Harvesting the Grape

For each of us there is at least one sacred stretch of railroad; for me it is the eight-hundred miles between Paris and the Riviera. When I was young, I preferred to make the trip by night. The Blue Train was a magic carpet transporting me from mundane actuality to a perpetual playground. In Paris it had been wet and windy: as I pulled down the curtain of my compartment, I would think, “through this window in ten hours’ time I shall see the sun soaked landscape of Provence, the palm trees and the blue Mediterranean.” I savored the sudden contrast.

But now, with wine having become my hobby, I prefer to travel south by day, for the sake of those twenty-five miles between Dijon and Santenay. What treasures he there; what a regal flow of names. First the Côte de Nuits—Chambertin, Musigny, Vougeot, Romanée then the Côte de Beaune— the low rounded hill of Cor-ton, with its tribute to Charlemagne; after that Beaune itself — Pommard and Volnay and those great white wines, Mersault and Montrachet. I had a friend who stood up and bowed as he passed each one. In half-an-hour you will see the lot. Looking at that gentle rise, you can appreciate why good Burgundy is so scarce and so expensive; there must be, perforce, so little of it. You appreciate, too, why there can be such a difference between two bottles of Burgundy, both bearing the same label. The best wines are garnered from the central slopes, yet the whole strip of land between the railway and the summit has the right to the one great name Chambertin or Beaune or Vol-nay. There is some estate bottling in Burgundy, but very little. There is no equivalent for the Chateau bottling of the Medoc. You have to rely upon your shipper—or rather upon your wine merchant who is the middle man between the shipper and yourself. There is so little great Burgundy in the world: the demand for it is so keen that the men who make it can rarely afford to drink it. Nor can there be ever any more of it than there is now. Great wine is not like other merchandise: you cannot increase the supply to meet the demand. The cost of production will go up; the population is increasing: more and more people are learning that Burgundy is the king of wines, but those golden slopes can only produce in a good year their 3,000 majestic hectolitres and there are as many poor years as good.

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Alec Waugh

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For each of us there is at least one sacred stretch of railroad; for me it is the eight-hundred miles between Paris and the Riviera. When I was young, I preferred to make the trip by night. The Blue Train was a magic carpet transporting me from mundane actuality to a perpetual playground. In Paris it had been wet and windy: as I pulled down the curtain of my compartment, I would think, “through this window in ten hours’ time I shall see the sun soaked landscape of Provence, the palm trees and the blue Mediterranean.” I savored the sudden contrast.

But now, with wine having become my hobby, I prefer to travel south by day, for the sake of those twenty-five miles between Dijon and Santenay. What treasures he there; what a regal flow of names. First the Côte de Nuits—Chambertin, Musigny, Vougeot, Romanée then the Côte de Beaune— the low rounded hill of Cor-ton, with its tribute to Charlemagne; after that Beaune itself — Pommard and Volnay and those great white wines, Mersault and Montrachet. I had a friend who stood up and bowed as he passed each one. In half-an-hour you will see the lot. Looking at that gentle rise, you can appreciate why good Burgundy is so scarce and so expensive; there must be, perforce, so little of it. You appreciate, too, why there can be such a difference between two bottles of Burgundy, both bearing the same label. The best wines are garnered from the central slopes, yet the whole strip of land between the railway and the summit has the right to the one great name Chambertin or Beaune or Vol-nay. There is some estate bottling in Burgundy, but very little. There is no equivalent for the Chateau bottling of the Medoc. You have to rely upon your shipper—or rather upon your wine merchant who is the middle man between the shipper and yourself. There is so little great Burgundy in the world: the demand for it is so keen that the men who make it can rarely afford to drink it. Nor can there be ever any more of it than there is now. Great wine is not like other merchandise: you cannot increase the supply to meet the demand. The cost of production will go up; the population is increasing: more and more people are learning that Burgundy is the king of wines, but those golden slopes can only produce in a good year their 3,000 majestic hectolitres and there are as many poor years as good.