THE OTHER WINES OF BURGUNDY
BY PATRICK COMISKEY >>> If you love or collect wine (if you have a stash, however modest, that you feed and replenish), you will reach a point where you come face to face with Burgundy. You will, inevitably, taste a Chardonnay or a Pinot Noir from this tiny region in the center of France where these varieties originated, and your love of wine will instantly, irrevocably, take on a haunting new dimension, and you will want them until the end of your days. ¶ If you’re a wine lover, your first Burgundy is like a child’s first bowl of ice cream. It is a bell you can’t unring. The pursuit of great, memorable wine, of the sort that conveys the profound and the transcendent, travels through Burgundy; there’s simply no getting around it.
And this leads to a second painful truth: Demand for the region’s best wines, its Premier Cru and Grand Cru bottlings from fabled, historic vineyards, has gone through the roof, as collectors have stoked global demand and driven prices into the stratosphere. That and a string of catastrophic, hail-strewn vintages, which has made supply scarce.
Wines from the classic appellations (AOCs) in the Côtes de Beaune and Côtes de Nuits, from villages such as Volnay or Meursault, are prohibitively expensive. Less celebrated villages such as Maranges and Irancy, and the auxiliary appellations of the Côte Chalonnaise, are also becoming pricey: Bottles that were once $20-$35 are now $45-$60. Even ordinary Bourgognes Rouges and Blancs — wines blended with fruit often grown on inferior soils — are creeping into the $40 and $50 range.
The days of cheap Burgundy aren’t returning anytime soon.
In the meantime, you can dip into two of the region’s classic outliers, Aligoté and Passetoutgrain. Both wines have been overlooked or looked down upon for decades, but have clawed their way back into relevance — in part because traditional Burgundy is unattainable, and in part because they’re delicious and relatively inexpensive.
Let’s start with the white, Aligoté, a variety whose acreage is just one-eighth that of Chardonnay in the region. It’s an ancient variety, one that gives an austere and unmodern first impression — a focused and thrillingly mineral wine, with steely aromatics and a terse suite of flavors.
Aligoté’s austerity has made it vulnerable to adornment. The former mayor of Dijon, Félix Kir, drank his Aligoté with a floater of the local blackcurrant liqueur called crème de cassis, resulting in the classic French aperitif that now bears his name. However, the world’s tastes have come around to Aligoté’s austerity measures, in part because a better clonal selection called Aligoté Doré has been isolated, which yields wines with a more supple texture and superior aromatics.
Some of the world’s great Burgundy producers — such as Charles Audoin and Aubert de Villaine — all make one, usually in tiny quantities, as an everyday wine.
The most interesting exception is Sylvain Pataille, who makes four Aligoté, bottled separately to delineate subtle variations of each vineyard’s terroir. Many can be had for less than $25.
Then there is Passetoutgrain, a wine that can be made anywhere in the region and is a blend. Passetoutgrain (the name means, roughly, “throw it all in”) combines Pinot Noir, at least one-third, with Gamay Noir. Pinot Noir is lightly tannined, transparent, casually profound in the right hands — but Passetoutgrain’s charm comes from the Gamay, which is itself a lens for terroir. You could hardly find a better introduction to the category than through the wines of Yves and Jack Confuron of Domaine Confuron-Cotetidot, whose Nuits-Saint-Georges and Vosne Romanees are famously structured, but whose Passetoutgrain is a juicy, lightly spicey, quaffable red.
As with Aligoté, a few fabled Burgundians make it: Michel Lafarge, Vincent Bitouzet of Bitouzet-Prieur, and Robert Groffier, whose 2015 is as complete as any Burgundy but substantially more accessible.
Then there’s Nuits-Saint-Georges producers Denis and Bertrand Chevillon of Domaine Robert Chevillon, who age their Passetoutgrain for 16 months in largely neutral barrels before release, almost as long as their Premier Cru Pinots. Not surprisingly, theirs is more Pinot-like, darker, more structured, and hinting at the profound, for less than $30.