Burghound
December 22, 2022
The respected American critic, Allen Meadows, with a breadth and depth of knowledge of the subject scarcely rivaled, publishes a detailed scholarly newsletter devoted exclusively to Burgundy and Pinot Noir, which he calls Burghound. I’m not sure whether the association was explicit to Meadows at the time of its conception, but in the choice of nomenclature for his publication he has perhaps hit on the most striking feature of Burgundy. Unique among wines (and certainly not always, mind you), it can make us crave it in a way not unlike the feelings evoked from another inexorable primal urge, that gripping, essential physical longing; Burgundy has a quality that can transform us all into slavering hound dogs.[1] [2] [3]
It occurs to me that I first became interested in growing and making Pinot Noir in California 1981 for reasons not entirely unrelated to the passion that drives our desire to consume Burgundy. Note, I believe it is a damn difficult thing to achieve a truly stellar effort outside the Côte d’Or. Having taken the proper measure of the grape, it may be that only through the magical power of testosterone that a winemaker in the New World will have the will and stubbornness to even attempt to make great Pinot; he (mostly he’s) does it because in so doing, he can show the world how absolutely clever and masterful he is, that he is the alpha hound of the pack.[4] [5]
I have over the years learned that there are features of Pinot Noir winemaking that seem to run counter to the alpha-dog instinct, which is often predicated on “doing.” (The “doing,” in fact, is largely done by the time the grapes arrive at the winery.) There is much about Pinot wine making that is counter-intuitive, for example the question of what we nerds call “phenolic extraction.”[6] As an alpha dog, your first instinct might be to want to punch down your tank of Pinot Noir n-tuple times a day, ideally to sleep next to it at night as it ferments, so you might punch it down yet a few more times in the wee hours, stealing the march, as it were, on your somnolent vigneron competitors. But I’ve found that the gentlest possible extraction of your grapes will more likely enable the balance and harmony you are seeking; while inwardly you’re habituated to asking yourself what more can I do or add to the wine, the reality is that generally less is truly more - the flavor potential must perforce come from the grapes that you’ve so lovingly tended during the year. One of course must be a skilled vineyardist to grow brilliant Pinot Noir grapes in the New World but as importantly, one must have the great luck to have successfully identified a site that has the potential to produce such grapes in the first place.
What has Burgundy taught me? I still don’t drink enough of it, of course, because it is impossibly expensive, and maybe because I drink it so infrequently, I’m not sure if I’m getting any closer to understanding it any better than I did forty years ago. Perhaps in fact there’s nothing to really understand - it either gives pleasure or it doesn’t. Despite my deep admiration for “lighter” and “elegant” wines, many Burgundies still strike me as rather too lean, green and slightly mean,[7] but I’ve at least learned to give them a chance with air and time after opening. They almost always improve, sometimes rather dramatically, even a day or two after opening. I try to avoid drinking very young great Burgundies if I can resist, as inevitably I find that I have opened them too soon; the last sip from the bottle is invariably the best. So, I suppose Burgundy teaches patience if one is willing to learn. Burgundy wins you over by seduction, needless to say; it doesn’t reveal all of its secrets at the beginning of your assignation.
I believe that Burgundy remains haunting and compelling to us in the unique way it can fuse the organic and inorganic elements contained within it. There is not just its ability to express the mineral aspect of terroir[8] but also the vegetative/fruit elements of beetroot, cherry and truffle and not to forget, suggestions of the natural scents of human beings themselves - blood, sweat and shit. As I’ve written before, we as human beings have for the most part been banished from anything like a direct experience of the natural world; we are abstracted by societal constructs, by our immersion in electronic virtuality. Maybe the experience of Burgundy affords us a brief nostalgic moment of geophagic bliss, the rare opportunity to intimately reconnect with primal tastes without the mediation of language and analysis.
One gift that Burgundy has given me is that I’ve realized that if I want to emulate its genius, perhaps the last thing I want to do is grow Pinot Noir in California. I’m finding that other varieties, perhaps better suited to the Popelouchum site, like Grenache Noir, Cinsault or Tibouren, can express a Burgundian aesthetic with significantly less effort. Keeping crop levels well in check, managing the canopy and crop thinning to achieve uniform and complete ripening in essentially the coolest site possible, can enable one to make wines of haunting fragrance and seductive elegance. The varieties I’ve mentioned are none of them densely packed with phenolic richness; there’s enough openness on the palate to allow the wine enough space to move and evolve in the glass - a coy trick that Burgundy does so well and maybe the one that keeps us returning.
These days I make a little bit of Pinot Noir at my Popelouchum Estate in San Juan Bautista; it’s a little over a half acre on a gently north-facing slope and it’s totally impractical. I’ve planted it own-rooted with a mixed selection of biotypes on an insane .5 m. x 1 m. spacing grid. The results look quite promising from a quality standpoint; from a financial point of view, it remains madness.[9] I still don’t know what I will do if I ever catch up to the sleek speeding sedan.
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[1] As majestic as may be a first growth claret from a superb vintage, (and with the possible exception of some vintages of Ch. Cheval Blanc in the day), no one has ever felt that he or she would die if they never tasted Chateau Latour again.
[2] Wait! How could I have failed to also mention Jamet Côte-Rôtie,”Côte Brune,” as well as older vintages of Chateau Rayas? The point remains however that there are not many other wines out there that can get us as hot and bothered as great Burgundy. These wines all possess fragrances that are uniquely haunting.
[3] The presence of the human sex pheromone molecule has been detected in Burgundy, but I’m sure that’s just an amazing coincidence.
[4] Happily, I realized early on in my career that while in my imagination I might be an alpha-Pinot dog, I really wasn’t quite sure what I practically was going to do if I ever did catch up to the speeding car. Truth be told, for most of my career, the chase itself was a lot more interesting (and safer) than actually catching up to the object of one’s desire.
[5] Which is not to say that there aren’t plenty of testosterone infused winemakers in the New World who are at the same time utterly naive as far as understanding what it truly takes to make a great Pinot.
[6] One can famously evaluate red Burgundy by applying the aesthetic criteria of Rhône or bordelais styles with predictably unfortunate consequences. Who could ever be so foolish?
[7] I think that I’ve likely drunk up most of the bottles of riper vintages in my cellar, leaving a bit of a straggly gang of the remainers.
[8] I haven’t seen any studies on the subject, but I’m convinced that proper Burgundy contains elevated concentrations of geosmin, that molecule associated with the smell of soil after a rain. Beetroot, for me an indicator of Burgundian typicity, is also known to contain discernable levels of geosmin.
[9] I am remiss to not mention the extraordinary concentration of wildlife living adjacent to the Pinot block that take a keen interest in the maturation of the grapes - diverse rodentine species, primarily but also foxes, coyotes, rabbits, ground squirrels, bobcats and mountain lions.
