Barrel Tasting the Grand Crus of Burgundy

Before we visited the region this summer our knowledge of Burgundy wines was limited. Sure, we had heard that the best wines from the region were also the most expensive. But when we were in Beaune, the town that is the centre of Burgundy wine country, we had the good fortune to meet up with Christine Botton, the Oenologist at Louis Jadot, one of of the major wine producers of the region.

We heard from her about the astounding complexity of Burgundian wine classification and finally began to understand the supreme importance of terroir to the wines of the region: why one vineyard 50 meters wide can produce wines distinctly different from its neighbouring vineyard, also 50 meters wide.

In Burgundy only two grapes are used: Chardonnay for the whites and Pint Noir for the reds, totally unlike the region we knew most about, the southern Rhone, where various appellations are allowed to use up to 14 wines in their cuvées.

In Beaune we had heard it said that there are over 1200 wines produced in the area and Christine told us that Louis Jadot alone produces over 130 wines. Christine led us on a tour of her pristine winemaking facility and then, unexpectedly, took us to the storage cellars where we barrel tasted a couple dozen of the 130 wines aging there.

The 2013 Vintage

What we tasted were wines from the 2013 vintage that were still aging in oak barrels, so they haven't yet reached maturity, they aren't yet ready to be bottled. But even so, and even though we were merely Babes in Burgundy, we could taste and smell the beauty of these wines.

Christine, who regularly has to taste dozens of different wines in an afternoon, sampled each wine and then spat it out. We reluctantly followed her example, though a few rivulets of the elixir did course down our throats every now and then. After we had sampled from each barrel, we poured our remaining wine into Christine's glass which she then poured back into the barrel, not wasting a drop. She then marked the barrel with a special token so it would be topped off tomorrow with additional wine, leaving no air space in the barrel, thereby reducing oxidation.

We tasted vineyard appellations of magical names – Beaune, of course, Mersault, Pommard, Chassagne-Montrachet, Puligny-Montrachet, Nuits-Saint-Georges, Pernand-Vergalesses, and other hyphenated names that a week ago before had meant nothing to us, but are now taste-memories of the amazing flavours Burgundy wines can produce. They're also the expensive ones.