute barest minimum of service possible, which from a French waiter is saying something.

There’s an odd cultural disconnect between French dining and American dining.  Our version of great service is quick and efficient interaction where the server fetches things you request as quickly as possible.  In France, they believe it is rude to run right over to your table when you sit down.  They believe it is polite to allow you to settle in, take a moment and get the feel of the place.  You can be sitting there with your American mind watching a waiter whisk by you a half dozen times before even making eye contact and think to yourself “Am I fucking invisible here?”.  Each step in the dining process is a lengthy decision with long periods of intermission.  It’s why everything except restaurants shuts down between 12-2.  Lunch is a two hour endeavor.  If you can shut your American frantic mind down you discover something.  It’s quite nice. 

While we spend our lives shoving down nacho cheese guacamole beef burritos in our car that we pulled out of a drive through, there’s a French construction worker sitting at a real table eating a poached sea bass with fresh vegetables.  While you are wiping nacho cheese guacamole insanity sauce off your pants in traffic, that guy is waiting for a small piece of cake and a good quality coffee in a cup with a saucer.  The counter argument is then waged about how “America works hard which is why we are the best country that has ever existed!”.  This argument is almost exclusively made by people that have never traveled further than Disneyland and have no idea that in multiple ways other nations have figured out a way to live that is vastly superior to ours.  In France you have a two hour lunch daily, work 35 hours a week, and take 8 weeks vacation.  As I looked around I saw well paved roads, reliable infrastructure, healthy people, and a less frenzied pace of life that is enviable.  It all seems to work.