Burgundy

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

Flirting with Passetoutgrain, Burgundy Pinot Noir’s fun sister

In his History of the Franks, Gregory of Tours (c. 539-594) wrote one of my favorite opening sentences: “A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad.” Who can disagree? Gregory’s works are full of interesting morsels. Writing about the miracles of St. Julian, for example, he notes that a cask of wine that was left half empty was found “overflowing and forming a rivulet of wine across the floor. Although drawn from repeatedly, the cask remained full until the next day.” A good fellow to have around, that Julian. Gregory seems to have taken a keen interest in wine. He was one of the first people to opine about the wines of Burgundy. which he compared to storied Roman Falernian in 591. What do you suppose that wine was like?

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

The best bargain burgundies

Apropos the subject of this column, videlicet, wine, a friend told me an arresting story about the once-famous British theater critic and playwright Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980). Sometime in the 1960s, when the prickly Gamal Abdel Nasser ruled Egypt, Tynan went sailing on the Nile. One night, he came ashore to enjoy dinner at the Luxor Hotel. The wine list was impressive. He ordered a famous bottle that cost practically nothing. The head waiter swept over to tell him, so sorry, they’d drunk the wine out. Tynan manfully looked again at the list and asked for the second best bottle. Alas, the waiter replied, that wine, too, had been exhausted. “Well, what do you recommend?” Tynan asked. To which the answer was: “We have no wine of any kind.” That hasn’t happened to me yet.

Burgundy

Monday

Calla Jones Corner

The fine wines of Meursault

In November, I was privileged to attend the 91st Paulée de Meursault. There are three coveted invitations at that time of year in this part of Burgundy: the world-famous wine auction held in Beaune and the luncheons called la Paulée de Beaune and la Paulée de Meursault. La Paulée de Meursault celebrates the fine wines grown in this small village. It is home to eighty wine-growing families and the area is known for its charm and terroir, that unique blend of soil and climate that has been producing exceptional white and red grapes for centuries. I had heard from our family about this festive celebration ever since our daughter and son-in-law moved to France fifteen years ago to work in wine.

Meursault

Friday

Calla Jones Corner

In a balloon over Burgundy

I said I’d never go up in a hot air balloon again. But that was a terrified me forty-five years ago. And here I was, relaxed and enjoying the views of the French Côte d’Or with my family and a handful of French people at 1,500 meters, hovering over vineyards, pastures and fields. In 1979 I was contacted by Hans Büker, a thirty-nine-year-old German balloonist who was hoping for some free publicity in the International Herald Tribune, for which I was the Swiss correspondent. Büker was trying to launch a ballooning festival in Château d’Oex in the Bernese Oberland, known for its cheese and rolling pastures pierced by imposing alps.

balloon
winter
Roger Kimball

The best winter wines

Winter is a natural moment for a little recherche du temps perdu. For my band of serious thinkers, the usual aides-mémoire are not petites madeleines dipped in tea but some of the various wines the holidays afforded us. Wordsworth said that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” The jury is still out on the accuracy of that neatly phrased observation. But regardless of its pertinence to the art of poetry, its pertinence to the art of wine appreciation can hardly be gainsaid. With that in mind, I offer, as a minor public service, a brief recollection of some of the wines that a beneficent providence vouchsafed us as the winter solstice came and went and the house was redolent of evergreen and wood fires.

Monday

Calla Jones Corner

Cycling and sleeping in wine country

Tom Kevill-Davies and I are sitting on the deck of the Hungry Cyclist Lodge chatting about food and adventures. This enchanting forty-six-year-old man, a cyclist and a chef, arrived in the village of Auxey-Duresses in Burgundy eleven years ago, where he found an abandoned mill that was ripe for renovation. He met Aude, a local teacher, and they have two toddlers. Perhaps Tom is better known (but only slightly) for his captivating bestseller The Hungry Cyclist which he wrote in 2009. The book recounts his two-year-long trip by bike from New York to the beaches of Brazil. The Lodge is neither a B&B nor a gîte. Tom thinks of it as more like an auberge, “a home away from home,” he says.

cycling