Thank heavens for the joys of Burgundy

Jan 29 2010 By Helen Savage, The Journal

BURGUNDY offers a restricted range of flavours and wine styles in comparison with most wine regions.

If you ignore a small amount of rather dull rosé and quite a bit of sparkling wine that’s never as fine as champagne, Burgundy only makes two wines: dry white, almost all from Chardonnay and fruity red, most of which is Pinot Noir.

But these, at their best, are inimitable and wonderful.

The fascination for me of Burgundy wine lies in the way in which a world of subtle, different conditions of soil, slope and climate all affect the quality and flavour of the grapes.

Further nuances are added by the range of techniques used by the growers to make wine, and still more by the unique character of every harvest. Every growing season in Burgundy is different.

The huge annual tasting organised in London every January by the Burgundy wine growers is the highlight of my month. As well as a chance to assess the quality and style of the last two or three vintages, there’s always something new to discover. I love Burgundy.

The 2009 wines aren’t yet ready. The best ones won’t be bottled until spring 2011, but the cask samples I tried show that the growers are right to be excited by what promises to be a feast of fine wines: concentrated, fruity and in the case of the reds, marked by a good balance of tannin and acidity.

The 2008s are much lighter, but even at this early stage, they are delicious, with much crisper acidity than for many a year. Chablis in particular, from the northern part of the region, has a kind of zippy green apple fruit that reminds me of how Chablis used to be before the run of warm vintages of recent years softened its bite.

La Chablisienne, the superb co-op in Chablis, made some very good wine – as they usually do. A lot of it will be sold in our supermarkets under a variety of labels, but Blason de Bourgogne is in many stores.

2007, a much earlier harvest, made for richer, softer wines with lower acidity in Chablis. La Chablisienne came up trumps again.

For example, if you’re in a restaurant and see their Les Vénérables Chablis 2007 (until this vintage called Vieilles Vignes) don’t think twice: it has rich, complex apple-like fruit with the kind of salty minerality that reminds some of struck gun flint – though not, I confess, a smell I readily call to mind.

The higher acidity in 2008 makes almost all white Burgundy refreshing and food-friendly.

From the southern edge of the region, Louis Jadot’s Saint-Véran 2008 combines lovely, light lemony fruit with mineral saltiness. Their straight Bourgogne Chardonnay 2007 (around £9.99 in Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Fenwick) is excellent in the richer way typical of the previous vintage, with a nutty addition to the apple and lemon-like fruit blend of grapes grown near Mâcon and Beaune.