About 15 years ago, when I did not know I was between marriages, a newspaper asked me to travel through Burgundy on a bicycle. The timing was tight and there were unforeseen difficulties – unforeseen, that is, by English journalists who had forgotten that mid-July, in France, is not just high season but Bastille Day. Somehow, everything worked out, and I spent four blissful days pedalling from Beaune to Mâcon. Sometimes, my path ran along a canal towpath; at one point, I cycled the defunct railway line, like a slightly winded little train. But the rest of the time, my route wound through the vineyards of the Côte de Beaune, the southern half of the limestone ridge that juts into the dreams of wine lovers everywhere: the Côte d’Or.
From Beaune past Pommard and Volnay and Meursault, inhaling Puligny-Montrachet on my left and admiring Chassagne-Montrachet on my right, observed by rows of vines that seemed, to my passing eye, identical. Only when their fruit is in the glass do the variations between plots and plants – a wealth of tiny differences, made by centuries of growers and millennia of evolving soils – become subtly apparent. And of course, once I dismounted, hungry and tired but as elated as any sans-culotte razing the Bastille Prison in the name of liberté, I dove into a fair few of those, too.
I knew already that, while almost all red Burgundy is pinot noir (and most of the whites are chardonnay), Pommard reds are rich while Volnays are lighter, more elegant, leaving, as the Dijon-born politician Jean-François Bazin put it, ‘a trace of lipstick on the Côte de Beaune, like the outline of a kiss’. I also knew that the steepest slopes of the Côte d’Or hold, just about, the best vines, on soil so poor that the Burgundians say (with some pride) that a chicken could die of hunger during harvest. I had not known that the hills were capped with trees, exhaling cool air, or that the villages seemed to bloom among the endless vines in outcrops of creamy stone. Nor had I thought about the advantages, to a fair-weather cyclist, of a place where steeper land was far too valuable to give over to les voies vertes, France’s network of dedicated cycle paths. These days, I am usually offered an e-bike, but no cyclist in Burgundy needs one, nor does that kind of shortcut feel appropriate to a place that has been making a virtue – a delicious one – out of difficulty since a huddle of Roman ex-legionaries looked up at the inhospitable limestone slopes and said, let’s plant that.
I came home dizzy with beauty, my head full of stories and my bags as packed with bottles as budget and weight restrictions would allow. I brought gougères, the Burgundian cheese puffs that must be eaten that very day, for two close friends and announced to them, with some bravado, that I was making it my mission to visit Burgundy every year.
About a year later, I met the man who is now my husband. Who had four children, then very young, growing up in Burgundy, and so a house about 45 minutes from the Côte d’Or proper. Soon, I was joining him on fortnightly trips to the region, to nurture young humans rather than vines (albeit helped along by judicious amounts of good Burgundian wine) and I’m glad to say those two gougère friends have never once commented on how a person should be careful what she wishes for.
We did not, in those early years, manage to visit many wineries, although I have fond memories of popping in, on a whim, to Bruno Clair in Marsannay-la-Côte, and having him stare in disbelief – did Madame not realise it was lunchtime, l’heure du déjeuner? – thrusting a bottle at me and showing me, pleasantly but firmly, the door. But the children grew and our time, the magic ingredient for wine drinkers as well as winemakers, became our own again. We went back to Marsannay-la-Côte and stood in a vineyard with Sylvain Pataille, the passionate, curly-haired iconoclast who has somehow managed to scrape together enough land (thinner pickings for a would-be grower than for that proverbial chicken) to make vibrant wines with a modern tang. We visited Drouhin-Laroze in Gevrey-Chambertin, where one generation poured her wines at a table facing a tiny vineyard, her son sorted grapes in the winery and the estate’s future owner played with a soft toy and cooed. Turning south, we went to Saint-Aubin – once marginal but now, as the world and the slopes warm, one of the most exciting white wine areas in the region – and gazed at vines stretching uphill behind the pale rectangular mass of the Post Office in such orderly lines that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the mail arriving via the dark channels between each green row, whooshing out as if from a pneumatic tube…
I have mooched, in a hotel barge, along the Burgundy Canal, the 18th-century waterway that connects the river Yonne in northern Burgundy – Chablis country – with the Saône, flowing tranquilly towards Lyon. In a grassy enclosure between the winery and the shop at Domaine Faiveley, in Nuits-Saint-Georges, after a tasting of raspberry-rich reds, I admired the smooth bronze limbs of Rodin’s The Kiss (Le Baiser), placed here in honour of the long-dead Faiveley who served as the sculptor’s patron, and a reminder that there are many ways, beyond flavour and certainly beyond alcohol, that good wine can make us happy.
We drink Burgundy, as good as we can afford, in our little house within sight of hills that are no longer, since phylloxera, covered in vines, and with it we often eat the food of the region: beef, sometimes bourguignon; jambon persillé, chunks of moist rich ham hock clustered like guests at a good party, held together by a white-wine jelly flavoured and coloured by handfuls of parsley. Gougères, of course. Snails in garlic butter, naturellement. Feasting on vine leaves, those languid gourmets earn their place in the special pocked platter – the escargotière – and their pairing with a fresh aligoté, the region’s less famous white grape. In Burgundy, revenge is a dish best served hot, with good bread to mop up the unctuous sauce.
And when we leave Burgundy for London, undulating vineyards for tangled streets, country calm for perennial bustle, we still take bottles, to add to those we buy in London, so that a little of the Côte d’Or – the Golden Slope – accompanies us to the city, just as that magical first excursion seems to have stayed with me, nourishing my life in unexpected and delectable ways.
