Beaune - A deserved resurgence
I can remember many years ago Mary Ewing Mulligan surprised everyone at a tutored event - as I recall hosted by the Burgundy Wine Company in New York - when she stated that Beaune was her favorite Appellation in Burgundy. I think perhaps we misunderstood her meaning since clearly no one would surely assert there are no better wines in Burgundy than those from Beaune. Yet Beaune seems to be out of favor to a degree not justified..
There are three reasons for this -
The negociants dominated the production for decades - and still do. Therefore the assertion follows that the wines cannot be especially good. And even if one accepts that the negotiant made wines are as well made as any other, these enterprises own land in much more prestigious terroirs than Beaune. The visitor and buyer tends to focus on the many Grand Crus available at these address. The Hospice, although holding fine plots across 23.5 ha, blends five cuvees which, therefore, requires assiduous attention to generate a following. Historically at least , there are no widely recognized cult growers resident in the town to offset this bias.
Beaune wine has no particular characteristic to call its own. It is not especially floral, mineral or elegant. As Matt Kramer eloquently put it in 1990 in Making Sense of Burgundy - “the presence of distinctive terroirs is not insistent,” Beaune wine has no markers to distinguish it.
Not only is the terroir not especially distinctive, but it is assumed to be all the same. As Christophe Bouchard put it to Bill Nanson for his Burgundy Report, “ Beaune is hard to sell…In France there is a ‘small is beautiful” mentality and the vines of Beaune in the context of Burgundy are a large “whole”. There are of course no Grand Crus to give definition to the Appellation - but this is no less true in Appellations that today have greater prestige.
These three influences, which have robbed Beaune’s wines of their historical prestige, are about to change.
1. As consumers continue to look for wine at cheaper price points they are paying more attention to Beaune, and in doing so will raise the profile of the resident quality producers - of whom there are several (including some negotiants who of course own a good deal of land in Beaune)
2. The pendulum of opinion that Beaune’s lack of defining characteristic is a detriment will swing to become an appreciation that this is more appropriately considered a merit. The wines, far from being soft and fruity as has been the conventional wisdom, are actually balanced in all components, with drive, freshness and good depth. If they perhaps lack for the most assertive minerality or floral aromas the wines have characteristics of there own. Everything is in balance. What is not to like ? This is perhaps what Mary Ewing Mulligan was appreciating.
3. It is evident on even a perfunctory inspectionthat the vineyards in Beaune are not all the same. Even if one tries to generalize about the qualities of the three sections - north, middle and south - the soils are in fact extremely varied even within this division. The central area - including Cras, Greves and the Teurons surely gives wines of the most distinction - as the slightly lower clay content in the soil gives wines of real completeness that do not lack for elegance. The locals view Greves as the most regal site but it is a big vineyard and not all Greves deserves such accolade. More widely across the commune the upper part of Les Bressands, together with Les Feves and L’Ecu from the northern side deserve attention. From the side closer to Pommard there are perhaps fewer reliably excellent climats, but Vignes Franches, Pertuisots and of course the expansive Clos des Mouches produce wines of character and individuality.
I commend to you the series of brief articles written on Beaune by Robert Collins in “Collins Corner” on the Winehog website and Bill Nanson’s Article on Beaune in the Summer 2010 edition of the Burgundy Report. More recently there is a webinar by Jasper Morris available through his site and 67PallMall.