Maconnais win
A quick two autoroute exits south of the southern end of Burgundy’s Cote d’Or, and you land in the river town of Tournus, greeted by a tire store and a McDonald’s. This is the start of the Maconnais — not far from the famed heart of Burgundy, but in spirit, a world away.
Once upon a time, when wine largely revolved around France, the Maconnais was a reliable place to find chardonnay. You encountered its wines if you drank something labeled Macon-Villages, Pouilly-Fuisse, Saint-Veran or maybe Vire-Clesse (the last approved in 1999, as the region’s fortunes were on the wane). They were fruity and more generous than the often-stoic white wines of northern Burgundy. If they tasted more basic, that was by design.
For decades, they helped to bulk up the rosters of large Burgundy merchants — bottles that kept shelves full and offered a weeknight drink. Maybe they didn’t have the cachet of Chablis. But if you wanted a decent chardonnay, touched by the wand of Burgundy, Macon wines were there.
Of course, that world is long gone, which is why I recently found myself back in the Maconnais, trying to figure out what comes next. Chardonnay is grown in nearly every wine-producing country, leaving wines like Macon-Villages without any special flair. They’re not cheap enough to compete with the oceans of inoffensive chardonnay from elsewhere. It’s understandable wh their fortunes waned.
Except that’s starting to change handful of forward-thinking vintn are overcoming the region’s peren al inferiority complex, hoping that will be seen in a different way. The envision a future guided by better, often organic, farming and defined much by red wine as white. And their white wines largely trade the generic bottles of the past for disti tive wines from specific villages an vineyards. It’s an acknowledgmen that the region’s best parts share th same hillside plantings and limestone soils that made the Cote d’O so special.
“When you think about the Ma connais, people think of MaconVillages, of a flat ocean of vines,” s Jean-Philippe Bret, who with his brothers Marc-Antoine and JeanGuillaume created the ascendant Bret Brothers label. “And it’s not fl
Let’s stick with geography for a moment, because it explains a lot about the region’s mixed fortunes The city of Macon and surroundin countryside are squeezed in a com plicated spot: Burgundy’s most famous dirt sits to the north, while t the south lies Beaujolais, whose northern edge touches the southe most Maconnais towns. Historical the area’s farmers aligned their for tunes more north than south; in th 16th-century era of Louis XIII, his rian Roger Dion has pointed out, t Maconnais proclaimed their wine making “superior in dignity” to th southern neighbors.
Their fortunes largely lay to the