"this burgundy is cinsault!"

This is the sixth part of 6-part series about time travel, wine histories, and the bottles of the fall/winter 2025 club shipment.

Part 1: Chablis, or “minerality.”
Part 2: Orange wine, “typicity”
Part 3: chilled red ate rosé
Part 4: what gets to be American (wine)?
Part 5: what gets to be Champagne? (coming soon)
Part 6: this burgundy is cinsault (that’s this one)

Hi folks,

I got sick for something like two full weeks in February, and I got sad, and I got busy. I’m sorry for not writing sooner.

This is my attempt to finish my now three (?) month long series about the wines of the fall/winter 2025 club shipment, which sprawled to 20 years of orange wine internet discourse, how carbonic maceration became entangled with the natural wine movement, what you’d get in downtown Manhattan these days if you asked for Chablis under $100, recipes for Minnesota hot dish, and, idk, the concept of time itself.

(Since I last wrote, a few remaining bottles from the holiday shipment have shaken loose over in the Copake cellar, and we’ve put together a leftovers 4-pack, including the artwork and all other club benefits, for anybody who missed this the first time around and wants to play! Details here.)

Where were we, again?

Its fanciest stretch of vineyards and villages is along a limestone escarpment, the outer rim of the big saucer of the Paris Basin.

You have woods on the plateau at your back, exposed and windy, for game and firewood; an alluvial plain in front of you, soggy and fertile, for asparagus and potatoes. On the slope (côte) named not for being golden but for the direction of its exposure (or, east-facing), a little stack of eroded marls, heavier clay towards the bottom, harder chalk towards the top, inflected by little streams that have eroded gullies and combes, is where you grow your vines.

The vineyard plots have old names, sometimes for what grew around them (juniper bushes, genevrières) or for the way the soils look (stony, perrières), or for where they are on the slope (the plot beneath the woods, la piecé sous la bois), or for their owners (an abby like Vougeot or Béze, the duke of Burgundy, the French king after the last duke fell in battle in 1477 and his dreams of an independent kingdom stretching from Savoy to the North Sea died with him, etc).

After 200 years of post-Revolution inheritance law, the ownership of the named plots is mostly split into tiny pieces between different growing families. You can taste a half dozen different peoples interpreting a single sliver of land, and the name of the vineyard will be the biggest thing on the bottle.

This is the dream of Burgundy: a little postage stamp–sized plot planted to a single grape variety matched for a thousand years to its soil and rock and light, ranked from good to better to best by the patient work of monks tasting dirt and finished wine and writing down what they thought, channeled in each vintage through the work of a grower–winemaker whose insight and craft result in a wine of infinite subtle variation.

Put a pin in whether this story is true, exactly — we’ll get there.

Maybe more important than whether the dream is true is the way that it has swallowed up the rest of the world of wine.

Your avant-garde grower in the Aube, bottling single-vintage, single-variety sparkling charting the tiny differences from one plot to another, the inverse of your big houses?

Burgundy with bubbles, basically.

The VDP growers’ association in Germany, increasingly eschewing prädikat ripeness designations in favor of a vineyard hierarchy of ‘great growths' (grosses gewächs), dedicated to monumental, dry (often chaptalized) rieslings?

They’re just asking, what if we make Burgundy harder to pronounce?

Is it single contrada bottlings on Etna (illegal to put on a label until the aughts)?

Comando G in Gredos marking their higher end garnachas with “1er” cru?

The way Roland Velich treats blaufränkisch in Burgenland?

Or Leo Erazo, above, classifying the hillsides he works with in Itata?

Increasingly, no matter where you are, the blueprint for ascension in regions shadowed by the bulks of defunct co-ops or in hock to merchant houses is, basically, to dream the Burgundy dream: a small grower becomes the first in generations to put their own wine into bottle, channeling a single site into your glass, with a “village” wine blended from the wider region for easy drinking.

(These days, site will often be tightly tied to a local grape variety instead of an international imitation, whether it’s Santorini assyrtiko or Penedès xarello or Ribeira Sacra mencía.)

It’s the stuff I get excited by, honestly. They’re the kind of bottles that people are pulling out of their bags to show me as a buyer, that have made working in wine in NYC for the last fifteen years so dynamic and compelling, even as affording and accessing Burgundy qua Burgundy became more and more impossible. All of us are products of our time and place. Dreaming the Burgundy dream was where the fun part of wine was supposed to be, the part for the nerds and the poets.

For a more than a century, the paradigm for wine as luxury commodity was Bordeaux. Whole regions — Barolo, Rioja, Chile’s Central Valley, Napa, Brunello — were built to spec using it as a model. Big Disneyland chateaux trying to look older than they were, long elevage in wood, single flagship wines: Bordeaux, Bordeaux, Bordeaux.

Britain’s entire wine palate evolved to marry these wines to its class structure: you bought bottles to lay them down, and the wines you opened for drinking were dusted off from the cellar you’d inherited from your father or your father’s father. (It made the new money easy to spot.)

(It also drilled in deep the idea that older is better, at least for those Brits. This leads to funny disjunctures like, for example, Jean-Louis Chave saying his northern Rhône syrahs are at their best seven or eight years after bottling, while English experts talking about the same wine intone solemnly that they are just coming into their own in their second or third decade. )

The last thing to say in this digression about Bordeaux-model wines is that they represent luxury at a certain scale. Château Margaux or Lafite-Rothschild make somewhere in the neighborhood of 180,000 to 300,000 bottles a year of their top wine, which can soak up a lot of disposable income. It’s an order of magnitude above, say, the 5,600 or so bottles that come out of the hectare that Armand Rousseau owns in the Clos de Béze. (To name a wine that big-money guys ask for to an exhausting degree).

What does it say about the current moment that money has turned its attention to the handmade, the small-scale, and the irreplaceable? What is this insatiable hunger for the real? What does feeding that hunger to the money guys mean for the rest of us?

(Is this why des Miroirs is $1,000/bottle on the secondary market?)

So we’re hungry for the real, which means it’s time to come back to this, to pick it over:

a little postage stamp–sized piece of land planted to a single grape variety matched for a thousand years to its soil and rock and light, ranked from good to better to best by the patient work of monks tasting dirt and finished wine and writing down what they thought, channeled in each vintage through the work of a grower–winemaker whose insight and craft result in a wine of infinite subtle variation

Wine is so fond of just-so stories. It still talks about the pseudoscientific zones on the tongue where you supposedly taste sour or bitter; it still says Dom Perignan invented sparkling champagne while crying “I can see stars!”. It’s so easy to lean on “they’ve been doing this forever.” It was the Romans. It was the monks.

I’ll never forget Pascaline putting up the Court of Master Sommeliers certified course slideshow to give a little intro course for the management team at Rouge Tomate in 2016 and stopping at the title card for the Burgundy regional overview: monks, vines, “Burgundy” in big letters. “But this isn’t in Burgundy,” she said, pointing at the shoulder-high vines and the black rubber hoses near the soil. “Look: there’s drip irrigation. That’s illegal there!”

If Burgundy has ever mostly been the work of grower-winemakers — a vigneron, useful word — it’s only been in the last 50-odd years. Post–World War II, post–the Beatles recording Help!, post–the Civil Rights movement.

Before that, with notable exceptions —Lafarge, d’Angerville, Roumier, and Ponsot, for example, who all started in the ‘20s—Burgundy was like most other places: farmers farmed grapes and sold them to merchants that blended to achieve consistent quality and a house style. Through the 1970s, nine-tenths of Burgundy was bottled and sold by négociants purchasing grapes or finished wine.

Those monks a thousand years ago, meanwhile, for sure made wine, but there was no such thing as drinking one part of the hillside and finding it to be ‘better’. No rankings of vineyard plots, no tasting dirt.

“There is no specific mention,” writes Pascaline in One Thousand Vines, “of the tastes either of the land or the cépages in the monastic archives that have survived to our times. Any mention of winemaking suggests instead that the monks were most exercised about selling the largest possible quantities, with no distinction of place of production.” (p. 183)

The monks of Saint-Vivant de Vergy, for example, farming stone wall enclosures around the village of Vosne, were custodians of sites now considered hallowed ground, grand cru like La Romanée, La Romanée-Conti, and La Romanée Saint Vivant, as well as other sites less-revered.²

They made one wine out of their enclosed land: a vin des clos made from all the grapes they could produce, a slew of red and white varieties fermented together into juicy, weird rosé.

Bottle glass hadn’t been invented yet, nor corks to seal them. The wines were not kept for decades; they turned to vinegar, fast or slow.

The vines grew tangled together like little trees, bush vines with enmeshed root systems centuries old.

We’d eventually get ranking and distinction, five hundred years later, in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was done by the emerging commercial middle and upper class in towns like Dijon and Beaune, who were buying land from the Church and investing in the hillsides around town. (This is why the Côte d’Or became golden, and this is when people started writing about the difference in taste between location and village.)

The studious monks picking over the slopes to rank them were a fantasy, projected backwards into time. (If you want to read more about this, I wrote about it six (! — jeeze) years ago for Punch.)

By the 1878 Paris Exposition, the merchants were showing all kinds of Burgundies, including red, sweet, fizzy Romanée — champagne method sparkling was the rage, and you could find it labeled everything from Chambertin to Meursault to Beaujolais (to say nothing of the Ohio River Valley catawbas down the hall).¹

So it’s the booming 19th century, 1878 red La Romanée is bubbling away, railroads and steamships and canals are making moving grapes and finished wine around a breeze, a modern miracle.

1878 was also the year phylloxera first appeared in the Côte d’Or, in Meursault, after crawling north for a decade and a half, vines withering around it. (The government ordered the village cordoned and the vines destroyed. The army had to be sent in to enforce the edict. It only delayed the inevitable.)

Transport and industrial capitalism, non-native diseases introduced to unprepared ecosystems, merchants more than happy to find the cheapest source for raw materials…

Meanwhile, France has conquered Algeria. (In 1847, after 17 years that began as a special military operation aimed at Barbary privateers and transformed into annexation, decades of guerrilla warfare, and genocide. It will not be fully ‘under control,’ whatever that means, until 1903.)

Algeria becomes, not a colony, but part of the French metropole — France itself. Settlers flood the territory. Vines go into the ground: cinsault, mostly, hardy and productive. The wine gets shipped to the mainland through the port at Sête, in the Languedoc, by the hundreds of millions of liters.

In 1903, the year Algeria is ‘under control’, it’s estimated that 9 in 10 French wines are blended: Chablis with Spanish white, Champagne with the Mosel — and Burgundy with Algerian cinsault. Burgundy’s vineyards have largely been grafted over onto American rootstock, after phylloxera. The landscape would be unrecognizable to those monks, and even to the Dijonnaise burghers ranking the slopes in the 1700s: newly-rationalized rows according to a method deployed by Dr. Jules Guyot, centuries-old tangled root systems gone, some sites quarried and filled in with other rocks.

When Algeria wins its independence from France in 1962, it is the fourth-largest wine producer in the world. Innumerable millions of bottles of Algerian cinsault have become red Burgundy, purchased by merchants and mixed into the region’s wine, or simply labeled with a stylistically appropriate village.

French colonial rule ends, the settlers leave, the fourth-largest wine producer in the world stops making wine almost entirely.

And so here’s Jeff Coutelou, certified organic the year I was born, farming in the Languedoc, long a spigot, like Algeria, for bulk wine and adulterated juice. I met him last fall, at a wine bar in the East Village, where he talked about the fig leaf quality of cinsault’s delicate tannins, and poured me a version of his “5SO” (say it in French, it’s a pun) from 2019, six years old and zero sulfur, silky and delicate.

A wine from a grower channeling a place, you might say.

I wonder if we’ll look back on the moment when we thought everywhere in the world could be a handmade transmission of a little piece of soil and think it was the beginning of a renaissance, or whether it will seem structurally naive in retrospect.

Burgundy got there first, back in the ‘80s. It’s reaping the benefits now, I guess you could say — or maybe, in becoming the new luxury commodity shibboleth, it’s reaped the whirlwind.

Here were the pairings for Jeff’s cinsault from the club box:

Pair this (bodega): barbecue kettle chips

Pair this (Bridges): my favorite juke pairing there, with a dish that's become one of their standouts, was to pull a silky, infusion-y lifted red for the dates with cured tuna and spring onion. I think this would be perfect with that.

Pair this (at home): My mom's been bugging me for the date / tuna recipe ever since I took her to Bridges a year and change ago, but to be honest the more I learned about it the less I thought it would translate to a home cook (there's the intricate layering of belly and loin cuts, the yuzu koshu ...). Maybe just make devils on horseback? Or — and I mean this — consider waiting. (see above)

Studying for tests?

Tired of old men asking you where Chambolle is in relation to Gevrey?

Here’s a matching game I drew and painted yesterday: “Build Your Own Côte d’Or.”

You can download print-ready US Letter pdfs of all of the sheets at the dropbox link above (I recommend using cardstock or construction paper if you can, it’s not as nice to move flimsy pieces of paper around).

Here’s a preview of what it will look like:

Have fun, let me know if it helped you learn, and think about where else you would build a Côte d’Or if you could.

Talk soon,

<3,
grape kid

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