At Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.
Burgundy is among the most highly revered wine producing regions in the world. But a lot of Burgundy fans will admit their knowledge about the wine they love pretty much stops there. Burgundy is generally thought of as too big and too complex to ever get your head around it. We felt that way too, until our recent trip to the region. Being there and seeing it and experiencing it sorted out a lot of things for us. It gave us a better overall understanding and showed how the little snippets of information we had picked up over the years fit into the whole Burgundy picture. In fact, it allowed us to simplify understanding Burgundy into 5 straightforward and easy to remember concepts.
This brief article should allow you to come away with a good general understanding of Burgundy and its wines. It will give you the lay of the land so that you won’t just grasp the basics of Burgundy, you will also have a simple structure that will allow you to remember these concepts when you next need them; like when choosing which Burgundy to have next!
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Oregon vs Burgundy tasting at Domaine Drouhin.
On a recent trip to the Willamette Valley, Oregon’s prime wine-growing region, we had the opportunity to really delve into the connection between Oregon and Burgundy. We met with two winemakers from France, a sommelier from Oregon, several Oregon winemakers and did a comparative tasting of the two regions. The experience taught us a lot and of course was great fun as well.
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One of the many amazing vineyard views in Stellenbosch.
Terroir is one of those words we often hear spoken in the wine world. Most of us have a vague sense of what it might mean, though many of us would be challenged to actually provide a proper definition for it. Terroir is very important to the quality of a wine, so it is worth exploring further. In this article we will put forward our definition of terroir and describe why it is so important to the world of wine.
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The wine world has always made a point to differentiate its various different terroirs, as the differing conditions of site, soil, temperature, aspect, sunshine, rainfall and a myriad of other factors have a big influence on the wines that different terroirs produce. Across the world it is well known that different sub-regions produce different styles of wine, and, perhaps even more importantly, different quality levels of wine. These sub-regions are generically referred to as Geographical Indications or GIs. Across the world, these GIs have more local names. In France they have the AOC (Appellation d’Origine Controlee) system, Italy has Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita (DOCG) and two others, and the US has the American Viticultural Area (AVA) designation.
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