The reason is called demand. When people like you stop buying Burgundy, prices will stop going up.
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Prices went down in 2008 and 2009 when the world economy collapsed. Got some great buys in 2009. Again, the issue is demand, not wineries.
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Agreed. When you can buy Burgundies at the cellar door, the prices are much different. And, restaurants in Beaune that get wines directly from the wineries have unbelievable prices. See, e.g, Microsoft Word - Carte des vins (lemaufoux.fr)
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what do you mean? People who love burgundy and have been buying burgundy for the last 16+ years?
What a pretentious old asshole as always @Howard_Cooper
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Please learn to read. I made clear in three posts that I believe the problem is overdemand. This was not personal. You really are an overly sensitive moron, as always, who thinks his sh*t doesn’t stink. The only way prices go down is for people to stop buying Burgundy or buy less of it.
I don’t care. My big buying years are over. I am almost 68. I don’t buy that much wine, including Burgundy, anymore. If people who have been buying Burgundy for the last 16+ years and have more bottles than they will ever drink don’t cut back on buying Burgundy, prices will keep going up. Great for me. The value of my cellar just goes up. But, don’t think you are not part of the reason prices keep going up.
I really don’t have a dog in this hunt, but if you say “people like you,” you’re absolutely making it personal.
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This happens all the time here. If you aim a comment at a certain group, members of that group will understandably feel the blow. It does not excuse an insulting or demeaning comment to say “no offense meant,” because that is disingenuous. It is deflection to turn an insult around on the offeded party by saying they are “taking things too personally.” This is all debate without good faith.
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indeed. it’s also gaslighting.
edit: though i suppose we’ve kind of lost the thread when mods allow users to call each other assholes and morons.
The prices are great for a restaurant but the only real “steal” on it is the Lafon Monty on my first quick pass
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And, rather hopeless with a mod calling someone a “pretentious old asshole.”
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The restaurant looks great though. I miss burgundy. Been too long.
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Could we try not to pollute a lovely travelogue with some of the vitriol and bragging that tends to come out when the community “debates” Burgundy pricing please?
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Love the very egalitarian “These bottles are rare, we limit one bottle per table” section that ranges from $40 to $1500 a bottle.
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I would jam out hard on a 14 Raveneau Vaillons at 135 Guillaume Selosse Largilier at $180 after a Benoit Moreau CM Fariendes at $110. Stop with the Montrachet nonsense, this is a helluva list. I mean Cotat Cuveé Paul is the 3rd entry on the normie list. Not surprised to see it associated with Le Soufflot
Edit: Matthew, I’ve been following this thread with a sort of dignified envy. Your writing is poignant and really allows the reader to share in the experience, and it’s really a lovely trip journal. I’m equally baffled at the quality of tastings you were able to secure. its like each day I’ve been wearing tuxedo at the computer, covered in a drool cloth, refreshing for the next entry 
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#concur.
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what a wonderful travelogue of an amazing trip. your analogies are so spot on and very insightful. and if thinking that a great chassagne rouge can not match the heights attained by an ethereal chambolle, by all means, i have a neanderthal palate, similar to your traveling companions.
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TIps in and around Beaune
Our traveling party decided to make Beaune our base of operation for the trip. Some people might appreciate staying at more idyllic lodgings in the countryside. But Beaune is the place if you want full city services and more wide-ranging dining options.
Two of our group chose to stay at L’Hotel de Beaune, a 5-star accommodation that offers very comfortable rooms and a lively bar scene. I’ve had other friends stay at Hotel Le Cep, another 5-star joint that is great for one last bottle of Burgundy when the rest of the town is shut down.
My wingman and I opted for an Airbnb in the heart of town. Run by a friendly and hard-working couple, Beaune Sweet Home offers a number of flats that are well-appointed and clean. It’s great to have some space to spread out and a kitchen to cook some simple meals when you burn out on tasting menus. It’s also nice to have rooms on separate floors so you can have some privacy and solitude after hours jammed together at tastings and long lunches.
I’m from Santa Monica, which is foodie famous for the breadth and quality of its Wednesday’s farmers market. It’s where many of L.A.’s better chefs source produce and what-not for their tables. The Saturday Market at Beaune is equally impressive. We obviously hit a great time of year for late-spring produce – think apricots, cherries, white asparagus, and tender pea shoots. But there’s a whole slew of other artisan producers – honey, olives, tapenades/harissa, pastries, cheeses, you name it. There are also butchers and fish mongers on site with an impressive array of cuts and catch you just don’t see in the U.S.
A rotisserie truck also entices with plump, juicy birds hot off the spindles. Grab a baguette, some frissee salad and a wedge of semi-soft Delice de Bourgogne cheese and you are good to go for lunch.
The meal at “home” appealed to us after a hit-and-miss few days in the Beaune dining scene. Young master William Kelley recommended a place called La Superb in Beaune, a Michelin notable restaurant in the center of old town. It has a wine-bar-with-food vibe with modern high-tops and a fair sprinkling of oenophile tourists from around the globe.
After a lot of fish and snails during the trip, I had a hankering for some meat. Two of us split the cote de boeuf, which I tried to order “a pointe” – essentially medium rare in U.S. parlance. The somewhat stern waitress shook her head with a firm “No.” The chef prefers it rarer. I tried but she wouldn’t be swayed. Oh well.
When the dish arrived it looked like a Brontosaurus rib steak that Fred Flintstone had sourced and Barney Rubble had cooked. I know the French like their beef cooked “blue,” but it seemed way too rare for my tastes. Truth be told, every time I get a steak in France, I’m heartened that there is still one corner of the culinary world they haven’t conquered. Grillmasters in Kansas City and Buenos Aires aren’t quaking in their boots …
I give the wine list a solid B on selections and pricing. But the Soup Nazi dynamic – or perception of it – creeped in. I simply adore Cecille Tremblay wines, but, like the rest of you, I have a very hard time sourcing some. So when you see it on a list, you get a little rush. I kindly asked our server about a bottle of village Chambolle that was on the list. She went away a few minutes, only to tell me that they no longer had the wine. I asked her about one other Tremblay wine on the list and she immediately said they were also out of that one too.
Your mind starts to play the paranoia card. We are the loud Americans not worthy of such wines. We aren’t spending enough money to warrant a bottle. The truth is they probably were out of the wine because other savvy wine tourists had scooped up what the restaurant had and the staff just hadn’t the time/inclination to update the list. In semi spite, we moved on to a largely forgettable St. Joseph from the Northern Rhone. Too much of a shock to the system!
On our final night in Beaune, a few of us went to L’Expression, a Michelin-starred restaurant recommended to us by Veronique Drouhin. She’s the undisputed Queen of Beaune, so her word is golden. I found the sleek, hushed restaurant to be very pricey for Beaune and a bit too touristy for my liking. When you don’t see any French speakers in your dining room, it’s usually a sign of trouble.
I can’t even remember what dish I started with. But my main of Bresse chicken with slow roasted root vegetables made me happy. A fairly priced bottle of Mugneret Gibourg NSG Au Bas de Combe proved an excellent pairing. I don’t see the Bas de Combe bottling here in the States, so I appreciated getting a peek of the wine, which captures the sexy, meaty but elegant side of NSG.
After a week of feasting, we came very close to skipping dessert. But one diner persisted. We should have insisted. We ordered something that sounded a bit odd but worth a shot. You know how some dishes list all the ingredients but then when they hit the table you are a bit perplexed about how they have been assembled/presented? Well, this dish was like that with the volume turned up to 11.
I will try to describe It objectively.
The base is long, thin slices of peeled cucumber, almost the weight of those squash “pasta” noodles you see at the market. Then a bed of shaved blood-red ice crystals, like an Italian granita. It looks like raspberry a bit, but it’s actually made from beet juice Then there is a dollop of very sweet mango ice cream. On top of all that there is some kind of mascarpone-like whipped cream cheese topping. A sprinkling of what I think were crushed hazelnuts finishes the assemblage.
When the dish was put on the table, we shot each other funny looks. One person tentatively drove their fork into the mass and extracted a bite. Others followed. Soon the dish began to resemble a pint of supermarket cole slaw at a summer picnic. It kinds of tasted like it too – alternately too sweet and too tangy, with an acrid metallic taste and then the overriding burpy quality of the cucumber fighting against the sugary mango ice cream. It was all too much, a jarring cacophony of textures and flavors that offered no sensory or intellectual pleasures. It was a Sun Ra riff without any payoff.
I think it might be the worst dessert I’ve ever had – if not the worst dish ever presented to me as a paying customer. It almost seemed like a cruel joke, to see how far you could push gullible tourists. Or if you told my then 8-year-old and 5-year-old sons to take six ingredients out of the refrigerator/freezer and make dessert for mommy and daddy.
God bless my direct companion who has no qualms about being the Ugly American. When the waiter came by he asked very politely: “Have any of you on the staff tried this dish?” The waiter tentatively responded they had. “Do any of you actually like this?” my friend inquired. An older British couple across from us stopped their conversation to watch the fireworks. “Why of course!” the waiter said in a somewhat reproving tone, rising in defense of his chefs.
“Well, we hate it!” my companion said accurately. “Can you bring us something else?” The waiter scooped away the cream covered cucumbers. A few minutes later we received a dish of some delicious poached dark cherries that were unfortunately drowned in what looked and tasted like Yoplait cherry yogurt.
I ate my favorite meal in Beaune at Maison du Colombier, which has a small seasonally driven menu written on a chalkboard. It’s also a high-top wine bar kind of place with Tribeca-like aspirations. I ate a lot of fish tartare in Burgundy but their salmon “sashimi” was top catch of the trip. The wine list yielded a juicy but stony 2018 Paul Pillot Chassagne 1er cru Clos St Jean and a semi-resolved Lafarge Ducs 2013.
Honorable mention to La Table de Levernois, which sits a few minutes’ drive from Beaune. It’s run by the ex-wife of the dude who operates the fabled Ma Cuisine. The cooking is more adventurous and precise without being pretentious or fussy. There, I had what might be one of top 3 BEST desserts I’ve ever been served – a truly sublime Strawberry Palova. Imagine the best in-season strawberries, decadent freshly whipped cream and a meringue that provides just the right amount of crunch and crackle, all glazed with a judicious drizzling of not-too-sweet berry coulis. Like Chambolle on a plate! We also scored two excellent Vincent Dancer Meursault 1er crus at very good pricing.
A few notes on other excursions/side trips:
If you are with non-geeks, I highly recommend a stop at Domaine Drouhin’s tasting room in central Beaune. They have very capable English-speaking guides who will walk you through a sampler plate of Burgundy whites and reds. The tastings take place in the dark, cool cellars, which date back to the original Dukes of Burgundy and the 13th century. Lots of cobwebby atmosphere and cooler temps – it’s like stepping into the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland on a hot summer day. You feel immediate relief.
Normal civilians might pay a fee of $40 for the tour and lineup of serviceable wines that give amateur tasters a peek into the variety and subtleties of Burgundy white and red wines. I find Drouhin wines, with their balance and silky mouthfeel, the best of the big negociants. Drouhin manages more than 80ha of vines and makes dozens of wines each year – from lowly supermarket-style Bourgogne to her highly-toned and deeply-pitched Vosne Petits Monts (located right next to Richebourg.)
On our visit, Veronique proudly showed off commendations given to her relatives during WWII for their service to the Allied resistance. We also saw a secret tunnel that her grandfather Maurice used to escape the Nazis and hide wines. Maurice, the mayor of Beaune, led the Resistance for many years. He also found a way to hide wines made from his best vineyards for the locals while also meeting the demands of the region’s Nazi occupants.
She also showed us an enormous wooden wine press that looks like some Dutch windmill from the middle ages. It’s actually from the 1500s and found use by monks for a variety of wines. It still can be used gingerly – a small batch of the 2005 Clos de Mouches rouge came from the ancient press as a sort of souvenir/timepiece.
I have to admit I have a bit of a schoolboy crush on Veronique, who is so elegant, charming and chic. Despite being part of Burgundy royalty, she has this natural ease and warmth that is instantly appealing. So as we traipsed around the dank cellars, I’d ask a ton of questions and my heart would skip a beat when she would say sweetly: “Oui, Matthieu?”
It also skipped a beat when I asked her about a random piles of dusty bottles in the corne. She grabbed one and said: “We shall see.”
We tasted the wine blind, with most of us zeroing in on 2000-10. I guessed a wine from Beaune from 2001. I felt pretty good about my prediction and felt relieved when the reveal came: 2002 Clos de Mouches rouge. With their plump fruit and dusty tannins, I find the Mouches reds some of the best values in fine Burgundy. You can say the same about the whites that come from this walled vineyard. It’s obviously an important site, held close to the hearts of the family members.
Veronique had to dash. She had to get dinner on the table for her extended clan. So a few hugs, kisses on the cheek and au revoirs. I plan on seeing her Oregon winemaking operations in a few weeks.
I highly recommend a down day if you go to Burgundy. Two of us spent one afternoon just driving around looking at some of our favorite vineyards. We made the trek over to St. Aubin, where I’d never been, to see the vines and figure out why Pucelles and Chateniere are the prized plots here.
We also made the pilgrimage over to DRC’s vines in Vosne. Cars pull off the side of the road and bike tours all make a stop at the iconic stone cross near Romanee Conti. It’s a bit like seeing the Mona Lisa at the Louvre – a bit touristy but it must be done.
A GPS app like https://burgmap.com/ proves incredibly useful for figuring out where one vineyard ends and another begins. After that amazing Ramonet Monty earlier in the trip, I had to walk the soil in Montrachet. It almost felt like a movie set-up when I saw a weathered farmer urging a big chestnut mare to move a plow through the vines.
After all that exhausting work driving through the vineyards, we decided to quench our thirst at one of my favorite spots in Burgundy – Rotisserie du Chambertin. The main restaurant, which has a great wood-fired oven, was closed but we could get an excellent charcuterie plate and a bottle of wine. Homemade duck rillettes, crusty bread and a bottle of 2020 Mugneret Gibourg VR Colombiere took the edge off nicely.
There’s a small wine store attached to the cantina. I poached a bottle of 2019 Rousseau Mazy at very attractive pricing and suit-cased it back to the U.S.
One note about wine stores in Beaune. I find them largely disappointing. Many vignerons you visit will shrug when you ask about ex-cellar possibilities, saying there simply isn’t any wine available. They will helpfully scribble down the name of a few retailers in town that might carry their bottles. Inevitably, when you visit the store they don’t have any more of the favored producers. So don’t expect to score lots of wine to export while on your trip. YMMV.
We did visit one online wine retailer in an industrial outskirt. When we arrived it looked like an insurance office, with four agents diligently looking at their computers. No one greeted us in the foyer, so we wandered to the back and opened a side door. We saw a very large warehouse that looked like a refrigerated sub-station at Costco – pallets of wine in long rows reaching 50 feet in the air. Thousands and thousands of bottles.
Later we got a look at the list of the wines for sale – all superstar, many unobtanium wines, from Lamy Calliat to Bizot. Prices were medium-high U.S. retail, like the list you’d see at Benchmark. It served as a stark reminder that Burgundy is Big Business. All these gorgeous wines sitting there, a commodity, available to the highest bidder, from Beijing to Beverly Hills. The wines felt like hostages to me, waiting to be freed from their capitalist abductors and enjoyed by true connoisseurs like me! But whom am I kidding? I’m part of the problem.
I can’t recall the name of the retailer now, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing …
On the other end of the spectrum is Mon Millesime, a small shop on the edge of Beaune. It specializes in older bottles, sourced from local cellars and estate sales as the aging generation move on. I’d bought a few bottle on my last trip to Burgundy, so I returned with my traveling companions.
It’s fun to walk downstairs and dig around the old stock like those dudes on “American Pickers.” But unlike that show, we aren’t savvy enough to score any real deals. Prices there, like everywhre else in Burgundy, have gone up since my last trip nearly a decade ago. $500 for an immaculately stored 1986 Trapet Chambertin with perfect fill and color, anyone? Tempting, maybe. But nah.
One final note: As I said in my first post, my rule in Burgundy is full-on indulgence and moderate excess (if that makes sense.) I give up the intermittent-fasting regime I recently adopted to great success. I eat and drink in a way that wouldn’t be sustainable back at home in L.A. When I got back home I stepped on the scale and found I had gained about 10 pounds after two weeks in Europe. Yikes!
I’m happy to report that upon returning home, I went on a strict anti-Burgundy diet for about the same amount of time. No bread. No sweets. No wine. Basically small portions of protein and vegetables. It was awful but it worked. I’m back to my normal fighting weight.
One final final note: I’ve enjoyed writing this all up. I hope you find it useful for your next trip. But here’s the bottom line. If you love drinking Burgundy, you simply have to go to Burgundy. Make your own memories and report back to us all.
A bientot!
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thanks again. one of the best travel threads i’ve seen anywhere. well done.
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Thank you for the kind words.
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You are the best looking Neanderthal I know!
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