Thanksgiving wines: Burgundy lookalikes at a sip of the price
Famed French region favoured by wine aficionados can be spotty and pricey, so try these alternatives
It’s nearly impossible to talk about the best wines for Thanksgiving without mentioning Burgundy. This French region just southeast of Paris doesn’t just make straight-up gorgeous wines from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay that pair perfectly with roast turkey, it is also the birthplace of those varieties.
Crisp Chablis is the quintessential unoaked Chardonnay, with its cool scent of wet stones, bone-dry flavours of granite, gunflint and chalk and a highvoltage charge of acidity.
At first blush, it could easily be mistaken for mere liquid refreshment — satisfying but simple. But that’s just its seamlessness talking. Close attention reveals much more. And it is precisely this subtlety that makes connoisseurs swoon — it’s wine with a heartbeat.
At the other end of the white Burgundy spectrum is Meursault — oaked Chardonnay that swells with come-hither aromas and flavours of buttered toast, butterscotch, vanilla custard, baked apple pie and more.
Between these two extremes, this fine French region offers every shade of Chardonnay imaginable.
The top reds of Burgundy are similarly exciting. Made of pure Pinot Noir, they start with a hallmark expression of berry-violet-beetroot that morphs mouth-wise into caramelized meat drippings, underbrush and earthy barnyard flavours. This stuff is legendary.
At best, it combines authority with finesse, depth with elegance, ironfist power with velvet-glove delicacy to charming effect. Little wonder it has been compared to hot sex, falling in love and every euphoric sensation in between. And of course, it’s expensive.
A single bottle from Domaine Romanée-Conti, the best vineyard in the region, fetches thousands of dollars. Last October, Sotheby’s sold a 114-bottle lot of DRC Romanée-Conti wines for more than $2.1 million in Hong Kong, setting a new auction record.
Burgundy is both fascinating and tricky — a treasure trove and a minefield at once. Largely because of the labelling laws.
The region doesn’t label by grape variety and simple geography like most of the winemaking world; the French would deem that far too simple. Instead, its labels are based on something called “terroir.”
The French believe a wine always tastes of its terroir — the soil, climate, topography and grape variety from which it came. So Burgundy wines are labelled by their region, sub-region and vineyard rather than grape variety. And an established hierarchy of quality dictates how much of that information must appear on the label.
But finding great Burgundy isn’t just a matter of knowing its geography and pecking order of excellence. More than 3,000 producers make wine there, with quality varying quite dramatically. So you also need to know who makes what well.
The exciting thing is that, although nowhere can match Burgundy’s finest reds and whites, these archetypal styles inspire winemakers everywhere to try their hands at making similarly captivating Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.
So, although Burgundy offers a significant touchstone for the finest Chardonnay and Pinot Noir on the planet, great value versions now hail from elsewhere — including right here in Ontario. And from a smart shopper point of view, that’s good to know. I’ll lift a glass to that.