Notes on the Grands Jours, Day 1

Chablis is the first stop on the Grand Jours tour. There, they also pour
Auxerre, Tonnerre, Vézelay, Irancy, and Saint Bris. Saint Bris is notable
since it’s made from sauvignon blanc. It tended to be aromatic and balanced
just under a percent of sugar. I would say the Saint Bris seems to be a
world away from white Bordeaux or New Zealand, and definitely a fun change
from a thousand Chablis.

They do make reds, especially in Irancy and Vézelay. The majority are
thinner than in the south—no big surprise—but also have nice noses and are
not oaky. The reds were acidic and so were the whites. We tasted mostly
2007, a cold year.

When it comes to Chablis wines, I found that a person could make a nice
Cartesian graph to explain them. On one axis, let’s say the X, we have
growth designations from Bourgogne to village to premier to grand cru. On
the Y we have oak. As you move along the X axis, the wines tend to go up in
oakiness.


Anyone can probably guess that as you move up and away, the Chablis also
get more and more expensive. The surprise of the day was that what was
interesting to me didn’t line up directly with the price. The lines of
people at the tables lined up directly with the price. Not that the
expensive stuff isn't good. It is. That isn't a surprise.

There was a really nice, balanced premier cru, Vosgros, that I loved, and
some of the Fourchaume and Montmains were great. My faves had a little oak.
A really smart importer could find some wonderful wine in this region
cheaper than grand cru. Then that person could import it to Oregon and we’d
all be happier.

Also, I might try to find a premier cru Chablis made in Oregon. Let us
know if you have found one.

Notes on the Grands Jours

Bethany and I knew our bags were pretty heavy with seven bottles of Burgundy and a cremant and a vin de paille from Jura, so we were going to switch the load between our bags to even it out. But the one I thought was heavier was already gone when our clerk told us that the second was too heavy. Bethany heroically suggested pulling out the books we’d saved from the Grands Jours de Bourgogne week of tastings, around 20 of them, and our bag was all right to go.
During our trip, including a few dinners and an extra tasting at the Hospice de Nuits, we tasted more than 1000 wines each. It gave me a lot of fodder for blog entries. We started the Grands Jours tastings in Chablis, then tasted the main areas of Burgundy over the next four days from Marsannay down to Pouilly, and I think there’s even another little town south of there, but I don’t have the book. Before that, we were farther north, in Paris, and we had a wonderful night at the restaurant of wine guru Tim Johnston of Juvenile’s wine bar.


Tim came to our table after we’d had a bottle of South African riesling and started chatting. He poured us some Beaujolais and we drank a bit of his birthday-barrel single malt. He found out we were going to Burgundy. After seeing the disgust on his face, I noted that he had no Burgundies among his glass pours. He said something like, “I only have good wine.”
There’s no good wine in Burgundy? Nope. And little good in Bordeaux, either. So if you want to follow the example of a successful restaurateur in your own cellar, you would only purchase Rhône, Bandol, Loire, east-of-France (Germany, Austria) and new world stuff. Now, he did say that he probably wouldn’t like the bottle of Illahe we gave him, either, but I’m blaming it more on the fact that our bottle was made from Burgundy’s king of grapes than it was grown and made in Oregon.
It was a great night. It’s always fun to hear different opinions. (Oh, he also mentioned that he kicked the director of the movie Mondovino out of his bar!) In the following week I tasted some spectacular wines from all over Burgundy. Whether they are priced fairly is another subject altogether.