Adventures on the Wine Route

WHILE MEURSAULT has provided the warmest memories, the white Burgundy that raises the hair on my back, that arouses passions ranging from teeth-gnashing outrage to utmost euphoria, is not even from the Côte d’Or. It is Chablis, northernmost Chablis, the yellow to golden-green wine from the gray, forgettable village of the same name, which has over two thousand inhabitants yet still manages to seem smaller than Meursault.

Halfway between Beaune and Paris, Chablis is surrounded by little burgs with names like Villy, Milly, Mussy, Bouilly, Joigny, Maligny, Irancy, Nitry, Chitry, and Ervy. On the road, when you begin noticing all the y’s, you know you are in the neighborhood of Chablis. Why it is not Chably, no one can tell me. None of the others has entered into the world vocabulary, but Chablis means something in many tongues. None of the others gave birth to an inimitable wine, so inimitable that Chablis itself has trouble begetting lucid versions of itself.

I worked to turn up a wine worthy of the fabled name Chablis, worked my palate to the quick in that bleak, drizzly, stone-cold village. Perhaps because its wine was too sour to the German taste, their bombers practically destroyed Chablis in June 1940, and I think its citizens still have not forgiven the rest of the world for that misfortune. I would like to announce to the people of Chablis that I had nothing to do with that bombing, that I was unborn, and that we Americans in general were gearing up to jump into the fray.

Aside from bombing runs and the local little cheese biscuits called gougères, wine is the only reason to go to Chablis. Otherwise, watch out for cold sheets, questionable quenelles, and frostbite.

Bitter? Yes, I am bitter. Loving Chablis is like falling in love with a frigid floozy. You begin to wonder if the rewards are worth the heartbreak and deception. And the vignerons there are bitter. They are bitter because of the frost and hailstorms that terrorize their grapevines. Imagine watching the fruits of your year’s labor destroyed in an evening. In his late-sixties book about Burgundy, Pierre Brejoux wrote that the harvest from the steepest Chablis slopes is destroyed two out of three years, and often the catastrophe is spread wider, as in 1957, when one single hectoliter (133 bottles) of grand cru Chablis was declared. Between 1955 and 1961, frost struck every year except 1958.

I can hardly complain about my first visit in 1974. Dinner included a heart-pounding flirtation with an adorable young kitchen maid and a bottle of 1929 Le Clos with cheeses. The following day I stumbled upon and purchased some impeccable 1973 grand cru Bougros and Preuses. This is not only easy, it’s fun, I thought, but then I returned two, sometimes three times per year, always to drive away empty-handed. The drought lasted seven years.

Well, of course, it is bloody simple to buy Chablis. My local supermarket sells “Chablis” by the jug, made in California. Or pay a visit to one of the big shipper houses in Beaune. You would think there was a river of the stuff. Hugh Johnson wrote about Chablis: “Every day, as much wine is drunk under its name as it often produces in a whole harvest.” No, thanks, I was determined to buy Chablis from grapes grown in Chablis’s stony Kimmeridgean limestone and clay. I wanted it raised in wood as my initial purchase in 1974 had been, and I wanted it bottled alive.

Before World War I, the vignerons at Chablis were also tonneliers, or coopers. Everyone made their own feuillettes, the small 132-liter barrels that were favored at Chablis, more than likely because in those icy cellars, where everything is slowed down, more wine-to-wood contact was desirable than farther south at Meursault or Puligny. The wine was sold in barrel; in other words, when a buyer bought Chablis, he bought the wine and its container. Thus, the growers were obliged to put their wine into new oak each vintage. New oak brought its special tannin and all sorts of other qualities to the raw wine, including greater potential for aging. Then the roller-coaster prices Chablis suffers finally make it financially impractical for the growers to afford new barrels every year. One grower claims seeing some years when the barrel was more costly than the wine in it.

How can one be for or against new oak for Chablis? One likes the flavor or not. What is undeniable is that Chablis premiers and grands crus profit from a passage in oak, old or new, be it feuillette, barrel, or the larger-sized demi-muid. Yet today it is rare to see an oak container at Chablis unless the winemaker has placed one on display outside his cellar to let passersby know that he has wine for sale. Modern vinification, which has almost taken over, employing 100 percent glass-lined or stainless-steel tanks, can produce good wine. There is a freshness to it that is not bad. But I have never tasted one that possessed the depth of character, the profoundness, if you will, of the old style, which is aged in wood. Chablis, from that rough soil and climate, needs that respiration, that exchange with the atmosphere that glass and stainless cannot provide. Barrel aging refines the wine while slowly liberating its character. Even when well done, the new vinification in tanks inhibits this evolution toward a certain kind of maturity, resulting in a good rather than a great wine.

When it is badly done … ah, here is where the gnashing of teeth comes in. Chablis that tastes like Chablis is so hard to find even in the cellars of Chablis that I have trouble working up any sympathy for the French howls of noble outrage when they begin raving about our supermarket jugs of Chablis and even Pink Chablis. I know their indignation is justified, that Chablis is a place-name, that it is not fair to allow a vulgar vin ordinaire to parade about sporting the name of a truly noble growth whose reputation has been honored for centuries, blah, blah, blah … Agreed! On the other hand, criticism, like charity, begins at home, or should. By the time many bottles roll off the bottling lines at Chablis, the grapes might as well have come from Fresno, because cellar after cellar turns out the same anonymous-tasting plonk. No goût de terroir, no Chablis character, and little wine flavor left to them. The poor juice undergoes flash this or flash that, heat here and drop it below zero there, dose it with a hit of this and a hit of that, pump it up, down, and sideways through this filter and then through that, inject a stinky cloud of sulfur dioxide just to be extra-safe, insert the cork, et voilà! it is in bottle and on the market three months after the harvest, calling itself wine and wearing a Chablis label. And they want us to worry about Pink Chablis?

If anyone has wondered why I did not simply return to the producer of my 1973 Bougros and Preuses, I did, and it was quite like my Sancerre experience. I found the old fellow’s son in charge and nary a barrel left in sight. He had improved the vinification. He was in the process of gathering together the most extensive collection of filter devices I have ever seen.

Then one year I visited a grower named Dauvissat, and I was swept away by what I tasted in barrel. I bought a few bottles to sample later, but when I uncorked them, by some inexplicable fluke, they had an off-taste. Or more likely, my taste was off. Based on those two or three bottles, I did not return to Dauvissat’s cellar and I have kicked myself ever since. I order Dauvissat’s Chablis whenever I see it, because it satisfies my notion of real Chablis.

But finally I did find what I was looking for and I found it at Taillevent, the gastronomic palace in Paris that possesses such a lovely wine list, including ancient vintages. Always on the lookout for a good Chablis, I spotted a 1976 Montée de Tonnerre from François Raveneau, and I knew as soon as I drew in its perfume that it was his that I wanted to import. Here was Chablis to rival the world’s finest Chardonnays.

The next day I was to drive south from Paris, so it would be an easy detour to Chablis. I telephoned François Raveneau. His phone rang and rang. Then, just as I was about to give up, a rather steely voice responded: J’écoute! which means “I’m listening!”

My left ear shattered from frostbite, I pondered taking up another line of work.

The next time in France, though, I rang him up again, “just to drop by, say Bonjour, see your cellar, taste the new vintage…?”

No. He was too busy and there was no wine for sale. But he did say Au revoir before clicking off.

Six months later I received an excited phone call from Rebecca Wasserman, an American living and working in Burgundy. She announced breathlessly that she had visited Raveneau.

She was exporting certain products for Jean Troisgros, the three-star restaurateur who bought Raveneau Chablis regularly for his wine list. Jean Troisgros invited her along to taste in Raveneau’s cellar with him.

Well, after that, it was really very simple for me to get into Raveneau’s cellar, too. When she called him to request an appointment for me, how could a Frenchman refuse a woman, a woman who was also an associate of Jean Troisgros? It would have been not only uncavalier but an insult to French gastronomy as well.

But, Raveneau told her firmly, the visit would be a visit to taste only! He had nothing for sale.

I invited Hubert de Montille from Volnay along with me, one of the illustrious names in Burgundian winemaking, who is also a successful attorney-at-law, an altogether persuasive combination, I hoped.

While de Montille and I tasted and enthused about the wines, Raveneau seemed impatient, cold, and aloof. Then I confronted him with the matter of a few cases of wine for the United States. He turned me off sharply. Too much paperwork. His wines were too fragile to ship. They were all sold, anyway! I turned away, mumbling and gnawing my glass of Chablis.

By the time we left, de Montille and Raveneau were gabbling so rapidly and I was enveloped in such a fog of despair that I could not keep up with their French. Did I say goodbye? In the car I swore that I never wanted to see or hear the word Chablis again. “I give up!”

“Didn’t you understand?” de Montille asked. “At the end he said he will save three or four cartons for you from his next vintage!”

But that, I knew, would not be the end of it, and what Raveneau had said in a moment of warmth toward the irresistible Hubert de Montille might not be remembered a year later when I returned to Chablis alone.

Then I had an additional bit of luck. I was dining at the Champagne house of Billecart-Salmon, and Monsieur Billecart brought up a magnum of Le Clos, François Raveneau!

Later Monsieur Billecart reported that Raveneau remained strongly against shipping overseas because his is a natural wine which undergoes no treatment whatsoever to stabilize it.

When I saw Raveneau again, I stated my case: that I take unusual pains in the transport of my wines, that his Chablis would be safe in a refrigerated container, that I buy other completely natural wines and have experienced no problems.

FRANÇOIS RAVENEAU. CHABLIS

“All right,” he growled, “but if one bottle spoils, I don’t even want to hear about it.”

And that is how, with a little help from Taillevent, Rebecca Wasserman, Jean Troisgros, Hubert de Montille, and Jean-Roland Billecart, I bought three hundred bottles of 1979 Chablis Le Clos.