The Juice (20 page)

When Wasserman heard whispers that the Domaine Duchet was for sale, she contacted another symposium alum, the real estate investor Richard Forbes, and again hired Croix to make the wine. The estate, Domaine des Croix, is named for a stone cross in the courtyard of the domaine, with a nod to the winemaker. And while she had no part in the recent sale of Domaine René Manuel, her former employee Dominique Lafon, who now runs his family domaine in Meursault, was one of the principals in the deal, one of many top Burgundian producers whose wines she exports to the States.

A few days after I meet her in Beaune, Becky is eager to talk about the humble side of Burgundy over lunch at the old stone
farmhouse in Bouilland. “There’s so much emphasis on the famous domaines and the Grands Crus,” she says, “that I’m afraid people are overlooking appellations like Monthélie and Savigny and Marsannay. Burgundy can be so expensive, but there are wonderful bottles for $30 or $40.” Russell, who has prepared another lamb stew, this one with lots of garlic over a white bean puree, pours me a glass of 2002 Sylvain Pataille Marsannay, an inexpensive red that’s one of the best things I’ve tasted during a week in Burgundy. “It’s always the small things that have intrigued us the most,” Becky says. “The handmade, the artisanal. That’s really what Burgundy is about.”

The first time I remember drinking white Burgundy was in 1985, shortly after I returned to Manhattan after a sojourn at graduate school. The bottle in question was a birthday present from my wife, a 1982 Carillon Puligny-Montrachet. I’m not entirely sure whether it was a Premier Cru, from the middle slope of the gently rising hillside adjacent to the famous Grand Cru Montrachet vineyard, or a simple Village wine from lower down, but I was so blown away that Puligny-Montrachet immediately became my favorite special-occasion white.

Over the years I’ve learned to love Meursault, Chassagne-Montrachet, and even select New World Chardonnays, but I’ve always maintained a soft spot for the wines of Puligny, a tiny village on the lower slope of the famous hillside known as the Côte d’Or. Puligny-Montrachet is located in the southernmost part of the Côte de Beaune, home of the best white Burgundies, made exclusively from the Chardonnay grape. In 1879, in an effort to boost its own profile and the price of its wine, Puligny attached to its own name that of its most famous vineyard. Le Montrachet had long been hailed as the world’s greatest dry white wine. Claude Arnoux, writing in 1728, could find no words in either French or Latin to describe its splendors (an example that wine critics should sometimes ponder). Thomas Jefferson was such a big fan that after tasting the 1782 vintage, he ordered an entire 130-gallon cask, according to John Hailman’s
Thomas Jefferson on Wine
. Must have made for quite a party. More recently, it was the wine that Grace Kelly brought over to wheelchair-bound Jimmy
Stewart’s apartment in
Rear Window
, along with a meal from the ‘21’ Club, a delivery that I’d willingly break my own leg for. The problem, from the point of view of a thirsty world, is that there are only twenty acres of this hallowed ground. However, the adjacent hillsides, with their similar aspects and limestone-rich geology, produce wines with a distinct family resemblance that often approach the level of the Big M. (Why Montrachet itself is always considered superior to, and worth more than, wines from vines just a few feet away is a question that wouldn’t necessarily be elucidated by a book-length analysis.)

So it was a natural, even brilliant move on the part of the former mayor of Puligny to co-opt this famous name. Unfortunately for him, though, the Montrachet vineyard straddled the border between Puligny and Chassagne, and the residents of that village, hearing of Puligny’s application, quickly followed his lead. “And thus the bigamous marriage was proclaimed, on 27 November 1879,” Simon Loftus writes in his book
Puligny-Montrachet
. “Puligny became Puligny-Montrachet … at the same time as Chassagne took the same partner, from that day forth.” The two villages had a long history of rivalry, which was exacerbated by the shared name. While I love some of the wines of Chassagne, those of Puligny seem to me to have greater precision and refinement. When I ask Jacques Lardière, the winemaker at Louis Jadot, which makes some five different Pulignys, what distinguishes the wine of that commune from its neighbors, he says, “Aristocracy.” This is a very short answer for the garrulous poet of Beaune, who describes wine making as the process of “seeking the unconscious of the earth,” but I think I know what he means. Even without that takeout scene in
Rear Window
, Grace Kelly might easily come to mind.

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.

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 the 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.