Tag Archives: Lalou Bize-Leroy

Jancis Robinson — The Beyoncé of Wine

Amber LeBeau in Wine critics, Wine Knowledge

Published on March 8, 2018

The world of wine has a long history of influential women.

It’s entirely possible that the first “accidental winemakers” were women who were responsible for gathering fruit and storing them in jars that would later start fermenting. Ancient cultures are awash with stories of wine goddesses like Paget, Siduri and Renen-utet.

In more recent history, we have the notable widows of Champagne and the trailblazing women winemakers of California as well as numerous other women figures from across the globe.

But for me, no woman in wine has been more influential than British Master of Wine and writer Jancis Robinson.

Independent Woman

My very well loved and well used 3rd Edition of the Oxford Companion to Wine.

Robinson studied mathematics and philosophy at St. Anne’s College of Oxford University, graduating with a Masters degree in 1971. Her original goal was to write about fashion but tasting a 1959 Chambolle-Musigny Les Amoureuses at Oxford enchanted her with the world of wine. In 1975, she accepted a position as an assistant editor for Wine & Spirit trade publication where she worked till 1980. During this time she began her studies for the Wine & Spirit Education Trust–earning the Rouyer-Guillet cup as the top Diploma student in 1978.

In 1983, she helped launched The Wine Programme on British television which was the world’s first television series dedicated to the topic of wine.

Initially, the diploma level was the highest level that a person outside the wine trade could achieve. But, in 1984, the Institute of Masters of Wine finally opened up the MW exams to non-trade personnel. Jancis Robinson was one of the first to take the exam. She passed on her first try–the first non-trade professional, male or female, to earn the title. She was the 11th female Master of Wine, following in the footsteps of Sarah Morphew Stephen who was the first in 1970.

In 1990, Robinson became the wine correspondent for the Financial Times. By 1994, she was editing the first edition of the Oxford Companion to Wine. While managing a team of contributors that ballooned up to 167 by the time the 3rd edition came out in 2006, Robinson personally wrote more than a third of the almost 4000 entries. It has been described by The Washington Post as “the greatest wine book ever published.” In 2015, a 4th edition was released.

Irreplaceable

2006 was also the year that I discovered my own passion for wine–at Disney World’s Epcot Center of all places. Touring around the different food pavilions, my 24-year-old palate fell in love with the Valcklenberg Madonna Riesling. It wasn’t 1959 Chambolle-Musigny Les Amoureuses, but that was enough to get me hooked and wanting to learn more.

I’ve had my geeky proclivities since I was a child, reading for fun things like the Encyclopedia Britannica in my free time. I loved getting lost in what I called “red text journeys” where I started reading an entry, following one of the capitalized red text words to a subsequent entry and so forth till I hit a dead-end. Then I would pick another entry and start again.

It was at Barnes and Noble when I first laid eyes on the beauty that was the Oxford Companion to Wine. The new pages smelled divine and my eyes lit up as I saw all the different entries (and RED TEXT WORDS!) Here was my new Brittanica! Of course, I flipped straight to the Riesling entry which covered three pages.

Another well loved and well marked up tome.

Bringing it home, I started following the red text words from Riesling to German History to Wild Vine to Phylloxera to Bordeaux and on along an endless ride that touched nearly every corner of the world of wine. The history entries and wine regions particularly enticed me as I saw a web connecting my fascination with history and geography to this continuing story about wine. It was a story that I wanted to put more in context which led me to Jancis Robinson’s Wine Course.

Crazy In Love

It was about 2007 when I purchased the DVD series and companion book. I watched the ten episodes with my wife, but the book was all mine to mark up and annotate to my heart’s desire. Here I learned some of the nitty-gritty details about tasting wine, deciphering wine labels as well as learning how grape varieties and place intertwined. From interviews Robinson had with people like Dominique Lafon, Lalou Bize Leroy, Didier Dagueneau and Randall Grahm, I learned more about the stories of the people behind the wine which made the time and effort they put into the bottle come to life for me.

It was also at this time that I slowly started moving away from the comfort of my sweet Rieslings to drier whites and then finally reds. How could I not? Watching Jancis enjoy and describe these wines made them too irresistible to not want to try at least!

My “crush on wine” was becoming full-blown love at this point and I started entertaining ideas of pursuing a career in wine.

In 2008, I left working retail management and dived head first into achieving my first certification with a Certified Specialist in Wine (CSW) from the Society of Wine Educators. That opened the door to working as a wine steward for a major grocery chain. Unfortunately, that chain didn’t have much commitment to training and furthering the wine knowledge of its stewards, but I didn’t despair. I had Jancis Robinson.

By this point my collection of her books had expanded to include Vines, Grapes & Wines: The Wine Drinker’s Guide to Grape Varieties and the 5th Edition of the World Atlas of Wine which caused me to audibly squeal with joy when I discovered the used copy I bought on Amazon came signed by both Robinson and co-author Hugh Johnson.

All the Single Grapes

I startled my wife when I opened the cover of the World Atlas of Wine and saw this.
She thought there might have been a spider!

I became an active contributor to Wikipedia’s Wine Project as User:Agne27 where I set about to substantially rewrite and expand many of Wikipedia’s wine articles–with my trusty Oxford Companion to Wine at my side. When Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding and José Vouillamoz released their magnum opus of ampelography and geekdom, Wine Grapes, that became another immensely valuable tool. Until the sexism and politics of Wikipedia drove me away, I was pretty darn committed to creating a Wikipedia entry for all 1,368 grapes that Robinson and Co. enlivened my world with.

In 1200+ articles I worked on for Wikipedia, I don’t think there was a single one that didn’t reference one of Robinson’s works. In my opinion, she was the benchmark standard for reliability when it came to wine. While I found other wine authors and references, if there was ever a conflict of sources, I always went back to Robinson as the most authoritative word on the matter.

For the most part, I toiled away in the obscurity of crowd-sourcing–not expecting any recognition. But I have to admit that my heart did flutter a bit when I read a 2015 post by Jancis Robinson on her Purple Pages about What future for expertise? where she noted that she often finds the Oxford Companion cited at the bottom of Wikipedia articles.

I know that reference wasn’t exactly meant to be a compliment.

But she noticed!

Though I always tried my best to rewrite and regurgitate into my own words what I learned, I do feel that my frequent citations of her work are a testament to the unpayable debt I have to her. I wanted people who visited Wikipedia to see the Oxford Companion to Wine, Wine Grapes and her other works cited. I learned so much during those years and it all comes back to Jancis Robinson.

And I’m still learning from her.

All you have to do is look at the word cloud at the bottom of this blog’s front page to see how large the font is for the Jancis Robinson tag. She is still my benchmark standard and, frankly, my hero. To me, she’s bigger than Beyoncé.

A growing collection. Each one as marked up, highlighted and wine-stained as the next.

The 1500+ words in this post can never do justice in encapsulating all the many ways she has inspired and encouraged me in this journey. I can only dream of ever accomplishing a fraction of what she has done. But everything that I will end up achieving, anyone that I will ever inspire to fall in love with wine and thirst to learn more will be because of Jancis Robinson.

I’m working on the WSET diploma level and, someday, I hope to join Jancis in the ranks of 125+ female Masters of Wine. If I ever do get to that point and go to London to get my MW, you better believe that I will be packing my trusty 3rd Edition of the Oxford Companion of Wine.

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Getting Geeky with Cave de Genouilly Aligote

Amber LeBeau in Burgundy, Wine grapes, Wine Knowledge

Published on January 20, 2018

Going to need more than 60 seconds to geek out about the 2015 Cave de Genouilly Bourgogne Aligoté.

The Background

Cave de Genouilly was founded in 1932 as a co-operative of family growers in the Côte Chalonnaise region of southern Burgundy. Today, the co-op includes 90 growers with 180 acres based around the communes of Genouilly, Fley, Bissy-sur-Fley, Saint-Martin-du-Tartre and Saint-Clément-sur-Guye. Many of the growers are second and third generation members of the co-op.

In addition to Bourgogne Aligoté, the co-op also produces Crémant de Bourgogne as well as still wines from the AOCs of Rully, Givry and Montagny–including some premier cru.

The Grape

According to Jancis Robinson’s Wine Grapes, Aligoté is an offspring of Pinot and Gouais blanc, making it a full sibling of Chardonnay, Melon de Bourgogne, Gamay and Auxerrois.

Robinson speculates that the name Aligoté is derived from the old synonym for Gouais blanc, Gôt. The grape first appeared in written records in 1780 under the synonym ‘Plant de Trois’ which refers to the tendency of Aligoté to produce three clusters per branch. The name Aligoté, itself, appears in the Côte d’Or for the first time in 1807.

The grape earned some notoriety after World War II when the mayor of Dijon, Félix Kir, created a cocktail that blended Aligoté with Crème de Cassis. Today that cocktail is known as the Kir and, while it has many derivatives, the classic incarnation still features Aligoté.

The classic Kir cocktail of Aligoté with Crème de Cassis paired with gougères, a savory puff pastry made with cheese.

Today there is around 4800 acres of the variety planted in France–virtually all in Burgundy. Producers tend to plant Aligoté either at the very bottom or very top of the slope, leaving the prime mid-slope section for the more profitable Chardonnay and Pinot noir.

While most plantings are found in the Côte Chalonnaise, particularly in the Bouzeron AOC, the grape was permitted in Meursault throughout the 19th century and is technically still authorized for use in the Grand Cru of Corton-Charlemagne thanks to a 1930s legal judgement. Bonneau du Matray maintained 1 ha of Aligoté in the Grand Cru until the mid-1970s.

In my post Brave New Burgs, I noted that the list of Burgundian producers who seem to have a soft spot for this obscure variety is impressive. Aubert de Villaine (of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti fame), Lalou Bize-Leroy, Marquis d’Angerville and Michel Lafarge, to name a few. Aligoté is even planted in the prime real estate of the Morey-St-Denis Premier Cru Clos des Monts Luisants owned by Domaine Ponsot.

Outside of France, Aligoté can be found in Switzerland (≈ 50 acres) and several eastern European countries such as Bulgaria (≈ 2700 acres), Moldova (≈ 39,000 acres), Romania (≈ 18,000 acres), Russia (≈ 1,000 acres) and Ukarine where the grape accounts for 11% of total vineyard area with ≈ 24,000 acres.

By Ensenator - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, released on Wikimedia commons

Aligoté grapes growing in Romania.

In the US, California winemaker Jed Steele makes an example in Washington State called Shooting Star sourced from 2 acres of Aligoté planted in the Yakima Valley by the Newhouse family in the 1970s. Josh Jensen of Calera has also experimented with the variety in the high-altitude Mt. Harlan AVA in the Gabilan Mountains of San Benito County, California.

The Wine

Medium plus intensity nose with citrus and fresh cut white flowers. A little grassy. Makes me think of a Sauvignon blanc.

The mouthfeel has surprising weight with a medium plus body that helps balance the medium plus acidity. It rounds it out and keeps the wine mouthwatering rather than bitey. Apple flavors appear alongside the citrus (lemon) and fresh floral notes carrying through from the bouquet. The grassiness doesn’t, though, which has my thoughts shifting from comparing it to a Sauvignon blanc to something closer to an unoaked Chardonnay from the Macon-Village.

The Verdict

In Brave New Burgs, I summed up my tasting note on the 2015 Cave de Genouilly Bourgogne Aligoté “As if a Sauvignon blanc and an unoaked Chardonnay had a baby. Great mouthfeel with weight. Smooth but fresh.”

The wine has a lot of character that makes it enjoyable on its own but with its mouthwatering acidity, I thinks it place to shine is with food. At around $15-18, its combination of fruit, acidity and structure gives great flexibility on the table letting it pair with anything from white and shellfish to fatty tuna and salmon as well as vegetarian fare, poultry and pork.

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Brave New Burgs (Part 1)

Amber LeBeau in Burgundy, Wine grapes, Wine Knowledge

Published on November 6, 2017

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Pop quiz, wine geeks.

1.) What is the white grape of Burgundy?

If you know enough to be dangerous with a restaurant wine list or in a wine shop, then you probably didn’t hesitate to answer “Chardonnay”.

And for the most part, you’d be right.

But also a little wrong.

Some of the best “intro to wine” texts around like Karen MacNeil’s The Wine Bible, Kevin Zraly’s Windows on the World Wine Course and Madeline Puckette’s Wine Folly will teach you that it is easy to start getting a grasp of Burgundy.

Just remember that there is only two grapes–Pinot noir and Chardonnay.

It’s a reflex condition to think with Burgundy that if its red, it’s Pinot noir. If it’s white, then Chardonnay. Sure, everything else about Burgundy with it’s 100 appellations and intricate classification system of 23 regional AOCs, 44 villages, 33 Grand Crus, 585 Premier Crus and countless named lieu dits is enough to make your head spin—but it’s easy to nail the grape varieties. Right?

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

A Sauvignon blanc produced less than 20 km from the heart of Chablis’ Grand Cru

I started working on the Wine Scholar Guild‘s Bourgogne Master Level Program lead by Don Kinnan with the desire to get more comfortable with Burgundy. But it wasn’t long before I found myself diving head-first into a rabbit hole that would shake me out of my comfort zone but introduce me to a world far more exciting than the one I began studying.

As Allen Meadows, the Burghound, is fond of saying–Burgundy is “the land of exceptions”.

It wasn’t long before the first exceptions started blowing in like the north wind across the Yonne. Here, in the land of Chablis, we have the Auxerrois where grapes like Sauvignon blanc run wild in Saint-Bris and Melon de Bourgogne (the grape of Muscadet) in Vézelay.

However, the exceptions aren’t limited to obscure villages in the northern backwoods of Burgundy. Instead, in the heart of the Côte-d’Or we have the curious case of Pinot Gouges.

In the 1930s, Henri Gouges was inspecting his vineyards in the Nuits-St-Georges premier cru monopole of Clos des Porrets. He noticed that one of his red Pinot noir vines was producing white grape clusters. Intrigued, Gourge took cuttings from the vine and planted them in the NSG premier cru vineyard of La Perrières. His grandchildren still cultivate this “Pinot blanc” though instead of labeling it as that grape, the Gouges family describe Pinot Gouges as “Pinot noir that lost their color“. Regardless of what the vines are called–the fact still remains that in the middle of Chardonnay land, we have an exciting and distinctively non-Chardonnay white Burgundy being produced from a premier cru vineyard.

My notes on the Pinot Gouges “The color looks like a regular white Burg with some oak influence. On the nose, tree fruits of apples and pears but there is a lot of spice here–not oak spice but rather exotic spices.
On the palate there is a lot of weight and texture–things that would make me think of oak except for the complete absence of oak flavors. There is no vanilla, cinnamon, clove, allspice, etc.”

Now while it is technically illegal to plant Pinot blanc in most of the Côte d’Or (though, again, there are exceptions), several producers still tend to legacy vines. Inspired by bottles of Pinot blanc from the 1960s that aged remarkably well, Domaine Méo-Camuzet sourced Pinot blanc vines from Alsace to plant in their Clos St Philibert vineyard in Flagey-Echézeaux. The wine produced from these vines is blended with Chardonnay and classified under Bourgogne Hautes-Côtes de Nuits AOC (as opposed to a village level Vosne-Romanée).

Then there is the case of Pinot Beurot (Pinot gris), the sneaky pink-skinned mutation of Pinot noir that can sometimes find itself interspersed among Pinot noir vines. Not content to just be an interloper, the grape plays a starring role in wines like Domaine Comte Senard Aloxe-Corton blanc that is 100% Pinot Beurot as well Domaine Lucien Boillot et Fils Les Grands Poisots sourced from a parcel of Pinot Beurot first planted in the Volnay vineyard in 1958. Not legally permitted to be called a Volnay, the wine is labeled under the basic regional Bourgogne appellation. Likewise, in the famed white wine vineyards of Puligny-Montrachet, Domaine Guillemard-Clerc has a little less than an acre of Pinot Beurot which goes into it regional Bourgogne blanc. In the Bourgogne Hautes-Côtes de Beaune AOC, Domaine Guillemard-Pothier à Meloisey also produces a Pinot Beurot.

My notes on the Cave de Genouilly Aligote “As if a Sauvignon blanc and an unoaked Chardonnay had a baby. Great mouthfeel with weight. Smooth but fresh.”

And this is not even getting into the more widely known exception of Aligoté which has its own AOC and has earned the affection of a literal “Who’s Who” of legendary Burgundy producers like Aubert de Villaine, Lalou Bize-Leroy, Marquis d’Angerville and Michel Lafarge. Domaine Ponsot takes the love affair a step further to make premier cru level Aligoté in the Morey-St-Denis monopole of Clos des Monts Luisants.

The faith in these producers to devote precious terroir to this obscure grape is a testament that there is something interesting about Aligoté that makes it stand out in the Chardonnay-saturated world of Burgundy. It’s high acidity enchants with racy and mouthwatering appeal that is balanced by a weighty mid-palate that gives a sense of lemon custard richness which can charm even the most traditional white Burgundy lover.

There is no doubt that Burgundy is home to some of the greatest expressions of Chardonnay. However, for the wine geeks conditioned to merely think White Burgundy=Chardonnay, there is brave new world of exciting white Burgs waiting to be discovered.