Lardière took me on a tour of the Côte de Beaune vineyards, some marked off by tangible boundaries like a streambed or a road, others distinguished only by invisible shifts in the bedrock or soil type. The untrained eye might not register the borders, but a thousand years of observation and tasting have drawn the lines.
As we drove north from Santenay, we passed Chassagne and shortly arrived at the inner sanctum, the walled vineyard of Montrachet, located in the middle of the hill—the sweet spot. For such a famous piece of real estate the landscape isn’t very dramatic—a ten-degree slope ribboned with vines. I have to admit I was a little disappointed. Below, on a gentler slope, is Bâtard-Montrachet, also a Grand Cru, and above, on the steepest part of the hill, is Chevalier-Montrachet. Thanks to erosion, the latter has very sparse soil, some of which ends up downhill at Bâtard; the wines of Chevalier are generally thought to be leaner and more elegant, those of Bâtard fatter and richer. Montrachet, in the middle, is said to strike a balance between the two. I can vouch for these generalizations thanks to the generosity of several movie studios that employed me in the late eighties. I spent a fair amount of Paramount’s and Universal’s money comparing these three Grands Crus at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, which for some reason was well stocked with older vintages from Bouchard Père & Fils. There were only two or three solid items on the room service menu—apparently, the management of the then-raffish establishment where John Belushi met his end assumed its patrons weren’t deeply interested in food. But just in case you ever find yourself wondering what to eat with a fine Montrachet, I can assure you that a tuna melt works very well.
To the north of the Grands Crus, on the same southeast-facing slope, are the Premiers Crus of Puligny-Montrachet, wines I learned to love after the demise of my screenwriting career. They can attain similar heights, occasionally even surpassing the Grands Crus in the hands of a great producer like Domaine Leflaive, the ne plus ultra maker of Puligny. The vineyards higher on the hill, like Les Caillerets and Champ-Gain, tend to yield somewhat more structured, flintier wines, while those lower down, contiguous with Bâtard, tend to be rounder, though still marked by a mineral note. From the flatlands below the hill come the so-called Village wines, the third declension of greatness, entitled to be called Puligny-Montrachet, though the vineyard itself is generally not specified. Village wines from the better domaines like Leflaive, Carillon, Sauzet, and the newcomer Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey can be very special wines despite their third-tier ranking.
Leflaive is the superstar of the appellation, the reference standard for Puligny-Montrachet. (Domaine de la Romanée-Conti makes a few barrels of Montrachet every year, but unless you own a private jet, you probably shouldn’t worry about it.) Anne-Claude Leflaive, whose family has been in Puligny since 1717, converted the domaine to biodynamic viticulture in 1997, and such is the quality of the wines that many of her neighbors followed her example. Exponents of this cosmically conscious version of organic farming inevitably cite Leflaive to lend credence to this controversial set of practices. Its best Premier Cru is probably Les Pucelles, while its Grand Cru Chevalier-Montrachet is undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest white wines—celestial juice—more than worthy of being delivered by Grace Kelly.
The American-owned Maison Louis Jadot is a very good source of Pulignys at all levels. Shortly after touring the great Chardonnay vineyards of Beaune with Lardière, I retraced our journey in the cellars of Jadot, tasting through the wines of Chassagne, Puligny, and Meursault. Remarkably, each vineyard had a distinct flavor profile, but the Pulignys seemed to me more high toned, steely, and vivid than their neighbors. More recently, I repeated this experiment in Manhattan—with the wines of most of the top producers of Puligny, and a few Chassagnes and Meursaults thrown in for good measure—with the help of Daniel Johnnes, the wine director of Daniel Boulud’s restaurant group, who spends a good deal of time in Burgundy. Even with many different winemakers’ signatures, a decisive Puligny character was evident. “There’s an energy and a tension in Puligny,” Johnnes said. “Chassagne and Meursault are softer, less high toned.” Inevitably, we started comparing these great white Burgundies with women. Having agreed that Puligny was a beauty with distinctive bone structure, slightly more angular than curvaceous, I mentioned the model Carmen Dell’Orefice, and Daniel countered with Gwyneth Paltrow, though I still think it’s hard to improve on the Grace Kelly analogy, one that seemed all the more apt as we moved on to older wines from the 1992, 1993, and 1995 vintages.
Puligny acquires great complexity with age, and the best Premiers and Grands Crus can improve for decades, although the Village wines can often be enjoyed on release. The 2007 vintage was much more successful for white Burgundy than for red; tasting through more than a dozen 2007s, we didn’t encounter a single dud, with the exception of one bottle that was corked. The 2008s are classic Pulignys, while the 2009s are riper and more lush, which makes this a good transitional vintage for those who are accustomed to New World Chardonnays.
I haven’t spoken to my second wife in many years, but if I ever do, I should probably thank her for that first bottle of Puligny-Montrachet.
Secrets of Meursault
When I visited Dominique Lafon at his château in Meursault, he was a little bleary-eyed but exuberant, having just returned from Paris, where he had celebrated the completion of a complicated transatlantic deal that significantly increased the acreage he would be tending. Thanks in part to some deep-pocketed American investors, the chain-smoking Lafon, who looks like a shorter, weathered version of Liam Neeson, was essentially splitting the old René Manuel estate, which includes some of Meursault’s best vineyards, with his friend and neighbor Jean-Marc Roulot.
Lovers of great Meursault would soon be celebrating the news, too. Lafon and Roulot are basically the Han Solo and Luke Sky-walker of this small village in Burgundy’s Côte de Beaune, source of one of the world’s most famous and coveted white wines. The other great maker, the legendary and reclusive Jean-François Coche, of Domaine Coche-Dury, would be Obi-Wan Kenobi. Coche inspires reverence in the wine world, and his whites trade for prices that induce vertigo in all but the wealthiest of collectors. Fortunately, Meursault has many other excellent winemakers, far more than neighboring Puligny-Montrachet. It’s a picturesque and prosperous village, at the heart of which is a Gothic town hall with a multicolored enamel-tiled roof. Although some red wine is produced here, Meursault’s renown is based on the quality of its whites, made from the Chardonnay grape.
Thomas Jefferson was a fan of Meursault, and for a great many others this is the quintessential white Burgundy, easy to pronounce and easy to love, generally fleshier and flirtier than the svelte, steely wines of Puligny. Whether or not the R&D people at General Mills were fans of Meursault, they seem to have mimicked its classic flavor profile when they came up with Honey Nut Cheerios. Hazelnut, in particular, seems to be a recurring tasting note. While there are no Grand Cru vineyards here, there are many fine Premiers Crus, and most aficionados agree that the Perrières vineyard is worthy of Grand Cru status. But Meursault, like its neighbors, has a dirty little secret on which its future might hinge.
But first, some history: Domaine Lafon came into existence when Dominique’s great-grandfather Comte Jules Lafon married Marie Bloch, who owned land in Meursault. A man of great energy, a well-traveled bon vivant, art collector, and gourmand, he bought the best vineyards in the village in between two circumnavigations of the globe and founded La Paulée de Meursault, the bacchanalian post-harvest feast that survives to this day. The current comte seems to share many of the qualities of his ancestor, although when Dominique took over the estate in 1984 it was in fairly dismal shape. The young Lafon renovated the cellar, experimented with organic, and finally converted to biodynamics, the holistic agricultural system inspired by the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. In short order he created a rich, full-bodied Meursault that achieved international stardom. His Perrières is particularly admired; the 1996 is easily one of t
he best white wines I’ve ever tasted.
Meanwhile, Jean-Marc Roulot took over his family domaine in 1989 somewhat reluctantly, sidelining a successful career as a stage and film actor. Tall and slim, with a hawkish nose and a wry wit, he crafts wines that are a little leaner and racier than Lafon’s, which has made him a favorite with sommeliers and other fans of high-acid wines. He really hit his stride with the 1992 vintage—I recently tasted his 1992 Perrières, a beautiful and complex wine that seemed to have another decade of life. Roulot buffs are thrilled that the Domaine Manuel deal will greatly expand the supply of Roulot Meursault, which has never been easy to find.
But there’s a troubling mystery that Lafon and Roulot are beginning to confront. Although Meursault is approachable in its youth, experienced tasters tend to agree that a Premier Cru Meursault from a good year is at its best around the seven-to-ten-year mark—or at least they did until recently. There is now a general consensus that something changed for the worse starting with the 1995 vintage. Many of the wines of that vintage and subsequent ones evolved far more quickly than they were supposed to, suffering from premature oxidation, a.k.a. premox, that gave them an unwanted resemblance, in taste and color, to sherry. In 2011 I hosted a tasting of vintages going back to 1985 with some sommelier friends, and while there were some transporting moments, we also experienced some real disappointments; five out of sixteen bottles suffered from some degree of oxidation, including the two bottles that had us all drooling in anticipation—2002 Perrières from Roulot and Lafon.
Many white Burgundy makers have been in denial about this, but by now most acknowledge the problem, although no one has come up with a simple explanation. One theory links the premox phenomenon with the trend toward “natural” wine making and a decreasing use of sulfur, which acts as a preservative. Faulty corks have also been blamed, some claiming that around 1995 many cork manufacturers started bleaching corks with hydrogen peroxide, which interacts with—and oxidizes—the wine in the bottle. The practice of bâtonnage—the periodic stirring of the lees (the yeasty sediment) in the barrel—has also been cited as an oxidative factor, although it’s unclear why it would have started causing problems in 1995.
Lafon, for one, is not afraid to talk about premox, and he’s attacking the problem on several fronts, working with scientists at the University of Bordeaux, experimenting with corks and coatings as well as higher levels of sulfur, and he’s sharing and comparing notes with his neighbors. He seems confident that younger vintages will behave like the Meursaults of yore. One can only hope. Many white Burgundy lovers have told me they’ve cut back on their purchases or stopped buying altogether.
Personally, I’m trying to keep the faith for the present, despite frequent disappointments. Reason would seem to dictate caution, but love and the lower appetites have nothing to do with rationality. Drinking a great, mature Meursault is one of life’s more intricately nuanced pleasures, and even young ones have a unique and thoroughly beguiling flavor profile. Recent vintages, tasted now, have been good to excellent. The 2009s are very rich and ripe, the kinds of whites that provide an easy transition for California Chardonnay drinkers. The 2007s and 2008s are more classic and less opulent, with brighter acid. I particularly like the 2008s; recent bottles from Jobard, Ente, Roulot, and the rising star Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey have been superb. For a Meursault-like experience on a budget I would recommend the whites of neighboring Auxey-Duresses and Monthélie. Once you taste a really good bottle of Meursault, you may find that you’re willing to risk the occasional stinker in order to relive that incomparable pleasure.
Jacques’s Domaine
Back when Jacques Seysses arrived in the sixties, Burgundy was nearly as famous for its provinciality as for its sophisticated wines. If the archetypal château owner of Bordeaux was a polished man of the world in English tweeds and Lobb shoes, the stereotypical Burgundian vigneron was a taciturn peasant in a beret and gum boots who hadn’t ranged any farther than his great-grandfather, who’d occupied the same house and land. Seysses, by contrast, was a handsome, well-traveled, multilingual gourmet with a sophisticated palate developed under the tutelage of his father, Louis, who owned a biscuit company and was the president of the Club des Cent, a fraternity of oenophiles and gastronomes. Young Jacques visited all of France’s three-star restaurants and wineries like Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Ramonet while he was still a kid. After sojourns at Morgan Guaranty and at the family biscuit company, Seysses followed his heart to Burgundy, where he apprenticed at the Domaine de la Pousse d’Or under Gérard Potel.
In 1967 he and his father bought a small domaine in Morey St. Denis, a sleepy village between the much more famous towns of Gevrey-Chambertin and Chambolle-Musigny. Morey is probably the least famous of the Côte de Nuits appellations, although it contains within its boundaries five Grand Cru vineyards—the highest category in the Burgundian hierarchy. “I was a newcomer in the most traditional wine-making region in the world,” says the eternally youthful, silver-haired Seysses. The newly minted Domaine Dujac (a playful moniker signifying the domaine of Jacques) had a piece of three of these, Clos de la Roche, Clos St. Denis, and Bonnes Mares.
Seysses’s first vintage was the abysmal 1968, the grapes of which he sold off in bulk. He was luckier with the great 1969 vintage and luckier still when an American beauty, Rosalind Boswell, came to pick for the 1971 harvest. “The competition was not ferocious,” Rosalind Seysses said modestly, some thirty-five years later, over lunch in the former abbey in which she and Jacques have raised their family and grown their winery. (In fact, I have it on good authority that she was a celebrated debutante whose marriage saddened many bachelors back in her native San Francisco.)
Thanks to Rosalind and the importer Frederick Wildman, a fair portion of the production has come to these shores almost from the beginning, while his father’s connections helped Jacques place his wines in some of France’s best restaurants. Seysses continues the grand tour of France’s gastronomic shrines, although he now does so by bicycle, traveling thousands of kilometers a year, inevitably arriving at the end of the day at some two- or three-star restaurant. “We’re bicycle people,” Jacques exclaims, beaming at his svelte wife as he helps himself to another serving of lamb and pours out more 1985 Clos de la Roche.
In the summer of 2005, thirty-year-old Jeremy, who has a master’s from Oxford as well as a degree in viticulture from the University of Dijon, followed in his father’s footsteps when he also married an American, Diana Snowden, a twenty-seven-year-old UC Davis graduate who looks about a decade younger and has become an integral member of the Dujac wine-making team. The two met while they were both working as interns at Robert Mondavi in Napa. They had only a few dates before Jeremy returned to France, but he was taken enough to send her a plane ticket to France for Christmas.
Jeremy tried to escape the family business. He worked at the Monterey Bay Aquarium for six summers and studied biology at Oxford, but he also joined the Oxford University Wine Society, becoming part of the blind-tasting team that crushed Cambridge three years in a row. “All of a sudden,” he told me a decade later as we tasted through the 2009 vintage in the Dujac cellar, “wine was not something that only people of my parents’ generation could be interested in but something that young people could be interested in too.” After Oxford he studied viticulture in Dijon, worked as a wine sales rep in London for two years, and finally embraced his fate, returning to the tiny village of Morey St. Denis and assuming more and more responsibility. “I suppose 2004 was the first vintage for which I was really in charge,” he says, “but my father continues to be present to this day.”
The following year was memorable on several fronts, starting with weather that made for a nearly perfect vintage. Jeremy’s wedding to Diana, held at the sixteenth-century abbey of Clos de Vougeot, was a convocation of Burgundian royalty and an international wine-world event. Diana, who was by then working alongside Jeremy as the domaine’s oenologist, gave a speech in French, and Jeremy, w
ho speaks the language of Shakespeare flawlessly, gave his speech in Peter Sellers–style heavily accented English, much to the amusement of the Yank and Limey contingents.
The other, less publicized occasion for celebration at Dujac that year was the purchase of prime vineyards of the former Domaine Moillard, which includes choice slices of Chambertin, Vosne-Romanée Malconsorts, and Romanée St. Vivant. This purchase was the cause for a lot of drooling in the wine world. None of these wines, which had their debut with the great 2005 vintage, are terribly easy to find, or inexpensive; fortunately, the Seysses family launched a negotiant label, called Dujac Fils & Père; these wines, made from purchased grapes, are less expensive than the domaine wines and sometimes very nearly as good.
The Dujac style strikes many as the epitome of Burgundy. “Dujac has an aromatic complexity which is utterly compelling,” says Burgundy expert Robert Bohr. “It’s not foursquare, and it’s not powerful; it’s pretty and perfumed and elegant.” Like others, including Seysses, Bohr attributes this style in part to the old-fashioned practice of vinifying with the stems intact—a practice also followed at Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Once universal, this practice is relatively rare in Burgundy today, and it seems as if Jeremy is using a slightly lower percentage than his father did, but these wines retain an unmistakable signature, even as it seems that the 2005s and the 2009s may surpass the high standards of earlier benchmarks. For whatever reason, I find the aromatic profile unmistakable and haunting in the best sense.
A few years back I found myself at a Burgundy dinner, sitting in the dining room of the British wine master Jancis Robinson, along with Stephen Browett of Farr Vintners and Heston Blumenthal, the chef of three-star Fat Duck. I was daunted in the presence of these experts and prepared for a thoroughly nerve-racking evening until I stuck my nose in the first glass and experienced a thrill of recognition. It was as if I’d pressed my nose to the skin of a former lover—I knew that this wine could only be from Domaine Dujac, that it was almost certainly its signature Grand Cru Clos de la Roche. And I got lucky with the vintage, which was 1995, having tasted it not long before at the domaine. (This took some of the sting out of a humiliating episode in Jancis’s company the week before, when I’d utterly failed to identify one of my favorite Bordeaux, La Mission Haut-Brion, going so far as to idiotically insist that the wine in question wasn’t a La Mission.) After nailing the Dujac, having established my chops, I was free to kick back for the rest of the night, though in fact I came out of retirement an hour later to identify a second Dujac. On the one hand, the style was Dujac, and, on the other, the vineyard and the vintage shone through. You can’t ask any more of a wine than to be unique and unmistakably itself.