The Juice (21 page)

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.

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, who 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.

Guillaume d’Angerville and Frédéric Lafarge would seem to be unlikely friends; the former is a tall, sartorially elegant, multilingual aristocrat who spent years in New York and London as a banker; the latter seems very much a man of the soil, a modest, bespectacled farmer with deeply calloused hands who is most comfortable in Wellingtons. Such is Frédéric’s affinity for the rhythms of the natural world that Jeremy Seysses, of Domaine Dujac, calls him “Starchild”; Guillaume, on the other hand, is very much at home on the streets of Paris. They grew up together in the medieval hillside village of Volnay and attended the same school in nearby Beaune, their fathers taking turns driving them back and forth. But whereas Michel Lafarge encouraged his son to join him in the family wine business, Jacques d’Angerville sent his only son away. “He basically pushed me out,” Guillaume told me when we met at his eighteenth-century manor house, the finest house in the village of Volnay. “He told me there was no room for me at the domaine. In retrospect I see that he did me a great favor.” Guillaume went on to a successful career with J. P. Morgan in New York and London; his classmate Frédéric stayed in Volnay, with brief stints in Champagne and Bordeaux, working alongside his father in the vineyards and eventually, after he married, moving in to the house next door to his childhood home.

When Jacques d’Angerville died suddenly in the summer of 2003, Guillaume, then living in Paris, suddenly inherited one of Burgundy’s most venerated domaines in the midst of the most
torrid summer in recent history. “It was a real baptism by fire,” he says. (You may recall 2003 as the summer in which hundreds of un-air-conditioned French senior citizens died as a result of the unprecedented heat wave.) Fortunately, he was able to consult his old friends the Lafarges, whose house and thirteenth-century cellar, its walls padded with black mold, is just a two-minute walk down the hill. Since that first vintage he has continued to consult with the Lafarges, and he has followed their lead in converting to biodynamics, that cosmically conscious version of organic agriculture based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. “We taste at each other’s cellars several times a year and share information about
biodynamie
,” d’Angerville says.

Michel Lafarge, the snowy-haired former mayor, had closely observed with his piercing blue eyes more than sixty vintages in Volnay, including the similarly sizzling summer of 1959. “Michel is the wise man of the village,” d’Angerville says, and he continues to work alongside Frédéric in a collaboration that a family friend describes as “seamless.” The same word might well be used for their wines.

Volnay is located in the Côte de Beaune, the southern half of Burgundy’s Côte d’Or, and many snobs insist on the superiority of the Côte de Nuits, to the north, but Jacques-Marie Duvault-Blochet, who owned the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti in the mid-nineteenth century, was equally proud of his holdings in Volnay. Although Volnay doesn’t have any official Grands Crus, more than half of its vineyards are Premiers Crus, the second-highest category. If I had to limit my Burgundy buying to just one village, this would probably be it.

The wines of Volnay have been highly regarded since at least the Middle Ages, when the Dukes of Burgundy owned vineyards here and exported the wines to the court. Volnay as we know it is a red wine made from Pinot Noir, although for many centuries it was a
light pink, and that perhaps partly explains its reputation as one of the most ethereal and delicate wines of Burgundy. The word “feminine” invariably comes up. (The neighboring commune of Pommard, which generally has heavier soils, is said to produce much more structured, masculine wines.) “Silky florality” is how the wine importer Peter Wasserman sums up the stereotype of Volnay, although he insists the reality is more complicated. There is real diversity in the 527 acres encompassed by this village of some three hundred people, but the level of quality and consistency is almost unmatched in Burgundy, a region whose wines have sometimes reminded me of British sports cars of the sixties in their fickleness and undependability, although both are happily more predictable today than in years past.

Today it’s a given that the best wines here and everywhere else are estate bottled, produced, that is, by the people who grow the grapes, but through the nineteen twenties most of the grapes grown in Burgundy were sold to large negotiants who vinified and bottled the finished wine, frequently blending them with heartier wines from the sunny Rhône Valley and elsewhere. Guillaume’s grandfather Sem, infuriated by this practice, sued some of the large Beaune negotiants, who thereafter boycotted his grapes. As a result he became a leader of the estate-bottling movement in Burgundy, selling his wines in Paris and then, with the help of Frank Schoonmaker, in the States. Thanks to that connection, the d’Angerville Volnays have long been available here.