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Wines of Interest >  Burgundy & Beaujolais
Southward Ho! over the pretty commune of Vergisson looking towards the craggy face of the brooding rock of Solutre.There is an old wine trade requirement to answer the question, "How much do I have to pay for a decent bottle of Red Burgundy?" with the snappy response "300 quid: £275 for all the disappointments and £25 for the good bottle you eventually find." The good news is that standards across the region have never been higher - and a guarded hooray to that - but you still have to watch your step. Burgundy is not a place to look for bargains: evidently cheap lines should be avoided like yellow snow. We were recently offered a parcel of reputedly well-sourced wines at ridiculously low prices that could have been hysterically profitable. Fatalistically we tasted and, yup, sure enough, the tired, coarse, over vegetal flavours that we fully expected demanded instant rejection, leaving us wondering who actually buys this stuff. Apparently there were plenty of takers elsewhere. It illustrated the division between switched-on, modern growers obtaining perfume and Pinot Noir's delicious poise of restrained power and relative delicacy, and less clued-up winemakers stubbornly turning out clumsily produced potboilers that miss the point.

When the balance sings, when you find growers like Francois Lumpp (Givry's finest) who gets it very, very right, when it all comes together like a sweet, velvet poem, Red Burgundy simply has no equal.

The other side of the same coin features the beguiling imprint of what, to its many fans, provides about as much fun as you can have with your trousers still on: White Burgundy. Although Chardonnay is the world's most widely grown grape variety with great examples from several countries, it is in this small area that it reaches its peak. From the crisp minerality of Chablis to the north through the richer glories of the Cote de Beaune, south to the Cote Chalonnaise (and the extraordinary Francois Lumpp again), and on to the happy hunting ground of Macon, all this is crammed into an area that would barely merit a dot on a map of Australia.
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Wines of Interest >  Burgundy & Beaujolais