FINAL: My first trip to Burgundy -- tips, notes -- last update

I’ve just returned from my first journey to Burgundy, roughly a week of leisurely paced visits to winemakers, indulgent meals and walking the famous vineyards.

In a previous thread, board members were kind enough to offer suggestions for making it a successful trip. Here I’d like to share some of my impressions and tips for fellow rookies. If you are a repeat visitor, please excuse some of the obvious or newbie reflections.

Getting there and where to stay
We stayed in Beaune, which is a relatively easy two-hour train trip from Paris, requiring a change of trains in Dijon. Beaune is the heart of the Cote d’Or and the region’s biggest town, with a gorgeous mix of Roman, pre-Roman, Renaissance and modern architecture. It’s a great base camp for touring villages up and down the famous RN74 highway. From centrally located Beaune, you can reach most of the communes in about 30 minutes or so by car. My friend Greg had driven his SUV from London for the trip, which made getting around a breeze. I think a rental car is a must, as you won’t find Uber in this neck of the woods …

We had a group of three people – a reunion of sorts for me and my two post-college housemates. I split a two-bedroom suite with my friend Martin at Abbaye de Maizieres, a converted 12th-century monastery in the heart of historic Beaune. The inn has all the charm you’d expect and friendly service, but be prepared to hustle bags and walk up very winding stairs to your room (no elevators). There also are very limited dining options here. Greg happily booked down the street at Le Cep, a traditional full service hotel with bar, valet parking etc.

Planning your visit

We made a conscious decision to take a laid-back approach to our time in Burgundy, with a focus on sybaritic pleasure rather than rigorous back-to-back appointments with winemakers. The focus was soaking in the atmosphere rather than analyzing the 2014-15 vintages in a comprehensive or rational way.

We usually booked a single visit to a cellar and built our day around it. We’d usually wake up (late!), race to the tasting visit, book a wonderfully lazy two-hour lunch with wines in the nearby village, tour some of the nearby towns and vineyards afterward, stop at a caviste/wine store maybe, head back to Beaune for requisite nap and Internet check, have dinner in town, enjoy a night cap and call it a day. Rinse and repeat for five days. No pressures. No spouses. It was heaven.

Amid all the cares and responsibilities of daily life, a trip to Burgundy is a reward that I urge anyone to afford themselves if they can. The journey lifted my spirits, stirred my soul and satisfied my many curiosities about Burgundy. It exceeded expectations and I can’t recommend a trip enough if you are passionate about these wines. To see the vines and touch the soil from the parcels you adore, and only have known by a name on a label is magic. Chambolle Musigny Amoureuses – there it is right in front of me!! It helps put all the pieces of the puzzle together and give you proper context and perspective – geographically, philosophically, historically, oenologically, you name it.

Visiting the winemakers
I will offer some details of our visits at specific domaines later, but first some general thoughts on visiting a vigneron.

It is essential to pre-book your tasting appointments. You aren’t just going to wander in and knock on any doors. Greg, a greater Burg buyer and nut than I, has multiple merchants and distributors that he works with in London that were kind enough to set up our appointments. We were there during a busy time – right before the annual Hospices auction and during the traditional week when all the British buyers come to taste the wine in bottle. So we had to hustle to get the appointments we did.

Courtesy and punctuality are a must. I really came to understand what a juggling act it is to be a winemaker here – worrying about the fields, tending to the fermentations, checking in on cellar conditions, managing staff, negotiating in with your distributors, schmoozing the customers, etc. There are a million things for an owner-operator to do, so you need to be respectful of their time. But build in some flexibility – sometimes we left promptly after our scheduled visit while other trips spilled over to two hours-plus after we hit it off with the winemakers and they scampered off deep into their cellars to pull an older bottle for us to try.

I’m a former journalist, so I tend to ask a lot of questions. But you need to be able to read the room. As in all walks of life, some winemakers are natural extroverts and others are more circumspect. Don’t immediately start badgering your host about prem-ox, rising prices or the influence of the growing Chinese market. Ease into it with some softball questions. I found that many of our hosts appreciably brightened when talking about their actual vines — they seemed like they were talking about their children. And don’t expect them to tell you their favorite vintages or favorite bottlings – once again it’s as if they are speaking about their offspring. They may actually have a favorite but they don’t dare utter it aloud!

Also make time to share your experience with wine and what your life story is. They probably get tired of recounting their personal background to so many visitors, so it’s a welcome break to hear from their guests. I brought one winemaker a gift of honeycomb sourced from the hills in Malibu. He loved hearing about Malibu, how I surf there and that people actually make wine from grapes grown above one of the world’s first-class surf spots.

Don’t expect everyone to speak English. Many of our hosts spoke good English, but many spoke none at all. Learn some of the basics – please, thank you, this is good, etc. My traveling companions speak very good French, which made life much easier but most conversations turned into a kind of Franglish — where I could pick up the general gist/intent or my friends translated for me.

One side note: I had been unnecessarily anxious about the whole ritual of spitting. Spit if you want, and swallow if you like. The winemakers provide many receptacles and feel free to dump as well if you’ve sampled enough. Since we weren’t visiting multiple houses each day, we really didn’t have to worry about intoxication. So sometimes I spat and sometimes I didn’t. Greg and I followed a simple rule – never spit a Grand Cru wine. That turned out to be good guidance.

How and where to eat

You are in Burgundy, so eat like you are in Burgundy. Don’t worry about calories. Don’t ask for substitutions. You will have many pain au chocolat for breakfast in the car on the way to your first appointment. You will not find any Chinese chicken salads or tofu wraps. You will have both cheese AND dessert for lunch. At dinner, you will have a soufflé of foie gras as an amuse bouche, followed by a terrine of rabbit and then a rich dish of sweetbreads. You will have multiple cheeses and sweets yet again. You will have three bottles of wine for three people and happily wander back to your hotel. For some reason, you will not wake up with a terrible hangover or a case of gout. You will do this for five straight days.

We ate at local bistros and starred Michelin restaurants depending on our location and mood. I will share some specific recaps in later posts. We never had a bad meal. For lunch, we had a lot of luck ordering from the various fixed menus where you could choose from two entrees, two mains and cheese or dessert. These were remarkably priced – usually 20-30 euros – for the quality and presentation of the food. The restaurants make their money off the wine list, I reckon. And while there are markups, you feel like you are in heaven to scour lists featuring wines of pristine provenance. You won’t find extreme value and most of the truly great stuff has been picked over long ago at established spots, but you will find little gems. For example, we enjoyed 2002 Dujac MSD village and Rouget 2010 Vosne village for under 100 euro each. For lunch, make sure you give yourself enough time between appointments. Lunch there, unlike the U.S., is a blessedly leisurely affair that can span two hours, so give yourself enough time to relax and account for driving time and getting lost on winding village streets. And always make a reservation ahead of time – even on the drive in – instead of wandering in as a wayward soul…

After days of wandering and driving in the outer communes, we chose to eat all our dinners in Beaune proper. We had multiple meals at Ma Cuisine, which serves outstanding Burgundy fare with an understated bistro vibe. There’s a chalkboard of two dozen regional classics – jambon persille, magret de canard, etc. Think Julia Child, not Ferran Adria. This seemed to be a clubhouse of sorts for visiting Burg nuts and most of the dozen tables or so were filled with Brits, Aussies, Chinese and Americans. It’s not a locals spot, but the food is spot on and the service friendly and efficient from owners Pierre and Fabienne Escoffier (what an appropriate last name!) The wine list is deep. You will have to pay a pretty penny for the prized older vintages but there are nuggets of value here and there – we particularly enjoyed a 2008 Carillon Puligny Montrachet Champs Gain that Pierre helped us find (magic with the Coquille St. Jacques dish – the mature plump fruits, framed by a tinge of herbs and honey notes, played off the scallops beautifully.)

Side note: 2008 became an odd touchstone this trip – sommeliers and vintners almost to a person were opening this vintage completely unprompted throughout our trip …

When you want to eat with the locals, I suggest heading away from the town center to Cafe du Square, a relaxed wine bar/bistro that recalls Venice Beach or hipster Williamsburg more than a medieval French town. Francois’ son cooks there and we even saw Francois eating and drinking there after hours. Platters of oysters from Bordeaux, charcuterie plates, lamb shoulder cooked for 36 hours (!) … lots of local wines from young producers you never heard of. We just put ourselves in the hand of our waitress who brought us delicious and unfussy bottles of Chablis 1er cru and Marsannay 1er cru that went exceptionally well with the slightly rustic fare.

Next post: Day One – touring the fabled Grand Cru vineyards and surreptitiously staking out Freddy Mugnier…

loved your writing style, and the trip sounds perfect. Please continue the account of your visit.

keep it coming. Magical place.

What a great read! Thanks for sharing and do please continue.

No spouses. It was heaven.

Oh Boy. You are in so much trouble!

Great report. Can’t wait to see the rest of it.

Trip reports are the best, I know this will be a good one!

Heading there in two weeks. Keep the posts coming.

This is fantastic, thank you for sharing!

Great, I love this kind of stuff. Keep em coming!

Fantastic so far, please continue!

Wow! Thank you. I enjoyed reading and can’t wait to read more.

(P.S. Loved the photo with the dog.)

Lovely write up, full of very good advice. Beaune is possibly the easiest place to eat well I’ve ever visited. Such good sense about etiquette with winemakers too.

Looking forward to the rest of this account.

Second installment: touring the villages and vineyards

We didn’t have any tastings scheduled for our full first day in Burgundy, so we opted to just spend the day exploring the various vineyards and villages scattered along the Cote d’Or. What an exhilarating feeling – having nothing to do, and a full day to do it!

We had been expecting rain for most of the trip, but the day was glorious with that invigorating combination of piercing winter sunshine and cool temperatures – broken up by the occasional puffy white cloud for dramatic lighting and effect. We don’t really have an autumn in Los Angeles, so to enjoy crisp weather and the changing colors in the vineyards and the hills was lovely. It felt like a good time to visit – after the harvest, with fewer crowds and memorable scenery. One winemaker told us had we come three weeks ago we would have seen a lot of visitors, as the French make a pilgrimage this time of year as Americans might go to New England to see the change of colors. People apparently take a picnic and are free to wander the vineyards and hang out for the afternoon.

On that note, maybe this is an American perspective but I was shocked to see how open and accessible some of the most valuable real estate in the wine world – and indeed France – really is. You can drive up to any of these Grand Cru vineyards and just walk right in. No gates, no markers, no guards, no nothing. On a later tasting visit, domaine owner Gilbert Hammel explained that these lands are viewed almost like a national trust, where they need to be open and available. They belong to France. That’s not to say that they are public lands, of course.

Once again, maybe I’ve seen too many action movies but it was slightly disconcerting to me that we had our big SUV perched right two feet away from the fabled Chambertin vineyard. There was absolutely no one in sight. A madman could EASILY tear up one of the world’s cultural treasures in an instant, chewing up and uprooting some of the most valuable old-stock vines in the world. I know it’s a dark feeling – like pondering what would happen if someone opened a door midflight on an airplane – but it’s an honest thought I had standing there.

So on our first morning, Greg simply asked: “Where do you want to go?” I’m not sure why, but I instinctively said: “Let’s check out the DRC estate and vines.” Riding shotgun, it was my job to do all the navigating. I can’t urge people enough to download the free Burg Map app if they make this journey. It’s basically a Google Maps like app that layers and geolocates your current location against a color-coded map of all the vineyards. Look at the dot and you can instantly tell exactly what vineyard you are in, whether it’s 1er cru or grand cru, and when you cross into new territory. Priceless. Sure beats hauling around Clive Coates tome and guessing where the hell you are.

When we got to Vosne Romanee, we headed up the hill to the edge of town. And there was DRC. A relatively modest compound with not a soul in sight – either outside or scurrying inside. And then you make a slight turn and then the Promised Land greets you – a few hectares that are the source of the most sought-after wines in Burgundy.


To be honest, I wasn’t immediately struck as these being special vines. They looked like most of the other plots we had seen on the drive up. It took me a while to understand that the Grand Cru vineyards all tended to be in the middle slopes of the vineyards. I intuitively understood that the grapes in the flats, right next to the RN74, would make lesser wines. But I instinctively thought the vines closer to the top of the hill would make the best wines. Rookie mistake.

I guess I’ve been trained to think about California pinot, where my favorite wines come from the really gnarly exposed high altitude spots. I kept looking at the premier cru vineyards closer to the top of the hill, hard against the deep forest and at a greater slope, and thinking they would make the more interesting wines. But as every winemaker would remind me – it’s not just the slope and exposure, but the soil composition that makes the terroir and the better wines.

So for the next few hours, trusty app in hand, we just moseyed through many vineyards that produce my favorite bottlings – VR Beaux Monts, Chambolle Musigny Cras, de Vogue’s Bonnes Mares parcel, etc. Standing in these vineyards thrilled me. It’s hard to explain. It’s like being a soccer fan and standing on the pitch at Barcelona’s Camp Nou. Or being a surfer and standing on the shore of Oahu’s North Shore with perfectly peeling barrels pounding at Pipeline. It may sound corny, but there ARE special places on Earth and you feel lucky to be alive and part of them.

I also got a sense of how relatively big some of these Grand Cru vineyards are – I totally understand now why Clos Vougeot and Charmes Chambertin sometimes get a bad rap. You get a sense there are plots that are in a sweet spot and others that are living off the name.

When we got to Chambertin and walked around. I was surprised to see many clusters of what look like fully ripened grape clusters still on the vine. Someone later explained to me that they had been left on the vines during harvest for being unripe. Weeks later they had matured and I grabbed a cluster and tasted some of the world’s most expensive grapes. Juicy and delicious. A winemaker later told me that in 2003 and some other very lean years they received permission to take a second pass and include some of these late bloomers into their wines. But now in some spots, the owners will take these grapes and use them for food products – verjus for cooking or confiture/jam for eating. Who knew?

Once we had our fill of the vineyards, we decided to spy on some of the Top Gun domaines. In Beverly Hills, you can find people hawking Maps to Star Homes to tourists who can then drive by the gated estates of Hollywood’s A list. It kind of felt like the same thing here. Using our wits and Google maps, it was easy to drive right up to Freddy Mugnier’s home or the Seysses’ Dujac compound. We’d sit outside looking for any sign of life, as if we were on a police stakeout on “Law and Order.”

We’d sit for about 5 minutes and not see any stirring at all. I’d get restless and challenge my friend to just go up and ring the doorbell and play the dumb American and beg if we could sample some 2015s. We didn’t have the juice or the preplanning to swing an arranged visit, so this would be our only chance. We all knew we weren’t going to do it, but steeled by the bottle of Rouget Vosne Romanee we had had at lunch, I almost thought about it …

Instead, I started dreaming up these goofy fantasies that we would somehow bump into these guys in the tiny villages surrounding their homes – like Lucy Ricardo bumping into Bill Holden by the hotel pool during a trip to Hollywood in those old “I Love Lucy” episodes. It didn’t happen. We didn’t see ANYONE on the streets.

I’m not sure if it was the time of year, the time of day, or just coincidence. But I was shocked at how quiet these villages were. I would make a bet with my friends that I would pay them $5 if we saw a human being outside any building in Pommard – literally. I often won. It almost felt like we were on a Warner Bros. studio backlot, with these ancient cobblestone streets, achingly beautiful village squares and deserted storefronts. Either that or an episode of “Walking Dead.” Charming but eerie.

Which brings me to another side thought. Even when we were in Beaune you didn’t see many people on the streets. And when we did, it was very rare for someone to even acknowledge your presence, let alone give you a smile or nod of recognition. It seemed slightly unfriendly to this sunny Californian. My friend Martin, who studied abroad in Paris, explained that cool detachment on the streets is the norm in most of France. But as soon as you step into someone’s home, shop or restaurant, the floodgates of hospitality would open. As the trip wore on, his theory was proven right.

We ended the day/night at Ma Cuisine. I enjoyed the lightest, most refined boudin blanc dish I’ve ever had in my life, accompanied by a 2011 Roulot Meursault Tillet. Life is good.

Next: Our first tasting visit – the Keystone Kops visit Taupenot Merme

This is great stuff, Matthew!
Thanks for sharing and keep the reports coming.

This is great. I am having fun.

Fantastic post. Absolutely killing it.

Wonderful writing. Thanks for taking us there with you

Nicely written.
I love reading travelogues. Gives a sense of the place and people that just reading tasting notes do not provide. Wonder whether all such material could be filed separately to make it easier for subsequent re-read.

Tremendous write up, thanks. Regarding why the French take a relatively relaxed approach to protecting the vines from intentional destruction of property, I am of the opinion that it is because they share your perspective that “there ARE special places on Earth and you feel lucky to be alive and part of them”. Plenty of French frequent this board and they may agree / disagree but my conclusion (after 8 years of of working in an office dominated by French) is that they are exceedingly proud and they hold the utmost respect for their country. I say that as a compliment. As you noted, they appreciate if you can speak a few words of French. They want you to try their regional food. They are excited to speak to you about the plots and the vines. The same behaviour is on display all the way down to Provence, back up to Alsace, over to Brittany and up to Nord-Pas-de-Calais. I guess I could boil it down to them seeing themselves as being responsible for passing French culture (land, food, language) to the next generation. When you feel that way it is hard if not impossible to imagine someone ripping up vines.

All that said, vandalism in the vines has sadly happened in the past…

I digress. I am anxiously awaiting your next instalment.

Great reports! I will be there in three weeks so this is indeed timely for me. Keep them coming.