So, four or five hundred years ago, they celebrated the excellence of Burgundy in the taverns and cabarets of Paris: “If I had a gullet five hundred ells wide, an the Seine ran this good wine of Beaune, I would go down under the bridge, stretch myself out, and I would let the Seine run down into my belly.”
Heart-warming and joyeux, heady, big of body, magnificent and Rabelaisian, this is Burgundy. Surely not, as Maurice des Ombiaux has said, a wine for a man with a col and lazy stomach, since those who make good Burgundy are about the most industrious vintners of France, and Burgundy in turn, as Francis Bacon might have said, maketh a warm man.
I am always astonished when people compare Burgundy with Bordeaux, as if the two were similar, for they are as different as noon and twilight. In Gevrey-Chambertin or Beaune, when there is an honored guest or a great occasion, the linen nappe and the great crystal glasses are on the table by noon, and one is well into the coq au vin and the best wines by one-thirty. In Bordeaux, such meals are served by the light of chandeliers, and the greatest of the vieilles bouteilles only make their appearance in their gleaming decanters two or three hours after sundown. In Bordeaux you eat sole frite with a little white wine at lunch, thinking of dinner, and in Burgundy you take an omelette, or the simplest grillades, with mineral water at dinner, remembering lunch. The most celebrated poet of Bordeaux, Biarnez, wrote of the chateaux and the wines so dear to his heart in cool and measured Alexandrians reminiscent of Racine. Burgundy is celebrated in bawdy tavern songs.
The immemorial and indestructible and universal fame of red Burgundy is based on the russet-brown soil of one narrow, not particularly fertile hillside, and on the incomparable quality of one extraordinary grape. The hill, of course, is the Côte d'Or, or “Golden Slope,” of which I shall have more to say later. The grape is the Pinot Noir.
The origin of the Pinot is unknown; it is probably as old as France. In the first century A. D. a vine, “one of several grown in Gaul… the smallest and the best,” was identified and described by the Roman agronomist, Columella, in terms that make it reasonably certain that he knew what we call the Pinot, and had tasted its wine.
By about 1400, in any case, these “best and most precious wines of the Kingdom of France,” as Philip the Bold calle them, had become celebrated throughout the civilized world. The Dukes of Burgundy were as proud of the title, “Lords of the Best Wines of Christendom,” as they were of their dukedom, and in 1366 the Italian poet, Petrarch, could even charge that the Papal Court, then installed in Avignon, refused to return to Rome because of its fondness for the wines of Beaune.
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