Breakfast in Burgundy Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Raymond Blake

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Eve Siegel

  Cover photo credit Raymond Blake

  Interior photos by Raymond Blake

  ISBN: 978-1-62914-474-0

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62914-882-3

  Printed in China

  Pour

  ma

  femme

  PREFACE

  The Done Deal Dinner

  Once the publishing deal for Breakfast in Burgundy was signed we celebrated with a good dinner in the company of close friends and excellent wines. The evening was topped and tailed by champagne and port—Dom Pérignon 1998 and Dow’s 1977—but center stage was reserved for a trio of burgundies. First up was a Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey, Chassagne-Montrachet Les Chenevottes premier cru 2010, served with halibut, baby spinach, and herb beurre blanc. It was beyond brilliant, precision-flavored, intense and long. Yet, if anything, the next wine was more memorable: Cécile Tremblay, Chambolle-Musigny Les Feusselottes premier cru 2008, served with a Challans chicken supreme and wild mushroom sauce. Exotically scented and supremely satisfying, it provided ringing proof that when Burgundy gets it right, nothing can rival it. A magnum of Bernard Morey, Santenay Grand Clos Rousseau premier cru 1995 followed with the boeuf Bourguignon, and it picked up the gauntlet easily. Showing some sweet age and mellow notes on the finish, it eased us nicely into the port.

  I chose the wines not only because I regard them highly, but also because they are favorites of my wife, Fionnuala. Though my name appears on the cover of this book, it is, and has been for the past seven years, a joint effort with her. I did the writing, but that was the easy bit. She had to encourage and support, advise and enthuse, counsel and comfort. Her belief never flagged, not even as I prowled the house, sullen and morose, convinced that Breakfast in Burgundy would never be finished. She has been with me every step of the way, and she saw a way around all the difficulties I saw as insurmountable. As my belief wavered, hers strengthened, and it is only because of it that the book got written. I could never have done it without Fionnuala.

  Santenay

  Côte d’Or

  Easter 2014

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  So many people have helped with the writing of this book that it is difficult to know where to start. I owe a big debt of gratitude to Jacques and Rosalind Seysses, who spotted early on that I was suffering from the Burgundy bug and did much to nurture it by way of hospitality, advice, and guidance. Their home has always been open to myself and Fionnuala, and we look forward to sharing more good bottles with them in the future. Their sons and daughter-in-law, Alec, Jeremy, and Diana, were equally welcoming, especially when I visited during harvest.

  Our solicitor, Ivan Healy, is also a friend and fellow wine lover who always went the extra mile when we were buying the house, and further down the line when unexpected issues had to be dealt with. I am grateful to him for wise counsel well beyond the strict legal necessities. Dominique Roger, the estate agent who handled the sale of the house, came from the same mold. He was helpful beyond the call of duty, as he cut through red tape, and became a good friend in the process. Nick Dunlop, trusted friend and former crewmate, who corrected the French words and phrases, deserves a special word of thanks. Any remaining errors are due to my lack of diligence, not his expertise.

  So many people helped simply through words of encouragement and inquiries about progress: my parents, Gay and Frank, and my sisters, Barbara and Margaret, whose support I have always been able to count on; David Browne, ever ready with a positive word and the name of a contact to help move things along; Tomás Clancy, colleague, true friend, and encourager par excellence; Philip Dodd, whose wise words never failed to steady the ship; Mary Dowey, always wonderfully enthusiastic on hearing news of snaillike progress; David Eades, source of crucial advice as we set out on our house hunt; Michael and Kate Hayes, steadfast supporters, always ready with an encouraging word when the challenge seemed too daunting; Bill Kelly, through whom I met numerous Burgundians while they were visiting Ireland; Jim Tunney, an endless source of positive, practical advice; my fellow troopers in the Premier Cru Club, Randall Plunkett and Eugene O’Sullivan; and all the members of the Honky Tonque Wine Club, where spirited discussion takes precedence over worship of prestigious labels. Thanks to their generosity I have been lucky to sample a king’s ransom of fine burgundy over the years.

  In France we have been hugely fortunate to meet a legion of kind, helpful, and welcoming people, all of whom helped indirectly by enriching our life in Burgundy, providing the background and context for this book: Roger Belland, whose gesture of kindness may have been small to him but was priceless to us; Jean-Claude Bernard, generous host, always happy to share a bottle with Irish visitors; the Boisset family—Jean-Claude, Jean-Charles, and Nathalie—whose delight was boundless when they heard of our house purchase; Stéphane Colas, ever patient, ever helpful, ever friendly; Aubert and Pamela de Villaine, generous hosts and treasured guests; Véronique Drouhin, always charming when I visited during harvest; Corinne and Fabrice Germain, restaurateurs par excellence; Michel and Frédéric Lafarge, two quiet-spoken gentlemen of Burgundy; Guillaume Lavaillotte, who met every query and quibble with a smile; Frédéric and Éva Ménager, soulmates and great hosts; Jean-Charles le Bault de la Morinière, engaging, frank, and hospitable; Gregory Patriat, as thoughtful and talented a winemaker as I have met; Romain Ponnelle, whose advice on what wine to buy, and what wine not to buy, is second to none; Jean-Claude and Noël Ramonet, who conduct their tastings with a great welcome and a magnificent lack of ceremony; Bernard Repolt, disarmingly frank and wonderfully generous; Pascal Rossignol and his brother Hubert, the best ambassadors Burgundy could want; Jean-Marc and Anne-Marie Vincent, whose wines are made in their own delightful image; and our wonderful neighbors, Joël and Patricia, who cannot be thanked enough for their kindness and generosity.

  Over the course of 15 or more years, I visited countless domaines and met with scores of winemakers, too many to list here. They were all generous with their time, and some information was always gleaned to flesh out the tale told in Breakfast in Burgundy. To all of them, I say merci beaucoup. And I say bonjour to all our friendly neighbors in Santenay, many of whom I know only as smiling faces on the way to or from the boulangerie. Someday, I promise to improve my French . . . someday.

  A special word of thanks to Ray Walker, who introduced me to my agent Sharon Bowers, who then found me Skyhorse, where Julie Ganz’s enthusiasm for this book has been palpable across three thousand miles of ocean. Ray makes inspirational wine, as do other newcomers to Burgundy such as Mark Haisma and Andrew Nielsen. Their efforts fill me with optimism for the future of Burgundy and made the writing of this book a little bit easier, a little bit more worthwhile.

  Finally, to anybo
dy I have forgotten, I offer my sincere apologies—and a decent glass of burgundy when we next meet.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1 BEGINNINGS

  2 PLUNGE TAKEN

  3 THE CENTER OF THE KNOWN WORLD

  4 SLOW PROGRESS

  5 BREAKFAST

  6 PARLAY VOO?

  7 TO MARKET

  8 LUNCH

  9 LUCKY MAN, SAINT VINCENT

  10 HYPHEN HEAVEN

  11 WAITING FOR . . . GODOT?

  12 SWIRL—SNIFF—SIP

  13 DINNER

  14 HARVEST

  15 MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

  POSTSCRIPT

  1

  BEGINNINGS

  “Champignons! Champignons!”

  The weekly market in Beaune, wine capital of Burgundy, was in full swing, and the estate agent’s premises overlooked the outdoor section on Place de la Halle. As myself and my wife, Fionnuala, scanned the properties displayed in the window, the crowd behind us bustled and shuffled, concluding innumerable small transactions: Trois oranges, un demi kilo de tomates cerises, une baguette, deux tranches de jambon . . .

  “Champignons! Champignons!” bellowed the stallholder, doing more to alarm customers than to sell mushrooms. His entreaties were lost on us; we were after a bigger fish—we were looking for a house.

  “What about that one there?” said Fionnuala, pointing.

  “Ugh, looks a bit dull to me.”

  It didn’t, far from it, but our week of searching for a house in Burgundy, the most fabled wine region of them all, was drawing to a blank close and my heart wasn’t in it. It had been a tedious, blind-alleyed week, punctuated by a steady cycle of eager expectation followed by disappointment. Some of the houses we viewed were dismal beyond belief, and as the days passed, the disappointment compounded into a truculent, want-to-go-home-now mood. This was the last throw of the dice.

  “Champignons! Champignons!”

  “The garden looks nice,” she continued, examining the publicity photograph in detail.

  “Mmm.”

  “And it’s in a village not far from here.”

  “‘Not far?’ Sounds like estate agent puff to me.”

  “I am going in to inquire.”

  “There won’t be time to make an app—”

  The closing door cut off my protest.

  “Champignons! Champignons!”

  The stallholder was oblivious to my dilemma, but his refrain drove me in, and six months later we walked out as the new owners of the ‘bit dull’ house.

  I have been interested in food all of my life, and fascinated by wine for most of it. Wine held me in thrall long before I had my first sip, thanks to a television documentary seen when fizzy lemonade was still my favored tipple. Burgundy and Bordeaux were mentioned, and I liked the ring of the former to the latter’s more upright enunciation. Reference was also made to wine’s ability to age and develop, for decades in the case of the best, with plenty of cobwebbed bottles drawn from gloomy caverns for theatrical emphasis. Anything old interested me: old letters, old newspapers, old books. But something old that changed and improved as the years passed had to be special. If the price was anything to go by, it certainly was. My jaw dropped and my eyes widened at the then-enormous sum of £25 per bottle quoted for the very best wines. I had to learn more about this stuff.

  In the pre-Internet age that meant trawling through encyclopaedias and searching newspapers and magazines. I remember an article I cut from a magazine at the age of 10 that described in detail a meal that Cole Porter hosted for the Duke of Windsor at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York, in 1937. I was enthralled and pored over it for hours, imagining the flavor of the dishes and memorizing the names of the wines. I dreamed of one day re-creating it and still do. Another cutting from the same time detailed the contents of a dream wine collection that might be put together by the recipient of a significant inheritance.

  There were three bottles of this and six of that, all lined up and photographed like ranks of toy soldiers. What I now know as the standard bordeaux and burgundy bottle shapes were radically different from one another; the former—a tall, high-shouldered cylinder—seemed serious and somber, while the latter was lissom and curvy. The first appealed to the head and the second to the heart; one was cerebral, the other sensual. Lissom and curvy won the day.

  Fast-forward a dozen years and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited has been made into a lavish 11-part television series. It is the perfect antidote to the decade just gone, the 1970s, the decade that taste forgot. It is fashionable to wear a tuxedo again, a proper one, severely cut, with shirtfront starched to boardwalk hardness. The fondue set is put away and meals become more formal; wine is taken more seriously, it’s not just Mateus Rosé or wicker-clad flasks of Chianti that make such wonderful lamp stands when empty.

  They loved their food and wine in Brideshead—never more than when the philistine Rex Mottram hosts the central character, Charles Ryder, to a lavish dinner in Paillard’s, a leading Parisian restaurant of the early 20th century. After soup of oseille, caviar aux blinis, and “a sole quite simply cooked in a white wine sauce” came the main course: caneton à la presse, accompanied by a Chambertin-Clos de Bèze 1904. Mottram wants to talk about the mundane and the monetary, while Ryder tries to blot this out by addressing himself to the food and the wine: “This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew . . .” Ryder came across the same wine years later: “. . . it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime . . . it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.” I was hooked.

  Initially the love affair was conducted at long distance by way of endless reading of books, magazines, and even merchants’ wine lists. These latter provided great bedtime reading as I pondered the opportunities to spend a fortune. Bachelor status fostered irresponsibility; the fridge was often bare, but the cellar brimmed. I was amazed what I could afford once I cut out the essentials. Once a purchase was made, however, the results could roller coaster from sublime satisfaction to wretched disappointment. As a mistress, burgundy was fickle—always ready to sulk for no reason, yet clever enough, as she was about to be abandoned for something more prosaic, to throw me some gold dust in the form of a bottle that had the measure of any superlative.

  It reminded me of some Muhammad Ali fights I watched as a boy. There was no certainty he would do anything but loll about the ring, producing just enough to subdue his opponent, but there was always the prospect of some pugilistic sorcery so far beyond the bounds of athleticism that it defied comprehension. As does the greatest burgundy: how can it be possible to pack so much flavor and boundless delight into what is, at its most basic, fermented grape juice? That question will intrigue me for the rest of my life.

  Together with two similarly afflicted friends I set off in search of some answers, forming the Premier Cru Club in Dublin in the late 1980s, dedicated to the pursuit and purchase of fine wines. In a neat exercise in democracy the other pair ganged up on me and voted me in as cellar master, in charge of purchasing and record-keeping. A bank account was opened into which we each paid a monthly standing order, and if it was left alone for a while it mounted up nicely, so that one day I was able to sanction the purchase of a case of Armand Rousseau, Ruchottes-Chambertin grand cru 1990. The first bottle was broached at five years of age and was pronounced undrinkable, though one of our number counselled patience. The next was marginally less challenging, so the remaining bottles were put away and forgotten about for another few years.

  And then. And then. The strident flavors of youth were gone and in their place came satin tingle, rich fruit, and great length of flavor. Had we found the mother lode? It certainly tasted so. It was time to visit the source.

  My first sight of the hill of Corton—heavy-hipped, belted with vineyards, and crowned by a toupée-like forest—will stay with me forever. The visit passed in a trance-like state as I stru
ggled to take it all in: the landscape, the legendary villages, the fabled vineyards, the history, the culture, the food, the wine . . . A dream of owning a house in the region took hold.

  At the time I was working as a school master in Clongowes Wood College in Ireland, where James Joyce started his schooldays aged, as he put it himself, “half past six.” I was perfectly content with my job, complemented by freelancing as wine editor of Ireland’s fledgling Food & Wine Magazine, a position I had secured by the simple expedient of inviting the publisher to dinner. The bait worked: “Every free-loader in Ireland is looking for this job—but only one of them invited me for dinner. I’ll meet you. Where and when?”

  That dinner was choreographed to perfection: the table was specified, the wines were ordered in advance, and I even decided which seats we would occupy. So that when my guest said, “Tell me about this wine,” I had an avalanche of information to hand.

  “It’s a 1981 Pichon-Lalande, from Bordeaux.” (I had guessed, correctly, that his wine preferences leaned more towards bordeaux than burgundy.)

  “Was that a good year?”

  “I call it a shoulder vintage.”

  An eyebrow rose.

  “A shoulder vintage?”

  “I mean a vintage that is overshadowed by the one that came before or after, in this case 1982.” I explained.

  The wine, then in its teens, was beautifully composed, wholly satisfying. I continued with some history of the château, the lie of the vineyards and the grapes used in the blend, but it wasn’t necessary; what was in the glass could speak with greater eloquence, so I let it.

  We enjoyed it in silence for a few moments and then the conversation took flight, so that by dinner’s end we were getting on famously, tackling—and solving in a trice—many of the world’s most intractable problems. Fingers jabbed forearms to emphasize crucial insights, shoulders were slapped to cement the mood of good fellowship, the volume increased. We each had a lot to say.