About Académie du Vin Founded in Paris in 1973 by Steven Spurrier, the Académie du Vin grew out of a love of wine and a desire to share it with clarity and intelligence. What began as informal wine appreciation courses in 1970s Paris evolved into a publishing house dedicated to the finest wine writing of the past, present, and future. Today, the Académie du Vin Library maintains a deliberately small and carefully curated list, selecting books for their readability, authority and enduring insight into the world’s great wine regions – guided by the belief that fine wine writing, like wine itself, deepens with time. About this article This article presents the introduction to Côte d’Or: The wines and winemakers of the heart of Burgundy (2nd Edition) by Raymond Blake. In it, Blake sets the scene for Burgundy’s most revered stretch of vineyard, exploring the historical, cultural and human forces that shape the Côte d’Or. The introduction offers essential context on place, tradition and the vignerons themselves—laying the groundwork for a deeper understanding of Burgundy’s wines and the people behind them. Introduction The Côte d’Or, the Golden Slope, enjoys a reputation and exerts an influence in the wine world out of all proportion to its size. It possesses none of the grandeur of the Douro Valley, for instance, nor the picture-postcard beauty of South Africa’s winelands. It is not majestic; its beauty is serene, and what strikes the observer time and again is the tiny scale. From north to south it is about 50 kilometres long, is sometimes less than a kilometre wide, and can be driven in little more than an hour. At a push it could be walked in a day. Yet for a thousand or more years this favoured slope has yielded wines that have entranced and delighted wine lovers, with a fair measure of frustration and disappointment thrown in too. Avoiding hyperbole when writing about the Côte d’Or is a problem, for it has held people in thrall for centuries, frequently prompting poetic flights of prose: ‘The Pathetic Fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine … This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant … it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.’ Thus wrote Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited eighty years ago. Literary critics might cavil at such prolixity, and Waugh himself tamed it severely in later editions, but it was enough to intrigue me decades ago and engender a love for the region and its wines that has never waned. Greater Burgundy is a bigger, more geographically diverse, region than might first be supposed, stretching from Chablis, south-east of Paris, to Beaujolais, north of Lyon. The subject matter of this book, however, is Burgundy’s heart, the Côte d’Or. There is no more celebrated stretch of agricultural land on earth. It has been pored over and analysed, feted and cosseted, obsessed about and sought after for centuries and today, if anything, it exerts a greater pull on wine lovers than ever before. ‘Astronomical’ does not begin to describe the prices now being paid for prized patches of grand and premier cru vineyard, and for the wines produced from them by the top domaines. Such prices hog the headlines and paint a dazzling, though severely one-dimensional, picture of the Côte d’Or today. In the early years of the twenty-first century they are part of the story but they are not the only part. This book aims to get behind the dazzle and flesh out the story, to add some nuance and extra dimension. The Côte d’Or cannot be captured in a sound bite nor, it must be admitted, in a book of this scope – but my hope is that it may add another chapter to the ever-unfolding tale, setting it in the early years of the twenty-first century, a period that may come to be considered by future historians as a golden age for Burgundy but which has brought its own challenges in the shape of those ludicrous prices, the scandal of premature oxidation in the white wines, and the increasing challenge of dealing with extreme weather events such as hail and spring frost. The Côte d’Or has been the subject of forensic scrutiny for centuries, generating a library of books, so why another one now? For the simple reason that it is ever changing. Every year sees new names added to the producers’ roster and old ones slipping away, and thanks to this ongoing evolution the infant domaine of today can be the superstar of tomorrow. The core of the book comprises about a hundred producer profiles. Many fine domaines and négociants whose wines I am happy to purchase and drink have not found a place here. It is important to stress that they have not been included, rather than excluded, simply for reasons of space. The aim was to feature a representative collection of producers, not a top-down selection of the most celebrated names in descending order of renown. As a consequence this book is not, nor was it ever intended to be, a comprehensive A to Z of producers. I write as an amateur du vin, an enthusiast whose admiration for the wines of Burgundy stretches back over four decades, and who has been visiting the region and writing about the wines for some thirty years. I do not trade in wine. I try to see beyond the wine to get something of the backstory, the story of people and place that makes the Côte d’Or so fascinating. To examine the wines in isolation is to dislocate them from that, and not knowing something of the backstory precludes a full understanding of them. A broad lens must be brought to bear on the côte. Too narrow, and the wood will never be seen for the trees. I have learned much by coming across things serendipitously rather than dashing hither and thither, seeing a lot but noticing little. Without time for assimilation and reflection, subtlety and shade are missed. Finally, no gustatory experience can match the thrill of a great Côte d’Or red drunk at its peak. The colour, crimsoned by age; the heavenly scent, perfumed with notes of sweet decay; a sauvage edge, the palate lively and tingling, managing to be so many things at once, oscillating between fruit and spice and meat and game, a merry-go-round of flavour, spiralling on the palate, refusing to be pinned down by anything so prosaic as a tasting note. All the primary components melded by age and yielding up new ones, unsignalled when the wine was young. Everything cohesive and in harmony, like a great orchestra playing at its best. Above all, vital and living, endlessly enchanting and intriguing, engaging the palate and the spirit like no other wine. Learn more about Raymond Blake's Côte d'Or (2nd edition) Shop all books from the Académie du Vin Library Visit the Académie du Vin website Upcoming Event FINE+RARE & Académie du Vin Present: The Impossible Tasting FINE+RARE and Académie du Vin are delighted to present a rare and intimate exploration of the finest wines ever made. Wines of historical legend. Wines that are rarely seen, much less opened. Wines that should be impossible to bring together at one time. Lunch (April 29): River Restaurant, The Savoy Hotel Dinner (April 30): St James’s Room, 67 Pall Mall Club Learn more about the event here

Explore Burgundy with the introduction from Raymond Blake's book: Côte d'Or: The wines and winemakers of the heart of Burgundy. Blake tells the whole story of this hugely influential region, painting a complete picture of life there: the history, landscape, climate, culture and people.

Discover Raymond Blake's Côte d'Or (2nd Edition): a deep dive into Burgundy's wines, winemakers, history, culture and the people behind this iconic region.

Raymond Blake on the Côte d'Or

I. Distractions In 1987, when I was 18 and a dollar was worth more than twice as much as it is today, I started reading magazines: M, Esquire, GQ. Nearby, in our somewhat cultured Texas town, a new bookstore opened in a cavernous space that had formerly housed the shag-carpeted roller skating rink of our childhood. Through the front windows, which had before been darkly tinted to give the place an alluring den-of-prepubescent-iniquity vibe, now streamed bright, clean light, showcasing a look and layout that would become the interior design gestalt of today’s national-chain, big-box book superstore. The rows upon rows of open, dustless shelving bearing a veritable warehouse of volumes; the ceiling hung with its industrial innards on display; the enfilade of check-out cubicles; and the wall – the great wall – that displayed a preposterous-to-behold assortment of glossies, quarterlies, journals, newsweeklies, fanzines, tabloids, almanacs, and all other flora and fauna of magazines arrayed upon a rack perhaps 50 feet long.  I went in there to look for a book. I liked books, and, one day, I was sure I wanted to write one. But I got distracted and bought a magazine instead – that August’s issue of GQ, which still stands out in my mind as a thing of formative significance. At that time, the zeitgeist was defined by a Walkman-wearing version of the American Renaissance Man – the highly-ambitious, status-obsessed, money-motivated, health-nut known as a Yuppie. No magazine positioned itself more authoritatively in defining this new sociological creature’s lifestyle than GQ, and it did it with whiter teeth, snappier suspenders, better accessories, bigger polka dots and more caffeine in the ink of its display copy.  I remember that issue less for the photos by Richard Avedon or Steven Meisel, the words of Martin Amis or Frederick Exley, than for this: Erzeugerabfüllung. It was one of the longest, strangest strings of letters from the Roman alphabet I had ever seen. Neither did it seem designed to come out of someone’s mouth. But there it was in Alan Richman’s Wine & Spirits column, accompanied by a lovely still-life photograph of his topic: two bottles of Riesling Kabinetts on a white, sun-dappled tablecloth. Richman’s main point – made almost 35 years ago – still holds true: estate-bottled, table-quality German wines remain some of the least expensive, most delicious wines in the world, chiefly because – then as now – the labels, as he wrote, “cannot be understood by anyone who is not a part-time oenophile, linguist and cartographer”. One US dollar in Richman’s pocket, as I have already said, bought what roughly two-dollars-and-fifty-cents does today; what he was on the hunt for was a good dry white in a range that would now cost somewhere between 12 and 30 bucks, and he easily accomplished that by finding a dealer in New York City who carried a good selection of wines from the Mosel and Rheingau. At the time, I didn’t know the meaning or significance of any of this, but it staked a claim in my brain. The only wine I had ever tasted was the one served at our Episcopal church during Eucharist on Sundays. The flavour it had was of a strange, super-concentrated jam that somehow warmed your upper body. Even as a young kid, I liked it. But the adjectives these German bottles were squeezing out of Richman – “citrus-like”, “honeyed”, “tart-sweet” – weren’t close to describing what was in that chalice, even if you believed in transubstantiation. Was it because Richman’s wine was white, and the parish’s was red? Perhaps, but both colours of grape juice bottled by Welch’s tasted pretty much the same to me. No, I sensed there was something – a lot – I had to learn, and, along with the romance and beauty of the labels, and the contextual air of well-bred taste and cultural with-it-ness featured on the other pages, this, I feel sure, was the decisive moment, the true origin point, when I came to believe that among the many extraordinary things that make life worth living, not just words but wine reigns at the top.  I warned you about distractions, didn’t I? Because that would be my excuse for now informing you, as a quite apropos footnote, that, yes, there was something unusual about our church’s Communion wine. It was, as I have confirmed with the church, actually port (Taylor’s Tawny, to be more accurate), cut, according to tradition, with water. There is a good and fascinating reason for this. In 1701, when the War of the Spanish Succession kicked off, France also became an enemy of England, and its wines, as a result, were no longer made available for import. The Anglican Church searched for and found a replacement, the fortified wines of its new ally, Portugal, and port continues to be an acceptable option to pair with the Host.  II. Distillations A satisfying story, not unlike a satisfying life, is one that surprises you with the mystery of its unfolding. A thing pulls in a certain direction long enough to reach the proximity of something else which then turns toward a new destination. I had actually gone into that bookstore, as I said, to look at books. But I came out, even though I didn’t yet know it, with a different compass point. Within a few years, shortly after graduating from college, in 1992, I got hired by The New Yorker, where I stayed for almost nine years. I then met my future wife, who wisely laughed at the thought we might be able to survive in New York City on my meagre salary, so I went to Vogue, and soon after became the founding editor of Men’s Vogue. After 23 issues, and four years, the financial crisis laid an axe to many magazines, including that one. Eventually, I took on the editorship of Town & Country. Then, finally, in 2016, I moved up to Esquire, the magazine, as it happens, that didn’t offer me a job when The New Yorker did, and became that storied magazine’s editor in chief, until – well, you best read about that in The New York Times.  As far as distractions go, magazines were a good one. They made me who I am, gave me a tremendously worldly education, honed my taste, introduced me to all manner of accomplished people, required me to build quite a wardrobe, and paid me pretty well to do all of this, often with a glass of wine not far out of the picture. There was really no other way I would have ever got to taste all the bottles I have (a lot of the big names people whisper about from Burgundy and Bordeaux, Champagne and also Piedmont, Tuscany and Napa). I built a modest cave à vin of my own by buying the Smith Haut Lafittes of the world way before hedge-fund hoi polloi ran up the prices, and by having access to rare offerings, like 12 bottles of Fiorano, the legendary white wine Alberico Boncompagni Ludovisi, prince of Venosa, made before ripping out all his vines. I smelled the musty perfume of Margaux in the cellar as I watched the workers rack the wine by candlelight. I lured Jay McInerney away from the Wall Street Journal to become my wine columnist; and I once stood in Bordeaux’s town square, tight on 2002 Pétrus, trying with great focus to commune with the statue of Michel de Montaigne while my French friend, a true oenophile, extolled the majesty of the Big Mac’s special sauce.  As the editor of a magazine, curiosity is your profession, even to the point of distraction. Editors – writers, too – are prone to it. It’s a hazard of the gift, and having a jumble of ideas, if you’re any good, is key to making a magazine of any real intellectual or creative daring. Now as a husband and father of three, working from home and trying to be ‘present’, and a still youngish former editor and occasional micro-influencer trying to stave off the solitude to fathom and plot the next phase of a fruitful future, this skill of mine, the strength of which became even more magnified over two decades, is something of a family project.  The way I most often hear the word ‘distraction’ now, for instance, is when it’s being hurled at me in verb form by my wife or daughters accusing me of being more of a phone-enslaved screen vegetable than they are. (I respectfully disagree.) But it’s a sore point for two reasons. One, what I did as an editor is, in a nutshell, now what a smartphone essentially does. Not very imaginatively, of course, and not with taste or charm or originality, but with a bloody, money-grubbing ruthlessness that stalks every step of our digital peregrinations and doesn’t give a twist if the algorithms that are its brain make us its slave by retrofitting our attention spans for kindergarten.  The smartphone – not the former me or any of my fellow kind still in the media biz – is now the true croupier of culture, dealing out a targeted shuffle of Pavlovian temptations to the point of daily mental exhaustion. And, though this thing is in many ways my personal nemesis, I am, against every fibre of my being, too often its obedient servant. Aiming not to live according to the famous line by T.S. Eliot – “distracted from distraction by distraction” – I recently decided to at least take a serious inventory of my favourite ones, both those of the pre-digital sort (tennis, The Walking Dead, checking the mailbox, my sock collection) and those of the post-digital sort (the any and everything I do because my phone wants me to). Then I caught myself watching tennis on my phone and realised this might be harder than I thought. It’s enough to drive a person to drink, thank god! With that in mind, I like to keep a special something for the occasion around, in this case – what else? – two bottles of Riesling Kabinett, for it had struck me as more than a little weird that I’ve probably tasted fewer than a handful of German wines in my entire life. Part of the reason is that those I had were bad, and, like a lot of other simpletons about this great wine region of the world, I’d come to think of Riesling as a cloying elixir equal parts green Jolly Rancher, apple cider vinegar, and hairspray. This, I knew, was wrong, not true and, in terms of wine equity and inclusion, on the wrong side of history. But, if you happen to live in a place like I do – a bourgie swathe of Connecticut bordering New York City where the shops cater heavily to Cali-Fran-Taly banker’s tastes – it might take you a few stops to find what Richman recommended, an erzeugerabfüllung (estate-bottled) Kabinett (wine made from grapes with a minimum must weight/sugar content) Riesling, and when you do it will probably be coated in a fine sift of years-old dust. I bought a green (Mosel) bottle for US$16 and a brown (Rhine) bottle for US$20, both handsomely labelled. I opened them a few minutes ago and took several investigative swigs. The words bright, invigorating and snappy came to mind. One is indeed sweeter, and, though not my usual jam, it is tamped by a pleasing peachy tartness, and the classic overtone of honey isn’t making my palate feel doused with syrup. The other example is, as Richman said so long ago, a very finely layered creature with mineral clarity and an echo of baked bread, something a gluten-free person like me finds particularly appealing. A rather obvious thought: why haven’t I been buying this instead of throwing a ton of endless money at affordably bad white Burgundy, which is mostly a product aimed at fulfilling a desired outcome, like White Claw hard seltzer? III. Words But don’t let me get distracted, again. A writer really has to be careful about such things. Just think about it. Unlike, say, a painter or musician or actor or photographer, the process of writing requires zero physical exertion, no chance to score an endorphin release while sitting staring anxiously at a blank page. Of the many things in life that vie against the counter intuitive impulse to be glued to a desk, Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise, his classic study of the things that distracted him (and others) from becoming a great writer, names the temptations but does not say much about why they’re so deeply tempting to someone who would otherwise be sitting alone in an empty room. Praise, money, fame, social prominence, affairs and journalism are the most common boltholes, according to Connolly, who, as a famously late sleeper that married three times, might have also added the bliss of unconsciousness and excessive alimony. In 1938, the year the book was published, he would never have imagined how hard the task might get without a cigarette. Smoking is a death wish, I know, but when you want to off yourself for still having a hundred pages to go, being able to snap open a nice lighter, flick some ash, stub a butt and inhale some lungfuls of focus-enhancing nicotine must have been kind of helpful. Connolly also doesn’t have much to say about drink except that artists who drink to excess do so “out of the consciousness of wasted ability”. According to that, the 20th century’s most famous literary alcoholics – Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Styron, Elizabeth Bishop, James Joyce, Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner – might have left behind even greater treasures than they did. Because Ernest Hemingway did almost everything with more gusto than any of his peers, including running up his bar tab, as a drinker he belongs in his own sentence. He is the novelist who most romanced a good drink or nice bottle of wine as one of life’s great pleasures. Who didn’t want to have a vermouth with Jake when reading The Sun Also Rises? (Don’t, it’s gross, at least if you order it at one of those kiosks in Montmartre where the bottles are hung upside down with spring-loaded dispensers.) Or, track down a bottle of Valdepeñas, Hemingway’s favourite variety of Spanish wine. Or, get a drink at the bar named after him at the Ritz, in Paris, and then go somewhere on the Left Bank to order “a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine”.  In the early work, he is not boastful about drinking so much as he is the possessor of an unusual appetite for a good buzz. He is also, like Connolly, aware of the need to keep writing separate from drinking, and drinking within his control. It is hard to read the first paragraph of A Moveable Feast, in which he describes an “evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness”, except as a kind of terrifying admonition to himself. It is tragic that he didn’t heed his own advice. Late in his life, Hemingway became fond of rum daiquiris at the Floridita, his favourite bar in Havana, which might explain his taste for a prose style that soon became too often cloying self-parody. In one of the most extraordinary drinking sessions ever committed to words, in the roman à clef Across the River and Into the Trees, a 50-year-old Hemingway, who was smitten with a teenage Italian countess from Venice, fictionalises his infatuation with a last muse. In one stretch (that covers an evening-to-dawn crawl from Harry’s Bar, the grill at the Gritti Palace, a gondola and a hotel room), one half or another of the couple imbibes: one scotch whisky and soda; six Montgomery Martinis (15 parts gin; 1 part vermouth), two of which are described in size as ‘super’; a bottle of Capri Bianco; two bottles of Valpolicella; two bottles of Roederer Brut ’42; and two bottles of Perrier-Jouët. That is, I suppose, one extreme, and, clearly, not one to be tried at home.  The other might have been espoused by Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great critic and lexicographer. As a young man, he’d drained “many a bottle of wine” but loved port especially. (Perhaps Johnson, a devout Anglican who was born in 1709, in the midst of England’s 14-year war with Spain, also first encountered port as a boy at the Communion altar.) He describes himself to friend and biographer James Boswell as having been “apt to go to excess in it”, adding that, “therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it”.  Boswell, who worried about his own dependence on alcohol, even keeping a journal of his intake in an attempt to enforce moderation, argued for a third way, which some of the Romantics later adopted. Wine, he claimed, “produces truth; in vino veritas”. Hoping to persuade Johnson of his point, Boswell once convinced the critic to come down off the wagon for just one glass of claret, so Johnson “might judge, not from recollection, which might be dim, but from immediate sensation”. Boswell reports what happened after the glass was emptied: “Johnson shook his head, and said, ‘Poor stuff! No, Sir, claret is the liquor for boys; port, for men,’” adding, “‘A man would be drowned by it before it made him drunk.’”  That actually reminds me of something I think I forgot to mention about Riesling Kabinetts – they’re also highly admired for their low percentage of alcohol. On that note, I think I’ll have another glass.  This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two.

Jay Fielden, former editor of Men’s Vogue, Town & Country and Esquire, recalls how a magazine column on wine, read in a Texas bookstore, shifted his ambitions beyond journalism and set him on the path to becoming a writer of books.

Former Esquire editor-in-chief Jay Fielden reflects on magazines, writing, Riesling Kabinett and the distractions that shaped a life in words and wine.

Jay Fielden on Wine, Words and Distraction

How one became another  

Champagne’s climate can be fickle. Of all the fine wine regions around the world it has to be the most unpredictable. Lucie Pereyre de Nonancourt chuckles as she recalls the countless times she has heard the latest vintage described as “unlike any they have seen in 50 years”. She explains: “We hear this all the time. No vintage in Champagne is the same!” It is the region’s capricious nature that dictates the thought process behind Laurent-Perrier’s prestige cuvée, Grand Siècle. A blend of three vintages, all with very different, complementary personalities, the idea is, that when blended together, they capture all the potential qualities a vintage in Champagne is capable of – but are rarely found in one. While Laurent-Perrier is widely recognised as one of the region’s great Champagne houses, Grand Siècle hasn’t necessarily garnered the same sort of attention as other prestige cuvées. Possibly one could argue this is because it is the only non-vintage Grande Marque prestige cuvée – but it is almost definitely because, up until recently, the vintages that made up each new release of Grand Siècle weren’t revealed. That all changed in April 2019 when the house first released Grand Siècle Itération No 24 in bottle and Itération No 22 in magnum – identifying the blend of vintages and what each brought to the blend. Fundamentally each vintage should bring one of the three elements that can typically define a great Champagne year – structure, freshness and elegance or acidity. There have been just 24 different iterations of Grand Siècle since its conception in 1959. Pereyre’s grandfather and Champagne legend Bernard de Nonancourt first had the idea for the cuvée. (It was Bernard who took Laurent-Perrier from a small Champagne house to one of the region’s most recognised brands.) The concept came to him “from observing nature”, says Pereyre. “Champagne has a difficult climate – every harvest is very different but quality is also very different.” The perfect year didn’t exist. For him, a great Champagne was one that has reached aromatic complexity, without losing any of its vivacity and freshness – and that was the aim with Grand Siècle. Bernard’s concept had three rules. Firstly, it should always be made up of three vintages. Secondly, it should always be Chardonnay-dominant – a signature of the Laurent-Perrier house. And thirdly, it must all come exclusively from the Grands Crus of the Côte des Blancs and Montagne de Reims. Speaking with Pereyre, it becomes clear just how much work and time goes into each Itération of Grand Siècle. Each release is 15 years in the making: once all three vintages have been selected, they are blended then spend at least 10 years on lees. The wines do not see any oak and are made as reductively as possible, another key to the cuvée’s freshness. The wine is only released when ready to drink, but Pereyre is confident each has the potential to age 20, 30, even 40 years without losing its vibrancy. As larger-format bottles evolve more slowly, magnums of each Itération are typically released a couple of years later. Pereyre has spent her life in Champagne. Baptised with Grand Siècle as a baby, it seems fitting that today she is charged with the prestige cuvée. Laurent-Perrier is one of the few Grandes Marques still under family ownership. Her mother and aunt took over from her grandfather in 2010, with Peyeyre joining the business in 2019.  Ever since she joined, Pereyre has been training under the watchful eye of Chef de Cave Michel Fauconnet, one of Champagne’s most experienced winemakers. Fauconnet has been working at Laurent-Perrier since 1974 and headed up the winemaking in 2004. He is also the winemaker of the illustrious Salon (also owned by Laurent-Perrier). Fauconnet has Pereyre studying how each parcel tastes, how it develops and how it works in the blend. While Grand Siècle always comes from 11 Grands Crus – Mailly, Ambonnay, Bouzy, Verzy, Verzenay, Tours-sur-Marne in Montagne de Reims, and Cramant, Oger, Mesnil-sur-Oger, Chouilly and Avize in the Côte des Blancs – the proportion in each Itération is different. “The top of the hill versus the bottom can bring very different expressions to each vintage,” says Pereyre. “All the hard work of Champagne is in the blending – every cellar master knows what they have in mind and what style they want to express. Ever since my grandfather created the first Grand Siècle, it has been the cellar master’s job to try to recreate this style – linear, taut, mineral, a lot of acidity, not too open aromatically – but not too acidic and to have some roundness.” It is still very early days for Pereyre, but she is tasting all the time – the only way to learn, and appreciates she is blessed with a great teacher. With the contents of each Itération now in the public domain, the wine is gaining huge scores from the region’s leading critics – perhaps unsurprising given the pedigree of the vineyards and cellar team. Grand Siècle is the greatest expression of Laurent-Perrier’s house style. Browse all Champagne Laurent-Perrier listings

Ahead of the long-awaited release of Grand Siècle Itération No 23 in magnum, we speak to Champagne Laurent-Perrier’s Lucie Pereyre de Nonancourt to find out what’s so special about their prestige cuvée 

We speak to Champagne Laurent-Perrier’s Lucie Pereyre de Nonancourt to find out what’s so special about their prestige cuvée Grand Siècle

Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle and the perfect year

Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle: recreating the perfect year

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Everything you need to know about the Hospices de Beaune

The knife is a descendant of the sword, that emblematic and destructive weapon of war. We learn to respect it from an early age. Though powerful and dangerous, this day-to-day working tool is the one item in the culinary arsenal used to cut flesh in the preparation of food. Fingal Ferguson of the renowned Gubbeen cheese family in Ireland, and maker of world-class knives, remembers his mother Giana in the early days of his parents’ farmhouse cheese revival in the 1970s, cutting the curds with her grandfather’s dressage sword on the side of the Aga. It was not, however, this splendid, dramatic rapier that triggered his passion for the craft, but a hobby that grew out of butchering. Ferguson’s handsome handcrafted knives, which he started making 20 years ago, come in all shapes and sizes from small paring knives to cleavers, and have acquired cult status at home and abroad. They are coveted by those who love cooking – from domestic cooks to celebrity chefs – and those who value craftsmanship and beauty, not to speak of functionality, in the tools they use. His collection, full of character, ranges from high quality satin hand-finished steel to the higher end Damascus patterned blades with handles carved from maple, beech, chestnut, bog oak, spalted poplar, alder, Micarta (a composite), carbon fibre, buffalo horn and, more unconventionally, compressed rock-hard Donegal tweed, and gemstone turquoise.  These knives are much in demand – at one point in 2017 he had 980 people on the waiting list. Francis Mallmann – the world-renowned Argentinian, Michelin-trained, Patagonia-loving chef famous for open fire cooking – declared Ferguson’s knives the best, and ordered a set of 22, one for each of the tasks in his kitchen. “He is one of my heroes as I love cooking with fire,” Ferguson reveals when we meet in his workshop on the family farm not far from the fishing village of Schull in west Cork, one sunny September morning. Located far out on the most south-westerly tip of Ireland, nestled beneath Mount Gabriel with breathtaking views across the Atlantic to Fastnet Lighthouse, Coney Island and Cape Clear, Gubbeen (which means little bite) is a 250-acre coastal farm with a 140-strong cheesemaking herd of Friesian, Holstein, Jersey and Kerry cows that graze peacefully in the surrounding fields. It is here Ferguson grew up and became in turn a farmer, cheesemaker, butcher, charcuterie-maker, knifemaker, husband and father.  “I was two and a half when mum and dad started making cheese, so I grew up with it. The farm is the backbone of everything we do, and you are either mucking about in the yard or putting on whites to clean the cheese,” he says with a smile. Tousle-haired, dressed in a bleu de travail workman’s jacket, followed by his border terrier, Mouche, he shows me around the farm where the cheesemaking is in progress, and to a barn piled high with straw bales at the entrance to his workshop. Flocks of geese and Barbary ducks patrol the yard, undisturbed. A nifty Jack Russell called Sunny makes an occasional appearance, checking out newcomers.   Grounded, thoughtful, practical and creative, Ferguson comes from pedigree stock on both sides of the family. His father Tom was in his twenties when he inherited the farm, run by four generations of resourceful Fergusons, including his great-grandfather who introduced an innovative and successful milking system in the 1880s that benefitted the whole area. Tom’s mother Mary was a founding member of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association and ran one of Ireland’s first farm guesthouses.  Tom met Giana Luke – then in her twenties, of Austro-Hungarian ancestry, and daughter of the playwright Peter Luke – when she was visiting an uncle, a writer living in Inish Beg beyond Baltimore. “I was drifting around with a dog and a tent,” she later recalled. The pair fell in love, married in 1975 and started their life together. “She was a dreamer with a fascinating culinary background, and he was a west Cork farmer and a doer. Opposites attract,” Fingal smiles, adding that his own marriage to Dubliner Ciara Rogerson, a high-powered, Oxford-educated consultant statistician, carries on the family tradition.   Giana’s grandfather, hugely influential in her love and appreciation of food, was the Eton-educated Sir Harry Luke who spent 40 years in the British Colonial Service and dined for England in far flung places like Aleppo, Tonga, Tbilisi, Sierra Leone, Transcaucasia (present day Georgia), Armenia and Azerbaijan. His 1954 book, The Tenth Muse: A Gourmet’s Compendium, is a tour de force of descriptions of the culinary cultures he encountered on his extensive travels. Fingal’s own name he attributes to his parents’ love of Oscar Wilde whose middle name was Fingal – indeed one of his own five children is called Oscar. Memories of growing up between west Cork and occasional trips to his grandfather’s house in Jimena de la Frontera, in Andalusía, Spain, were huge influences: “being immersed in Spanish food and those long tables and robust flavours and if there was no garlic, there was no menu. That Spanish influence led us to preserve food with nothing left to waste. Food preservation was logical – we either share, swap or preserve,” explains Fingal whose self-built smokehouse was a pioneering step in establishing the farm’s charcuterie business. A strong work ethic is part of the Ferguson dynamic. “I was never pushed or forced into farming,” he says. At the Quaker school in Newtown in Waterford where he was educated, “if you were crap at something you were allowed to fail, but you had to compensate somewhere else and I was drawn to hands-on learning like woodwork because I love making things and hate having nothing to do. I can take most machines apart and put them back together again.” Having become the farm’s butcher, he got into knives, and with a family connected to food, needed to learn how to sharpen the tool of his trade properly. After school, when he spent some time in New Zealand “milking 800 cows on the North Island”, he made his first knife, then did a knifemaking and bladesmith workshop with Owen Bush & Bushfire Forge in the UK. “But my real inspiration,” Ferguson reveals, “was the knifemaker Rory Conner up the road here in Ballylickey who had trained with Bob Loveless in the US, one of the world’s top knifemakers. We used to contact Rory for knives for special occasions, for wedding presents – he is a real craftsman. All this led to knifemaking becoming my hobby.” In the workshop furnished with machinery, grinders, belts and assorted tools, Ferguson gives me a lesson in knifemaking, explaining that it has two essential parts – the metallurgy “taking the steel to make a blade and how different steels make different things. And the second part is the handle which can be classic or crazy – we live our personalities in our things, so you can have a carbon steel knife with a jet-black bog oak handle sitting right next to a shiny Damascus steel knife with a vibrant multicoloured handle.” Strangely, most of the parts of the knife are named after parts of the body – the belly, the throat, the cheek, the heel and the spine. Sheets of steel of different types are stacked in a corner of the workshop. The painstaking method of making a knife begins, Ferguson carefully explains, when suitable steel is cut and drilled into the shape of the blade, and he shows me the design of the blade marked out on the steel. “It then goes into a kiln for a short specific period at temperatures as high as 1,080ºC depending on the type or process. It is at these temperatures where the magic of metallurgy takes place and we can transform it from soft into hard steel. It is then quenched or cooled rapidly as a key part of the process. After some little adventures with the tempering cycles which balance the hardness and makes the knife more useable, it is ready to become a blade, ready for more grinding and thinning out, defining the edge and then polishing ready for the handle.” Demanding skill and precision, “you could be hours making a knife – and the level of obsession will determine the outcome,” he adds. The level of workmanship in a knife can, in turn, inspire a reverence that affects how its owner wields it. Some of Ferguson’s knives are made from Damascus pattern welded steel which adds an eye-catching beauty when polished and etched – these steels can be outsourced or, as he explains, makers can go through the lengthy, highly skilled and more advanced process that involves more than 60 layers of lamination and that can take years to master. Japanese knifemakers, in particular, have embraced these skills, drawing on Japan’s great historical swordsmithing tradition; when the Samurai were forbidden to carry weapons, their swordmakers turned their craftsmanship to making cutlery instead. “One of the interesting psychological things about a Japanese-influenced knife, with its hidden tang design, is that you might treat the knife differently, use it differently,” says Ferguson. “Images will be conjured up of the precise, thoughtful and accurate knife skills of the Japanese.” In some of his work, he draws on such influences to make knives based around thinner edge geometry and around more precise use. “Western knives tend to be sturdier for more general use.”  Ferguson believes that “a knife is either practical or emotional. You can have a Damascus steel knife, beautiful to look at, but another with a broken handle may be your go-to knife. Knifemaking has to do with weight, balance, edge geometry and geometry. A knife goes through the ultimate form of abuse – every day it is wet and dry. It might be left on top of the cooker. There is a knife for every job in the world and that’s what makes our life so interesting. With all these different knives there is an element of creativity that allows for specialisation and so many elements that one can get obsessed about. One of the easiest knives for a cook to use, with an edge like a razor blade and a light handle, can be the first knife to break if used to cut up bones, so the boundaries and capabilities are endless.” His views on popular TV shows about knifemaking are interesting. “Forged in Fire is not aimed at knifemakers, just as MasterChef is not for chefs. These are shows for lay people that give you a little insight wrapped in drama, and help them learn about your world. The most important process is the attention to detail.”  He stores materials for the handles in a disused kiln and describes how they are attached to the blade with Loveless bolts. “These countersink nuts into the hole in the handle so as you tighten them, they become like a clamp. The bolster area is the most vulnerable area of the knife, so you are strengthening the bolt hole at its weakest point.” Back at his house – a beautiful building dressed in stone from Mount Gabriel, with mesmerising views of the sea – Ferguson keeps the finished knives in wooden boxes in an upstairs room away from the chaos of children’s toys and a busy kitchen downstairs. This is where orders are dispatched, packaged in heavy-duty canvas rolls, tied in a similar fashion to his charcuterie netting, and stamped with his logo: crossed knives that form the shape of a capital F. The appeal of Ferguson’s knives is stunningly obvious. But despite huge demand, his output isn’t set to increase any time soon. “After one of my knives became a viral sensation on social media, I had more than a thousand people wanting it, so I could spend the rest of my life making them. But the knifemaking side of the business has become a way in which I can channel my creativity.”  Ferguson invests a range of emotional energies into the knives he makes, each of which is a unique creation. “You can be gung-ho and vent if you are tired or emotional – or, if in a calm mood, you can be precise and careful. There is also a point where you can cut yourself or break the knife, so there is room and a role for every state of mind.” It is a delicate balance, and he feels blessed in that people want these knives, but they are not something that can be mass produced.  His profile has led to some odd demands. He has been asked for knives with handles made from the wood of a sentimental apple tree, or to be bejewelled with precious gems. He’s even been asked to work gold into the process of making a blade. “You can go to extreme lengths, and part of me wants the knives I make to go up on a wall and be displayed. You can have your haute couture of knives, and indeed the ones I’ve done now are very different; there is an evolution because I’m part of a community of knifemakers. Another part of me wants to see my knives on family tables being used every day.” While he is happy to work to specific requests from his clients, Ferguson is a man in tune with the fluidity of process, and the never-ending learning curve. “You can spend your life becoming a cheesemaker, gardener, farmer, making really good silage for the cows, but these are adaptable moving targets and as soon as you feel you know everything, you realise how much you don’t know – it is a process of continual learning and that’s how food led to the knives. The handmade knife is a tool that makes sense to a cook like a Mont Blanc pen to a writer. Carpenters respect their chisels. You don’t need to buy a handmade knife unless it is something that brings you pleasure. But you want people to enjoy the knife for what it is. Rory (Conner) always said that a good knife should be recognisable in the pitch dark – that you should know which way is up.” This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two.

Fashion editor and author Deirdre McQuillan meets Fingal Ferguson to find out how butchery inspired him to become a knifemaker.


FONDATA: A Descendant of the Sword

A Descendant of the Sword 

Wine, though the most intimate of pleasures, lends itself to the most expansive of texts. We drink wine most often – tastings aside – in pairings of two, or in lonesome but agreeable solitude, and, its narcotic pleasure being felt internally, we feel its effects as we feel a fever: almost secretly, in shivers. Though wine is like sex in its intimacy, unlike sex, the form in which we fetishise wine – our vine erotica – is not hushed and illicit but encyclopedic. On the shelves of any wine drinker, there are likely to be catalogues, dictionaries organised by region, old Parker buying guides some 600 pages long that somehow, though dated, can’t be discarded.  Wine seems singular among human pleasures in this. We don’t, as a rule, rush from reading a poem to great anthologies of poetry, or add to the savour of seeing a play by reading a big atlas of dramatic literature – not, at least, after we graduate from school. Sports fans, it’s true, like big books of statistics, but then sports-watching is a social act in the first instance – the more people in the stands, the merrier the occasion. With wine, we like the macro with our micro: with a solitary glass in hand, we look, in print, over the next hill, or the current vintage, at the vineyard across the way, or the vintage yet to come. It’s part of the pleasure the glass provides. The reasons for this micro and macro turn are, on reflection, commercial and artisanal as much as aesthetic. The business of wine needs a big picture of its domain, its resources, and its potential market – scale sets the stage for commerce. The makers of wine like to place themselves on a broader map of where wine is and what it’s made with. The great Bordeaux classification of 1855 is not just the noblest public monument to a beverage ever attempted, but a model of market-making and even market price-fixing. Once a hierarchy of growths has been established, it is easy to slot in the price tags. But there is a truth of taste beneath the ordering of value. With wine, we know that what we are experiencing is, however singular, still an intersection of opposed forces – as the peerless wine writer Jancis Robinson MW says of her first glass of Chambolle-Musigny 1959; “I knew at once that there was something in the glass that was sensually delicious but that it was also made, produced, and therefore suggested a history of intellect and discernment.” The pleasure of wine is the crossing of a place, a grape and a people; and so, we turn to the big books to frame the small pleasures.  What distinguishes wine from even a good glass of ale or a local brew is the specificity of the pleasure set against the scale of the system that made it – one that historically embraces the planet. It’s a First Growth, or a domaine Burgundy, or a Ridge Zinfandel or a New Zealand Pinot Noir made to a Burgundy model by American wine makers … the more we know, the more we’re free to feel. Most sensory pleasures are specific to the point of being illicit – aside from the bemused fetishist, romance is a spontaneous pleasure, often aided, to be sure, by a systematic wine. Wine is premeditated; we choose a bottle, let it ripen, and break it open. Even casual table drinking has a tale to tell, a journey to trace on a map. These thoughts are brought to mind in contemplation of Wine Grapes, the monosyllabically titled but unprecedentedly expansive dictionary of grape varieties grown to be crushed and fermented on this green planet. Authored by Robinson, along with Julia Harding MW and the geneticist Dr José Vouillamoz, it marks an epoch – several epochs – in our understanding of wine, from both a professional planet-straddling and an amateur glass-in-hand perspective. A book of its time (published in 2012), it was made possible, in part, by a revolution in the DNA analysis of wine grapes to help discover their origins and histories.  The DNA profiling of wine grapes only began in 1993, and the first ‘paternity test’ successfully concluded in 1997 – a mere few days ago by historical perspective – with specialists, Dr Vouillamoz among them, drawing astonishing Darwinian lines among seemingly unrelated grapes. Zinfandel, it has been discovered in the last 40 years, is not only the Siamese twin of Primitivo, but its Croatian Siamese twin. In proper Darwinian fashion, the book tells us, “It looks increasingly as though an enormous proportion of the grapes we know today are members of a few key families.”  The leading families of wine, Pinot and Nebbiolo and the rest, like the leading houses of Westeros, jostle and engage in incestuous inter-breeding as they move towards dominance. As Jancis Robinson admits, the quest for the origins of grapes can become surprisingly emotional. “The Zin quest is so … heated. There was a Zinfandel conference in Croatia, with all the great Zin makers, even Joel ‘King of Zin’ Peterson from Ravenswood, and we all had to present our various things about Zinfandel. There was a small cohort of people from Montenegro who reckoned that their variety – whose name is unpronounceable – was the true progenitor of modern Zinfandel, not the Croatian one. It became so … Balkan! And you know what? They may be right!” Wine Grapes is of its time in another sense as well, marking the moment when we have started to think of wine not solely in terms of region, but much more in terms of variety, with the semi-mystical term ‘terroir’ acting as a kind of Holy Spirit between them. Thinking ‘grape’ more than ‘place’ releases our imaginations. The wholesome instructive pleasures of the book, to which we’ll come, shrink beside the unwholesome, guilty pleasures of turning the pages to meet the failures among grapes – the near-misses, the long-forgotten and forlorn lost toys – which please more than the patterns of primacy. The pleasure of reading about the grapes whose juice we do drink is nothing compared to reading about those we don’t. In dictionaries, oddities and parentheses fascinate us more than the major entries. No one turns to the dictionary to study ‘and’; we go to study ‘antediluvian’. So, turning these pages, flipping through the P’s on our way to encounter the great Pinot families, we come upon the lesser gods, even the little misshapen gnomes and dwarves of the wine world, and we delight in meeting them. (A fascination added to by the forthright sub-heads the editors provide.) On our way to Burgundy and Pinot Noir, we also meet Pinotin, a ‘recent obscure Swiss hybrid’ which edges into Pionnier, ‘a minor but complex, cold-hardy American hybrid used in blends in Québec’, and, of course, Pinotage ‘South Africa’s very own cross, both loved and despised’, which leads us on to Pugnitello and even Pukhliakovsky (a Russian variety ‘with erratic yields producing light wines’) and even unto Pules – ‘a minor Albanian white’. Radiating out from five pages on the major Merlot, we bump into Merseguera, ‘an uninspiring variety’ from Spain, and Merzifon Karasi, and Merzling, dismissed as a ‘very minor disease-resistant German hybrid’. Why these lost or obscure kinds of grapes bring so much delight with them is a fascinating question. It has in part to do with our general appetite for oddities and obscurities, which once produced ‘freak shows’ and still makes us fascinated with archaic musical instruments: we are curious to hear the sackbut because we want to know what led to the trombone. It is also the virtuous case that variety is the safeguard of continuity. In an age of ever-decreasing biodiversity with just a few varieties taking the place of many possibilities, one Quixotic California winemaker, driving through the fields of Cabernet and Chardonnay, dismissed them all – with a wave of the hand – as “chocolate and vanilla, chocolate and vanilla”.  The health of the planet is safeguarded by the persistence of so many kinds. It is also because the existence of these minor yet still thriving varieties gives us a satisfying picture of adaptation, the central biological act. Each of these grapes has found a home in the world. It may not be much of a home, but then neither, face the facts, is ours. We identify with the unknown grape. We are all more like a very minor disease-resistant German, or a cold-hardy Québec hybrid, than we are something noble and complicated. Few of us are bottles of Burgundy; we can all identify as minor Albanian whites. In conversation, Jancis Robinson, sheltering at home near Kings Cross in London, a home with a view of a graveyard (though a cheerful one she assures an interviewer) – talks of the wine almanac with the blunt enthusiasm that marks her writing. Robinson, in addition to her obvious honours and credentials, is a rare thing in the wine world, or any world: a writer who writes with equal parts brio and expertise. She explains the origins of Wine Grapes. “What happened was that one of the co-authors, Dr José Vouillamoz, who had been at University of California, Davis, felt that he needed to earn more of a living, and came back to Switzerland and got a job working on Alpine botanicals. But he didn’t want to lose his relationship with wine, and he came to me and said that he’d like to collaborate on a book about grape varieties. I’d already written one in 1986, based on our very fractional knowledge then.  Over lunch, I took along Julia Harding, a wine writer who works on my website. She’s extremely punctilious.” (Robinson, punctilious herself, says this with such emphasis that the listener feels that, with Harding, we must be talking about new frontiers, not to say dimensions, in punctiliousness.) “She had exactly the right sort of brain for a project like this. José suggested that we focus on the 10 or 12 most planted grape varieties to help simplify it. I thought that that book didn’t sound interesting enough. I waited until we were quite far down a bottle of Valpolicella and said, ‘I think our book should be about every single grape variety we can find.’ He gulped and said, ‘Then that’s what we shall do!’” The idea of creating a ‘perfect map’ of a subject is one of the itches that govern modern life. John James Audubon set out to describe not the major but every bird and beast in North America, and that’s what he did. Similar ‘almanacs of everything’ fill our botanical and anthropological shelves. It is an ambition so tied to modernity that in the mid-19th century, Lewis Carroll perfectly satirised it in his novel, Sylvie & Bruno, where two mad professors talk about their dream of making a map that would be on a one-to-one relation to the actual world – utterly perfect, if impossible to unroll. “I loved the scale of the thing,” Robinson says of her perfect map. “So, we carved things up: José did all the DNA stuff and history because he had good access to it, Julia, bless her, did the footwork – how much of each grape is planted where – while trying to taste as many as possible, too! And I wrote the entries on the best-known varieties, and the introduction and read every single word.  As with any dictionary, we used what came before: we went through appellation lists, with all of the varieties allowed, some of them almost extinct. A nice little detail of the book is that we persuaded the publisher that it should have some colour plates, and we were particularly keen to include the plates from the world’s first oenological book, L’Ampélographie: Traité Général de Viticulture, of 1901 … just out of copyright!” She pauses. “Of course,” she adds reflectively, “it was José, naturally, who discovered that Pinot and Syrah are related.” The offhand nature of her mention can’t conceal the significance of the remark. Of all the discoveries offered in the book, this is perhaps, for the amateur wine drinker, the most exemplary and astonishing. Painstakingly tracing the DNA heritage of the varieties, these two noble houses, Syrah and Pinot – the grapes of the Rhône Valley and those of Burgundy, the heart of Côte-Rôtie and the soul of Chambertin – are unified as cousins. This happened not through willed cultivation but in the natural evolutionary way: through variation and adaptation. Initially, the elegance of Pinot Noir was transformed through the usual evolutionary pressures of place and mutations, into the earthy pleasures of Syrah.  Chance mutation and lucky planting turned one grape into its near opposite. (‘Cross-fertilisation’, we’re told, ‘was common until the early 20th century because several grape varieties were often intermixed in the vineyards, facilitating natural crossings between distinct grape varieties’.) The phylloxera epidemic in France from the 1860s on – though it did not destroy as much as is sometimes thought – acted as a kind of sieve or filter of grape varieties, a sort of extinction event in large-scale natural history, forcing hard choices and making obscure varieties less desirable to save by root grafting with New World vines.   One virtue of the book is to propose, in effect, a new order of wines by celebrating ‘secondary’ grape varieties. “For me, among the obscure wines, something about as well-known as Cinsault stands out – it can make such lovely wines,” Robinson says. “There’s been such a sea change as the century turned. Everybody once wanted to make fruit bombs to one of three standard recipes. Then in this century, higher acidity, lighter wines are finally revaluing, and so Cinsault comes into its own. “Sometimes I come across a grape that isn’t well known but that’s so obviously superior. There’s Aglianico – the name suggests it’s Greek, though no Greek variety has ever been found and you only get it in Southern Italy. Perfect for late ripeness, and not for cool climates – and now it has travelled to Australia, where they’re desperate for hot weather varieties.  The whole array of Portuguese and Greek grape varieties are so fantastic! And so individual. And I love that after a dalliance with international varieties, both countries are now celebrating their own. There’s another white grape, an Iberian variety that’s stunning, and, again, I’m not sure it’s yet been planted much: Godello! It’s a bit crass to say it makes wines that taste like Montrachet, if a little more terroir-y and mineral … but it does. I could drink Cinsault for red and Godello for white into the next century. “There’s such a gap nowadays,” Robinson goes on, “between the Napa Cab thing, and these young people who are buying unknown grape varieties that sell for a fraction of the price, that are really good. Such a lot has happened in the field of recuperating old vines, some so obscure that they don’t even have a name. Miguel Torres, the scion of that great company in northeast Spain became very interested in grapes.  At first, he said, ‘Hey Dad, we need the posh varieties, Cabernet and Chardonnay’ – and made all these wines which did well in the Judgement of Paris. But, with time, he realised that it made more sense to concentrate on the indigenous varieties. He’s been engaged for 30 years, putting classified ads in the local press – ‘If you know of a wine grape that you can’t identify, let us know of it, and – if we think we can propagate out – we’ll do micro-vinification.’ He’s actually rescued Catalan varieties that were on the brink of disappearing; I think he found 30 varieties, and recuperated eight for micro-vinification with sufficient character to give them a new lease of life. And much the same thing has been happening all over Italy. If we published the book today, we’d be up to at least 1,500 kinds of grapes.” The great sorting question of our time, of course, is the question of climate change and its effects on wine cultivation. Robinson is cautiously hopeful about Burgundy. “I was lucky enough to go there and spend some time. The 2020 harvest is the earliest ever, at least since the 14th century. But, whereas the 2003 vintage, that legendary hot summer in France, produced wines that were pretty bizarre, the 2019s seem as fresh as a daisy, with pure fruit. I’m no plant biologist, but the vines seem to be getting used to the conditions … or the winemakers are. They’re not extracting as heavily, but, given that, there’s no sign of added acidity (it’s routinely added in the southern hemisphere), the acidity is coming from the grapes as well. Even some real old Burgundy hands, when you ask why the wines are so fresh, say, ‘I really don’t know.’” About the Southern Rhône, though, she is more pessimistic. “They’re not helping themselves in the Southern Rhône: too many are trying to make concentrated, high alcohol, 16% wines. And maybe consultants are too powerful down there – one consultant can be responsible for 20 or 30 labels, and so you’re going to have 20 or 30 wines that reflect that.” It’s here, though, that the knowledge of grapes, and our possession of this specialist dictionary, seems particularly valuable. If wine is to save itself from the vagaries of climate change, it will probably be through the introduction and new use of ‘marginal’ or forgotten ‘heirloom’ grapes. Only recently, France’s Institut National de l’Origine et de la Qualité (INAO) officially approved six new varieties: four red grapes – Arinarnoa, Castes, Marselan, and Touriga Nacional; and two whites – Alvarinho and Liliorila – all described as ‘well-adapted to alleviate hydric stress associated with temperature increases and shorter growing cycles’, potential saviours of the region against the villain of global warming. All of them, of course, are charted and explicated in Wine Grapes.

In the end, the great strange truth of wine is the truth of life: a thousand vectors press down on us at once – place, history, time, temperature, luck and breeding – and somehow in the intersection we find, or make, our pleasures. The question of type and variation was very different before Darwin who wrote, oddly (or perhaps not so oddly) almost simultaneously with the great classification of Bordeaux, publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859.  (Oddly because his theory would have been true in any other time; not so oddly because the urge to map the world, for the ‘almanac of everything’, was typical of mid-19th century confidence, as Carroll’s satire suggests.) Before Darwin, who loved wine, the fundamental view of the world was that the superintending categories, species and varieties, were the fixed things in the world. Everyone took it for granted that the ‘kind’ the ‘essence’, was the real thing and all the little variants merely particular shades away from it. A grape was a better or worse instance of its variety. Grapes, like apes, were of one fixed sort. Darwin’s great overriding insight was that only particulars exist, and that species and superintending categories are the labile and ever-changing kinds. Every kind of living thing came from somewhere weird and is on its way to somewhere weirder, with a brief stopover at being the thing it is now. The elegance of Pinot Noir is a close cousin of the earthiness of Syrah, one state is simply a moment in the life of the other, and each are moments in the life of the surging, unfixable whole. Wine, braiding through the planet and only coming to rest on a name for a moment in one place, is a bit of scientific epistemology in your glass, the truth of the particular made potable. It’s a fine destiny for a simple pleasure. This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue One Photography by Gavin Bond; floral set design by Studio Lupine

Essayist and author Adam Gopnik takes a look at the world of wine through the lens of seminal wine-lover’s bible, Wine Grapes, and talks to one of its three co-authors, Jancis Robinson MW about the joy of discovering long-forgotten indigenous grape varieties

Adam Gopnik talks to Wine Grapes co-author Jancis Robinson MW about the joy of discovering long-forgotten indigenous grape varieties

FONDATA: Pleasure in the detail

Pleasure in the detail

Raymond Verrier

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We're in the final stages of upgrading to our brand-new trading platform. As part of this transition, we're currently migrating all customer-owned inventory to ensure a smooth and seamless experience.

Our new and improved platform will be ready for you on Friday, April 4.

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About description for demonstration purposes

shows all the items you currently store with us. These items can be sold, delivered or transferred.

At {shortName}

Your allocation will be cancelled. Are you sure you want to continue?

Your pre-order item will be deleted. Are you sure you want to continue?

Your delivery request will be cancelled. Are you sure you want to proceed?

represents all the wines that are in your possession and have been consumed.

This is the price you paid for this item.

Cost price

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The lowest price you're willing to sell at. If the net price goes below this value your listing will be removed.

shows all the items that you have pre-ordered, including en primeur wines, and all the items on your watchlist.

Futures

You can set a floor price on items you're selling based on a % of current unit net value.

You can set a market price on items you're selling based on a % of current unit net value.

shows all the actions that you have taken on items in your Portfolio.

groups every action by type - Purchase, Sale, Delivery, and Inbound Transfer - so it's clear at a glance what happened to each item.

History

shows all the items that are currently in transit to or from {shortName}.

In transit

Local delivery is free for orders over HK$1,800 (to a single location). For orders below this value, delivery is HK$150 for up to four cases and HK$50 per case thereafter.

Shipping starts from €15 within Italy and €45 to Switzerland and the rest of Europe for up to 48 bottles (75cl). Costs vary by destination. Larger shipments can be quoted on request.

The date shown below is when your order will ship from our local warehouse. Your final delivery date, along with full tracking details, will be provided once our team has processed your request.

You can arrange collection from our Retail store on 22nd Floor, 8 Wyndham Street, Central Hong Kong.
Collection times are between 9:30am-13:00 and 14:00-18:00pm, Monday to Friday. We are closed on public holidays.

You can arranged collection from our warehouse STI INTERNAZIONALE SPA, on Viale del Lavoro, 57, 37051 Bovolone, Verona.
Pick-up hours are between 8:30 AM to 12:30 PM and 1:30 PM to 5:30 PM, Monday to Friday. We are closed on public holidays.

This is the current estimated market value for this item.

Manually set prices will be overwritten. Already listed wines are not affected.

Updates all unlisted wines to current market price.

Set all at market

represents all the wines you currently have in your Portfolio that aren't stored with us. Press the

My cellar

Name

Net price

New portfolio available

New portfolio

You do not have any invoices at this time.

shows all the items from your Portfolio that are currently on the market.

On sale

shows all the items you currently have in your Portfolio. You can perform individual actions on them from this page.

Overview

shows any items that are currently awaiting user action.

Pending

This is the dynamic market price of the item with trading margin removed.

This is the amount of profit you will receive if your listing sells.

Pre-authorised payments enable automatic transactions on your behalf, ensuring seamless and hassle-free payments. This allows recurring charges, subscriptions, or scheduled payments to be processed without manual approval each time.

The number of cases you wish to place on sale

Your catalogue item will be archived. Are you sure you want to continue?

Your catalogue items will be archived. Are you sure you want to continue?

Before you request delivery, you can adjust the quantity for each item in your selection below.

*Market price is dynamic and may change. At time of sale a 10% trading fee will be deducted from the final sale price.

Total market price*

The fixed custom price you wish to sell each item for.

Split into {caseSize} individual {bottleSize}cl bottles.

Title

shows all the items you currently store with us. These items can be sold.

Available for sale — items stored with {name} eligible to be listed on the marketplace.

Profile

This item is at FINE+RARE, available for storage, transfer or delivery.
 Most UK deliveries can be made within 3-5 working days, with next day delivery for London;
 an exact date will be available when arranging delivery.
 International deliveries have longer lead-times, please contact us for details.

This item is at FINE+RARE HOME Hong Kong, available for delivery or local pickup. Most Hong Kong deliveries can be made within 3 working days, an exact date will be available when arranging delivery. International deliveries have longer lead-times, please contact us for details.

Wines sold en primeur will be released from the producer after bottling, typically 18 months after the so-called campaign ends. Your wine will then be stored by FINE+RARE in a bonded warehouse until you decide to take delivery.

We will source this item at the guaranteed price from our network of suppliers and arrange expedited shipment to FINE+RARE.
 The lead-time depends on many variables, but 2-4 weeks is typical for expedited sourcing.
 Once your order is confirmed, we'll keep you updated on its ETA.
 Every item is checked on arrival by our expert team, with photographs available on request (please note that charges may apply).

We will source this item at the guaranteed price from our network of suppliers and arrange shipment to FINE+RARE.
 The lead-time depends on many variables, but 6-12 weeks is an average estimate.
 Once your order is confirmed, we'll keep you updated on its ETA.
 Every item is checked on arrival by our expert team, with photographs available on request (please note that charges may apply).

Raymond Verrier

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