The first week of August was hot wherever you happened to be, particularly if it was the Persian Gulf. I happened to be in Switzerland, where record summer temperatures were causing rockslides in the higher elevations and just plain indolence down where I was, in Sion, in the valley of the Rhone. Sion is the capital of Valais, one of Switzerland’s top two wine-producing cantons, so the heat was welcome there.
The Rhone runs roughly east to west through the middle of Valais. The vineyards around Sion are on the southern slopes of mountains that rise almost wall-sharp to the north of the river. Because of that, the vines get maximum exposure to the sun as well as reflected heat from the floor of the valley. The nice, terraced plots go hundreds of meters up the sides of the mountains, squaring off the natural contours of the terrain like some vast network of fortifications, which, because this is Switzerland, may well be what they are. Here, the vintners produce a white wine called Fendant and a red called Dole that do credit to the region without exactly violating the tradition of Swiss neutrality.
I was in Switzerland not to taste its wine but to serve on an international panel that awards prizes to the best classical recordings of the year. Drinking a Dole with the evening meal or having Fendant with a raclette was simply part of the job—not unpleasant, not exactly inspiring either. Fortunately, an opportunity to do some serious wine tasting presented itself soon after the judging was over, when Alain Fantapie, the French member of our jury and a professor at the Sorbonne, suggested a trip to Burgundy.
We drove up through the canton of Vaud, the other major wine-producing region of Switzerland, crossed into the Jura and had lunch in Vallorbe, on the border with France. From there, following an ancient Michelin map that didn’t show where the Autoroute has since been built, we took the back roads through half-a-dozen small towns and eventually came out into the valley of the Saone. We arrived in Beaune, the principal city of the Cote d’Or, around six in the evening. Half-an-hour later we were met at the train station by Maurice Joliette, the proprietor of Domaine des Pierres Blanches.
I had barely found the seatbelt in the back seat of Joliette’s Mercedes when we arrived at his cellar, which is no more than a couple hundred meters from the station. He had no idea who we were—all he knew was that Fantapie was in charge of the department at the Sorbonne where his daughter works—but that didn’t keep him from treating us like old friends. It was clear in an instant that he loved wine, loved making it, loved everything about it, and got enormous satisfaction from sharing his passion for it with others.
Joliette is a stout little dynamo who flew bombers for the Free French during the war, retired with the rank of colonel, did a stint in civil aviation, and decided that making wine was even more fun than flying. When we told him where we had spent the previous week he launched into an encomium on the Swiss, how serious and hard working they are, how businesslike, how exact. No, they do not make great wines, he said, but they are industrious. To prove his point, he offered a bet: if either of us could tell him what insect is pictured on the back of the 1,000 Swiss franc note, a prize would be ours. Fantapie guessed the bee, which was wrong. As anyone who has recently been to Switzerland all too painfully knows, the Swiss franc is rapidly gaining parity with the dollar, and for that reason I am not used to carrying 1,000-franc notes around in my wallet. But I picked up the hint from my unlucky colleague and guessed the ant, which was correct. The hardest part was remembering that in French, the word for ant is la fourmi.
“Well done, Monsieur, you have won a prize,” Joliette declared, though he did not say what my reward would be. As we talked, we tasted three different vintages of our host’s Domaine des Pierres Blanches Cote de Beaune red. Unfortunately, Joliette’s son, who serves as his negociant, had conducted a tasting that morning, and the bottles we were sampling had been opened and allowed to spend eight hours in the refrigerator. As a result they all seemed slightly stale. The 1983 had a powerful, jammy nose of strawberry with traces of ripe melon, but the taste was aggressive and out of balance. The 1986 had the same aroma as the 1983, not quite as powerful, but in the mouth it was rich and very appealing, a good wine though still quite tannic. The 1987 possessed a much more subtle bouquet of cherry that was noticeably different from its siblings’ and seemed rather closed.
The ant was not the only test Joliette administered during our visit. The tasting itself had been one, as we realized when he invited us to join him and his wife for dinner at their home on the grounds of the estate. A ten-minute drive to the west of town and we arrived on the Cote de Beaune. It was twilight, and as Madame Joliette prepared the meal we took a quick tour of the vineyard. Joliette was concerned because there had been little rain during the summer. The grapes were hard and pea-sized, and they badly needed water. Such are the thoughts of proprietors everywhere—nature is always the essential ally, the dreaded enemy, the x factor in the equation that produces a memorable wine.
Dinner was the sort of thing that happens only in France. Out under a tree next to the vines, in the still air, we merged with the night. The fare was simple and wholesome: carrot soup from carrots that had been growing in the garden the day before, foie gras with bread—not pâté de foie gras, but the actual goose liver—cantaloupe, cheese, and fresh plums. We started with a glass of champagne, which was strictly ceremonial. From then on we drank nothing but what Joliette himself had made.
The evening’s white was a sumptuous 1982 05te de Beaune, excellent in every respect, with a round, beautifully balanced, nectary taste that harbored a hint of pear. With the foie gras we switched to red, first a 1986 Aloxe Corton that was young and promising, then a half-bottle of 1979 Aloxe Corton, which seemed to be right at the peak of maturity, smooth and supple on the palate, generous and clean in the finish. During dessert we sampled two brandies that Joliette makes as a specialty, a fine de bourgogne and a marque de bourgogne. The marque was particularly impressive, and Joliette confided that he makes it solely for his own satisfaction, since even at 150 francs a bottle, he loses money on every bottle he sells.
That afternoon in Joliette’s cellar I had noticed a caricature of him on the wall that showed him smoking a cigar. I had therefore hidden away four coronas from the Davidoff shop in New York, and when Joliette asked us if we enjoyed a good after-dinner smoke, I produced them with a flourish. He immediately recognized the brand and lit up enthusiastically. We talked until midnight. When it was time to go, Joliette brought one more bottle to the table, a 15-year-old marque de bourgogne, his pride and joy, and my prize for guessing that ants are on the backs of Swiss banknotes.