The Jesuit promise to take the child and return the man holds loosely for wine.  Making the right calls during the formative stages of production should help deliver successful outcomes. Sticking with this analogy, the 2023 en primeur Burgundy tastings held in London a couple of weeks ago were the trade’s chance to check everything was on track.

Not that our opinions carry much sway these days. Limited sample size has always been an issue for Burgundy, and access to finished and mature wines is usually on a strict pay-to-play basis. Like attendant gillies on the Royal Dee, or caddies carrying the bags of bogey golfers round championship links, the trade has become a bystander in its own element. Life’s habit of becoming smaller with the passing of decades has dumped me back in time, parachuting me through the vapour-trails of a flush new generation of international buyers, all the way down to the lesser appellations and vineyards that gave me my first taste of red Burgundy.

I’ll admit it. As a habitual Bordeaux drinker, I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. Pinot Noir insists that you recalibrate your senses and sensibilities, like a painter shifting from oils to water colours. It lacks the weight and saturation of Syrah and Cabernet. Neither does it have Champagne’s party popping image that makes a lifestyle feature out of alterity. Most troublesome, along the Côte d’Or there’s little sign of the rebellious struggle against presumed inferiority that’s active in other regions and appellations. Generic red Burgundy is, for the most part, dull, uninteresting and lower caste. Defiantly tend to your parcel of ignobly located vines as though they were Grand Cru, and the dial barely shifts. If Pinot Noir is the exemplar of terroir, then it’s down to obduracy. Multivalent nature trumps nurture every time. Burgundy’s ridiculously complex geology may mean you can never step into the same hole twice, but the resulting differences between vineyards aren’t pure and unfettered. Individual identities are tagged for quality: Grand Cru, Premier Cru, Village. Sense of place can also be a stain.

Throwing money at Burgundy is one route to enlightenment, crass as that might sound. Kim Jong Un has tasted far more DRC than I ever will. If he appears in your contacts list, phone him, not me with your vintage questions. North Korea’s Supreme Leader included, the pursuit of the top names and vineyards has escalated into a bidding war. Finance capitalists and oligarchs have long craved the association of respectability that comes with France’s cultural output, even though their interest brings the risk of contagion and capture by the very forces of speculation and accumulation from which wine (and art) initially appeared distant.

Of course, as the adage goes, if it all goes to hell, you can drink your investment, which just brings in a whole other raft of complications. Red Burgundy is like the Cornish cottage you bought after a sun-blessed stay in lockdown, when all the climatic indices were shouting LUBERON at you. Now every time you visit it’s grey.

This year’s en primeur campaign began and ended for me in a newly opened restaurant at the base of the Nine Elms high-rise nebula. Paulées work on a barter basis: everyone brings a bottle to share. The only system of exchange operating within the room is the swapping of samples between invitees. Given the stature of the other guests, I found myself caught in a version of the debutant’s dilemma as to how one should best make one’s entrance. A 2015 was surely too young, and Vosne too arriviste?
I shouldn’t have worried. Yes, nearly everything we drank was either Premier or Grand Cru, but the format works so well because discussions of cost and value are absolutely de trop.  Bottles came and went without any glib commentary or boasting, in part because born loud wine merchants had been barred from the makeshift SW11 temple in advance.

The late-night LEVC Taxi glide home across Westminster Bridge, past Parliament and down The Mall, put me into a dream-like state….

If I was looking to bait the hook of a Bordeaux drinker with Burgundy, which of the evening’s wine would I choose?  It would need heft and colour, obviously; a thick slap of Bordeaux camouflage. Either Amélie Berthaut’s Fixin Priemer Cru Les Arvelets or Sylvain Pataille’s Marsannay Le Chapitre would do the job. Both have the brawn and the vitality that comes from cutting stingily cropped Pinot some slack in the winery. Though, for sure, this approach isn’t without risk. I imagine micro SO2 additions are lifesavers, like the short stitch tacks of a dinghy squeezed up hard against rocks. And there were victims of this method being poured side by side with the successes. The mountain climbing Lalou Bize had surely flown too close to the sun in 2008 judging by her spent Pommard Premier Cru; and, just for once, there wasn’t a rescuing merchant in my ear telling me how every other bottle from the case had been “top notch”.

The wine I wish I’d taken home with me in the cab was Duroché’s 2021 Grand Cru Latricières Chambertin. A long sweep of fruit over sunk tannins. A crimson monarch train surfing down Westminster Abbey steps. We were made for each other, and I’d drunk too much.

But when to open it? The sobering churn of the taximeter broke the spell of free wine. Not quite the million dollar question, or, at least, not quite yet. Over the evening, we sampled several 2005s, a glorious vintage if it wasn’t for the fact that the tannins still have a tendency to trip you up on the finish. Conversely, softer vintages like 2007, 2012 and 2013 seem to have wafted into the present on an invisible stream of benign dark matter. Maybe the appearance of tannin and its association with longevity is the last remainder of my Bordeaux prejudice. If it is, then I’m not alone.

I get the commercial precedent for muddying the waters between Burgundy and Bordeaux. The hoopla of the new release draws in buyers, but there’s a critical shift in emphasis between the two regions that gets washed over in the process. Vintage is immanent to Bordeaux in the way that place is immanent to Burgundy. It’s a distinction that ran through the paulée where the wines seemed taken from vintages at random, just so long as they were Grand or Premier Cru. Underscoring this difference in kind, my next paulée invitation is a Bordeaux 2005 retrospective.

Vintage is one way individual Bordeaux châteaux can pull their sprawling mix of varieties and vineyards together. It’s a means of aggregation and a point of contrast with de-aggregated Burgundy where the Côte d’Or is effectively broken down into its constituent parts: vineyards and lieux-dits.

There’s also a difference in how the respective cépages react to the annual tribunal of weather. Cabernet, particularly, seems responsive to warmth and drought, whereas Pinot, providing its roots aren’t pampered, can flourish under much more mixed conditions. This would help explain the broad spread of years on the night, and why my favourite wine was from the 2021 vintage.

Put another way, soil is depicted as the workshop in Burgundy, whilst in Bordeaux it’s much more of a shared effort with the season.

My final thought that evening was the extent to which this contrived connection between Bordeaux and Burgundy has the potential to become a two-way street. Over Christmas, I reverted to type and opened plenty of claret. A bottle that’s stuck in my memory is Château Labégorce 2015. It was great, and they makea fair bit of it from their 62 hectares. Best of all, it only cost £17 in bond, which isn’t such good news for the Perrodo Family who’ve spent a fortune on the cellars and vineyards since they arrived.

Given the heterogeneity of soils and subsoils over the estate, there must be a temptation to follow Burgundian precedent and begin winnowing out the best plots.  They may not be in possession of the next L’Enclos, but they should be able to find a few exceptional hectares which, vinified alone, could build pizazz and interest. It would make commercial sense too. Veteran Burgundy buyers, and I’m one, got forced into taking pallets of Bourgogne to secure a small allocation of the top vineyards. Of course, this would mean going against tradition, but wasn’t this what my Burgundian hosts had been doing for the last two days, retrofitting and stretching their miniaturist productions into a much bigger picture Bordeaux frame?