Notes on the Grands Jours, Day 2
Posted on May 5, 2010
During day two of the GJ, we did the Côte d’Or. Unlike my first Grands Jours day two, we went from south to north. We started in Nuits-Saint-Georges, had a snack in the Château de Clos de Vougeot, skipped through Chambolle, whose tasting is in an old barn, and finished in Marsannay.
The first time I made this trip, I was overwhelmed by the grands crus. I wanted to be able to say I’d tried Chambertin and Bonnes Mares and all that stuff. Since that was over, I tried to get around the lines at grand cru barrels and search more for the character of the places. I still got around to trying a couple St. Vivants and the Clos de Tart, just to make sure they were keeping up.
The wines are all wonderful. I’m a wimpy wine reviewer, but I was really happy with the heart of Burgundy, even though most of it was from an off-vintage. The quality creates the legends that abound in this place. Myths abound, too. The storytelling is fun, though, because this is where wine lovers all congregate, and it’s the people who really care that perpetuate and inflate all these stories. My head was filled with the stories.
I think I came out with two points that seemed real, anyway, and were reflected in the aromas and palates of these wines.
The first was that the tannin character of the wines tends to be high at the ends, and low in the center, like a suspension bridge. Nuits and Fixin have plenty of tannin, and it smooths out as you get closer to Chambolle. A writer named John Gilman (http://www.viewfromthecellar.com/index.html) pointed this out to me, and I found him to be right. Is it that the terroir naturally makes the wines this way?
Probably to a certain extent. But another thing I heard when my friend Stephane was talking with another winemaker was the word “Americanization.” It was in French, so I didn’t understand the whole conversation. I asked him about it later and he said that it was the word that described modern winemaking, and it seems to be characterized by more fruit flavor, less tannin, less acid—in a word, less of everything that helps a wine age, but helps a wine taste better initially. In a way, this could also mean that the wine is more controlled to produce these attributes and therefore has fewer flaws and more factory corrections.
The defenders of the faith demand that if a wine is made this way it’sflawed. This isn’t a wine flaw we covered in class. As the culture influences me, I’m beginning to lean toward enjoying the wines of Nuits and Fixin. They are more tannic, rustic, and real. We tried lots of ten-year-olds made in this style, and they’re fascinating. And they’re a lot cheaper.
Brad Ford
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment