A friend who had the art of living down pat once said, “There is no such thing as a cheap luxury.” I sometimes remember her words when I look at the prices of the finest white Burgundies and get a feeling close to vertigo. But if luxury is never cheap, pleasure need not be expensive. As far as white Burgundies are concerned, there are, in fact, delicious and even distinguished wines out there at reasonable prices. They’re just not obvious to us because we are dazzled by Meursault and Puligny-Montrachet and distracted by the flood of wines from the various Mâcon cooperatives.
I enjoy wines from the Côte Chalonnaise—essentially Mercurey, Rully, and Montagny. The area was considered an extension of Burgundy’s Côte d’Or until revolutionary France, dividing former provinces into administrative departments at the end of the 18th century, put it in the Saône-et-Loire, on the wrong side of an arbitrary line. But the white Burgundies I drink most often are from Saint-Véran, a small appellation (covering little more than 1,200 acres) carved out of the Mâconnais in 1971. These wines are usually fleshier than other Mâcons, with a brighter aroma and more intense flavor. Depending on the age of the vines—always Chardonnay—and the grower’s attitude toward barrels, among other things, a Saint-Véran can have exuberant fruit or the silky complexity we normally associate with far grander wines. I take advantage of the differences by serving the bolder style of Saint-Véran (fermented in a steel tank) as an apéritif and, at table, with fresh and uncomplicated dishes—pasta primavera, a curried sauté of lamb, or any kind of composed salad. I like Saint-Véran best, however, when it is fermented in barrels and aged a couple of years in the bottle. It’s delicious with a creamy blanquette of veal, delicately poached fish, or chicken braised with fennel and garlic.
Although the appellation is fairly new, the special area it covers has always been recognized for the quality of its wines. The great medieval abbey of Cluny had vines at Davayé. That particular hillside is now part of the teaching and funds-generating vineyard attached to the lycée viticole—the viticultural school. Indeed, the larger part of Saint-Véran’s appellation that lies within Davayé was originally to be included within the 1936 boundary proposed for Pouilly-Fuissé. (Pouilly-Fuissé is sandwiched between Saint-Véran’s two halves.) But the whole idea of controlled appellations was new then, and many growers were still suspicious of it. To them it smelled of government regulation, limited yields, and higher taxes at a time when wine prices were at rock bottom. Many of them simply wanted to be left alone to make what they could of a difficult situation. In Davayé, at a time before widespread refrigeration, that meant producing more red wine than white—and they didn’t see how being part of the Pouilly-Fuissé appellation would be of any help to them. So they turned the proposal down.
The area I’m describing is at the southern tip of the Mâconnais, just before it merges into the granitic mass of the Beaujolais. In fact, it collides rather than merges: The bed of limestone that runs through all of Burgundy breaks asunder here into a series of abrupt escarpments of which two, Solutré and Vergisson, dominate the skyline for miles around. Vines cover their lower slopes, drawing what sustenance they can from a bleak mix of clay and limestone. Those of Pouilly-Fuissé—that appellation draws together the villages of Vergisson, Chaintré, Fuissé, and Solutré (with its dependent hamlet of Pouilly)—are on steep, well-exposed slopes where the considerable presence of clay means the wine will have body and structure. In the Saint-Véran villages, especially Davayé and Prissé, the slopes are less precipitous, and the clay, less pervasive, often gives way to solid limestone.
There are differences between the particularly supple Saint-Véran wines of Davayé and Prissé, two villages north of Pouilly-Fuissé, and those of the four villages that lie to its south—Chasselas, Leynes, Chânes, and Saint-Vérand. Because of incursions of the Beaujolais’s granitic sand, experts of the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine are said to have checked carefully which parcels in those more southerly villages were to be included in the Saint-Véran appellation and which were not (some white wines of the area have the compromise appellation of Beaujolais Blanc). But I sometimes wonder. I’ve been told often enough that the wines from that side of the appellation simply need time to come round, but to my palate they’re hard when young and not much improved as they age. Fortunately, Davayé and Prissé produce more than half the wine of the appellation, and their wines are the ones I always buy.
The name Saint-Véran comes from what is now known as Saint-Vérand, even though, ironically, it’s the village with the smallest acreage devoted to the cause. Formerly “Saint-Véran-des-Vignes,” it was obliged by the French postal service to accept a distinctive final d some years ago in return for being allowed to shorten its name. The commune had thought the “des Vignes” suffix cumbersome (and perhaps too quaint) but is now fighting the bureaucrats—so far without success—to have it restored. The battle is perhaps no more than a sign of wanting to be more closely identified with the growing reputation of the wines. Yet it’s also a symptom of the changing attitude to vines and wine in rural France. Burgundy’s Côte d’Or and Bordeaux’s Haut-Médoc enjoy an international reputation that reflects glory on their vineyards’ proprietors. But the lives of most French winegrowers have never been particularly glamorous. They are small farmers—25 acres is a fair-sized holding—with a particularly labor-intensive crop. They live in their overalls.
Their sons and daughters, obliged to help with the pruning and picking, would often choose to become pharmacists and engineers rather than work in all weather for such uncertain rewards and so modest a life. But their sons and daughters, sometimes raised in cities, loved the summers they spent in their grandparents’ vineyards, and as the wine—growers of the hour have taken their place with the chefs du moment on the covers of magazines, they now see a life with vines as stylish and rather dashing. So when one generation, comfortably settled well away from the tribulations of agriculture, shows little interest in taking over the family vineyard, the next is frequently keen to take its place. Educated—usually they’ve had professional, technical, or business training—and often with experience in sales or administration, they know a thing or two about marketing and raising capital. Twenty, or even 15, years ago, there would have been little in a new and as yet unknown appellation like Saint-Véran to hold the imagination of ambitious young men and women, let alone draw them back from the opportunities of Paris and Lyon. But the modem and fax machine have redrawn the parameters of the winegrowers’ world and allowed them to be masters of their own fate.
Gilles Morat, now a Saint-Véran grower, left his village when he was 20 to follow a career in electronics. Yet when his father retired several years ago, he seized the chance to return. “I was successful in my work,” he told me, “and I enjoyed it. But when my second child was born, I realized I was spending too much time away from my family, constantly on the road, constantly under pressure. I never thought I would want to come back to take on my father’s vineyard. But I am now so totally engrossed in it, it’s as if the 15 years of my other life hadn’t happened.”
When he first returned, Morat spent a year at the lycée viticole of Davayé mastering the theory of what his father had simply absorbed while working at his own father’s side. It was essential for Morat to go back to school: A diploma of professional competence or its equivalent is a requirement in France to qualify for the generous assistance provided to young farmers by the state, including the guarantees for low-interest loans to reequip outdated cellars and to extend holdings if and when land is available. These days a good third of the student body at the Davayé lycée—a hundred or more—are men and women with professional qualifications in other fields taking special courses in enology and viticulture while getting involved in properties for which they had neither intended nor expected to assume responsibility.
It’s a sign of the dramatic changes at Saint-Véran. Thirty years ago the growers had no direct access to the market. The wine they produced—already by that time most of it white—was sold in bulk at the going rate for Mâcon Blanc. It disappeared into the blends of local négociants, so the quality and character were of little account. The grower was paid on the basis of volume and alcohol degree; therefore, every experiment, development, and change in the vineyards in the decades after World War II had but one objective: to increase yields. It was the establishment of the Saint-Véran appellation that turned things around by giving the wine an identity, a name by which its quality could be recognized and remembered. The growers invested in replacing old equipment and in replanting.
“We reverted with passion to the traditional methods of our grandfathers, as if they were something new and extraordinary,” Jean-Luc Terrier of the Domaine des Deux Roches told me. “Here we are, making our own compost again instead of using chemical fertilizers. And far from boosting yields, we prune severely and then go out into the vineyards again in summer to thin the fruit for perfect ripeness and better quality. We’ve found our way back to what had worked for us before. It has been our salvation.”
Gilles Morat was able to add a bit of land to his father’s holding and has a sharecropping arrangement on a few acres more. As yet, there’s very little space for barrels in his winery—though equipped with as much polished steel as a dairy, it’s not much bigger than a suburban garage. But his tank-fermented wine, long and supple, starts with an enticing burst of fruit on nose and palate that defies criticism. Though Morat is constrained by his circumstances, there are Saint-Véran growers who quite deliberately use no wood at all.
Richard Martin of the Domaine de la Croix Senaillet, for example, ferments his grapes in separate lots in small, enamel-lined tanks and never puts them into barrels. He pointed at the crumbled mass of limestone in his vineyard and said, “That’s what makes our wines smell and taste of fruit and flowers. Saint-Véran is not just a superior Mâcon or a lesser Pouilly-Fuissé. It has a character of its own. My job is to preserve it.
“When friends my age took over family properties where the wine had always been made in tank,” he said, “many of them promptly introduced barrels. I did the opposite. My father had used barrels, even though he sold most of his wine in bulk. I got rid of all the wood. I sell 80 to 90 percent of my production in bottle, and I want my wine to show as much fruit and freshness as possible.”
Jean-Luc Terrier, like many other Saint-Véran producers, avoids the use of wood for his basic, estate Saint-Véran so that it can be enjoyed young. He ferments the wine in stainless-steel tanks and holds it there until he is ready to bottle it. The 1998 opens with very seductive fruit. The wines he produces from his old vines and his best vineyard sites, however, are fermented or aged at least partially in wood. Part of his 1998 wine from the Terres Noirs vineyard is fermented in steel tanks and part in barrels. It has an aroma of honey and flowers and the texture of silk. The wine he makes from Les Cras, which is sold out almost as soon as it’s released, is fermented and aged in wood alone.
“The wine can be relied on,” he said, “to have a good weight and feel. It simply doesn’t need the spurt of fruit that stainless steel preserves in our other wines.” When I tasted the 1997, it showed just the beginning of bottle bouquet, but the flavor was already deep and long.
Roger and Christine Saumaize of the Domaine Saumaize-Michelin are among those who use only wood for their wines. “Stainless-steel tanks allow a very close control of fermentation temperature,” Christine Saumaize told me. “And fermentation at a very low temperature retains primary grape aroma. But it does so at the expense of any expression of terroir and robs the wine of real personality. Fermentation in barrel presents obvious problems, and temperature control is only one of them. But if the lees are left in the barrel and stirred from time to time, the wine will have a fatter texture and a length and depth of flavor that become increasingly important with age. That primary aroma, so attractive in a young wine, soon fades, and often there’s nothing much to take its place.”
Some growers who ferment their wine in tanks also hold it there a few months on the fine lees. Apart from any other benefit, a wine stays fresher in the presence of its lees: They protect it by absorbing free oxygen. But the surface area of lees settled in the bottom of a 10,000-liter tank, relative to the volume of wine, is less effective than lees that have spread over the lower part of a 220-liter barrel. Most Saint-Véran growers try for the advantages of both steel and wood by combining a proportion of wine fermented in each.
Quite a number do achieve that kind of balance, though Christine Saumaize says she doesn’t find the result satisfactory. “When we bought our first barrels in 1985,” she told me, “we used them to make wines we could combine with the wine we had fermented in steel tank. But the cuvée lacked harmony. We tried again and again, and finally we came to the conclusion that we had to choose tanks or barrels, one or the other, and we chose wood.”
I soon learned that it wasn’t so much a matter of choosing wood or tank, but doing what the fruit dictated. “If you’re going to ferment a wine in wood,” Bénédicte Vincent of the Château de Fuissé explained, “it must have concentration to begin with. That means old vines, low yields, a privileged site, or all three. The wines we make from our vineyards in Saint-Véran, where the vines are young, are never in wood. (To satisfy our American customers, who like a barrel—fermented style, we buy grapes from a Saint-Véran grower with old vines to make a wine we bottle under our merchant label.) And, in turn, we know that a wine with substance from older vines needs to have time in wood if it is to reach its potential.”
Guy Saumaize of Domaine des Maillettes, like many another, makes what he calls a “traditional” Saint-Véran, fermented and held in stainless steel on lees routinely stirred until he bottles the wine in the March following the harvest. (“Even in tank,” he says, “the lees give a fatter texture.”) He also produces a Grande Réserve, from old vines and fermented and matured in wood alone, and when I tasted the wine I could almost feel its power and intensity.
“There’s a call for both kinds of wine,” Guy Saumaize said. “A wine fermented in stainless steel has a dashing immediacy. But it’s out of place with certain foods. A barrel-fermented wine is more complex, more nuanced, and eventually more satisfying. You must be willing to wait for it, however. And then take the time to appreciate it.”
And that’s part of the art of living.