Introduction
Why is Pinot Noir considered the holy grail of wine? What makes the French region Burgundy so complicated, and how can we untangle it? What would surprise and delight you about how both the wine and the region have changed in the past five years?
In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I’m chatting with one of Ireland’s leading wine writers, Raymond Blake.
You can find the wines we discussed here.
Giveaway
One of you is going to win a copy of On Burgundy: From Maddening to Marvellous in 59 Wine Tales, to which Raymond Blake contributed three essays.
Two of you will win a copy of Raymond Blake’s book, Wine Talk – An Enthusiast’s Take on the People, the Places, the Grapes, and the Styles.
How to Win
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I’ll choose one person randomly from those who contact me.
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Highlights
- How did Raymond meet his wife, professional violinist Fionnuala Hunt?
- Which unusual setting did Raymond choose to announce his engagement?
- What makes Raymond’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Burgundy unique?
- How did Raymond transition into a career in wine writing?
- What’s behind Raymond’s fascination with Burgundy?
- What inspired the title of Raymond’s first wine book, Breakfast in Burgundy?
- What does it mean to do a tasting of the world?
- Why is Raymond so passionate about spreading the wine gospel?
- How can we make learning about wine more approachable and fun?
- What are some of the geological and human factors that contribute to the complexity of Burgundy?
- How are viticulture practices changing in response to climate change?
- How are some of the more recent innovations in winemaking – like glass globes – being used?
- Why is Pinot Noir considered the holy grail for winemakers in Burgundy?
- Why does wine writer Andrew Jefford describe Burgundy as the Bach of wine rather than Beethoven?
Key Takeaways
- Pinot Noir is considered the holy grail of wine because it’s so difficult to make and not easy to disguise with oak or other winemaking modifications if things don’t go well during the vintage.
- What makes the region Burgundy so difficult to understand? As Raymond observes, geologically, if you cross from one side of the road to the other, things change completely, and that’s reflected in the wine. Then add in the human element and different naming conventions, and no wonder we’re confused.
- What would surprise you about how both the wine and the region have changed in the past five years? Burgundians are now training the vines differently and using fewer oak barrels. Instead, they’re using new types of vessels, eg. glass globes and stainless steel “barrels.” All of this has a profound impact on the wine and its taste.
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About Raymond Blake
Raymond Blake is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and in a previous career worked as a schoolmaster in Clongowes Wood College (where James Joyce started his schooldays). He is one of Ireland’s leading wine writers and has been writing about wine and related topics for over 25 years. In that time, his travels have taken him to many far-flung corners of the wine world: Australia, South Africa, Bordeaux, Veneto, the Loire Valley, Rioja, California, Alsace, Burgundy, Champagne, Chile, Germany.
He is the Burgundy contributor for Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book, the world’s bestselling wine guide, and is also a regular contributor to the highly regarded The World of Fine Wine magazine. In addition, Raymond Blake has written for numerous other publications in Ireland and abroad, such as Sommelier India, principally on wine but also on a diverse range of topics such as food, travel, classical music, education, history and culture. Most recently, he contributed three articles to On Burgundy: From Maddening to Marvellous in 59 Wine Tales, the latest publication from the Académie du Vin Library, founded by the late Steven Spurrier. He is also currently working on a second edition of his Côte d’Or book.
Raymond Blake and his wife, violinist Fionnuala Hunt, own a house in Burgundy, where he regularly leads tours of the region. He is also much in demand as a presenter at themed wine dinners and has established a reputation as an entertaining and informative speaker. In response to the challenges of COVID-19, Raymond presented numerous online wine tastings, principally for the noted London wine club, 67 Pall Mall. His Life in Burgundy webinar for ‘67’ was watched by viewers in Ireland and Britain, Europe, North and South America, New Zealand and South Africa. He has also presented multiple online events for businesses as a means of staff or client entertainment, a role that he also fulfils for private clients.
Resources
- Connect with Raymond Blake
- Diary of a Book Launch: An Insider Peek from Idea to Publication
- Wine Witch on Fire Free Companion Guide for Book Clubs
- My Books:
- Unreserved Wine Talk | Episode 52: Visiting Burgundy and Tasting Barolo with Matt Cauz
- My new class The 5 Wine & Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner And How To Fix Them Forever
Tag Me on Social
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- @nataliemaclean on Twitter
- @nataliemacleanwine on Instagram
- @nataliemaclean on LinkedIn
- Email Me at [email protected]
Thirsty for more?
- Sign up for my free online wine video class where I’ll walk you through The 5 Wine & Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner (and how to fix them forever!)
- You’ll find my books here, including Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines and Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass.
- The new audio edition of Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass is now available on Amazon.ca, Amazon.com and other country-specific Amazon sites; iTunes.ca, iTunes.com and other country-specific iTunes sites; Audible.ca and Audible.com.
Transcript
Natalie MacLean (00:00:00) – Why is Burgundy so complicated?
Raymond Blake (00:00:02) – I suppose you can blame the geology in the sense that it’s a multi-layer cake which has been sliced across. So if you cross from one side of the road to the other, things change completely. There’s such a topsy turvy geology lying just below the surface there, that it’s possible to have these micro parcels of vineyards, tiny little garden sized plots. And when you taste, then say, somebody’s cellar and let’s say you’re tasting everything is the same, the vintage is the same, the grape is the same, the winemaker is the same. The only difference is where did the vines grow? And that becomes an a masterclass in how this sort of thing works. The human race has come in there and added a fair bit of complication on top.
Natalie MacLean (00:00:52) – Do you have a thirst to learn about wine? Do you love stories about wonderfully obsessive people, hauntingly beautiful places, and amusingly awkward social situations? Well, that’s the blend here on the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast. I’m your host, Natalie MacLean, and each week I share with you unfiltered conversations with celebrities in the wine world, as well as confessions from my own tipsy journey as I write my third book on this subject. I’m so glad you’re here. Now pass me that bottle, please, and let’s get started.
Welcome to episode 273. Why is Pinot Noir considered the holy grail of wine? What makes the French region Burgundy so complicated and how can we untangle it? And what would surprise and delight you about how both the wine and the region have changed in the past five years? In today’s episode, you’ll hear the stories and tips that answer those questions in our chat with Raymond Blake, one of Ireland’s leading wine writers. If you’re in my wine smart online course, we take an even deeper dive into Burgundy and Pinot Noir in module four. On a personal note, one of the many things I love about this podcast is that it gives me an excuse to meet others in the wine world whom I’d likely never run into at a tasting event or otherwise. Like today’s guest from Ireland. And you know what? Even if Raymond lived in the same town, I’d probably still never meet him. Given my introverted tendencies to avoid events at all costs.
Natalie MacLean (00:02:40) – This podcast allows me to ask nosy, sometimes pointed questions about wine and about their lives. We have a far deeper and longer conversation than we ever would in an event, and you get to eavesdrop, which you couldn’t do at an event without being really weird. My high school boyfriend once asked me how I seem to know a lot about human nature. I think he was naive. But anyway, my answer books. Lots of books, especially Jane Austen and Margaret Atwood. In their stories, they revealed human kindness, greed, sorrow, elation, and so many other facets. Now this podcast serves that purpose for me. People reveal themselves through their stories. Even when they’re talking about wine, they’re also talking about themselves and what they choose to include or leave out, how they frame their stories, and a lot more. Do you agree? Let me know.
Speaking of humanity in all its glory and devastation. If you haven’t cut your copy of Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, Defamation and Drinking Too Much and would like to support the book and this podcast that I do for you on a volunteer basis to ensure it continues, please order it from any online book retailer no matter where you live. It usually arrives in a day or two. And of course, the ebook is instant and the book is a fast read. Every little bit helps spread the message in this book of hope, justice and resilience. Buy it for a friend. I’ll put a link in the show notes to all the retailers worldwide at nataliemaclean.com/273. If you’ve read the book or are reading it, I’d love to hear from you at [email protected]. Okay, on with the show.
So before I introduce our guests, let me just say that one of you is going to win a copy of a beautiful book On Burgundy: From Maddening to Marvellous in 59 Wine Tales, to which our guest has contributed three essays. And you will also win a copy of Wine Talk: An Enthusiast’s Take on Wine, People, Places, Grapes and Styles. All you have to do is email me [email protected] and tell me that you want to win a copy. I’ll choose three people randomly from those who contact me.
All right, back to our guest. Raymond Blake is one of Ireland’s leading wine writers and has been writing about wine and related topics for more than 25 years. After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, he became a schoolmaster in Clongowes Wood College, which James Joyce also attended. Not at the same time, of course. Raymond is the Burgundy correspondent for Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine book and a regular contributor to the World of Fine Wine magazine. He’s the author of four critically acclaimed books, including In Black and White: A History of Rowing at Trinity College Dublin, Breakfast in Burgundy: A Hungry Irishman in the Belly of France, Cote d’Or: The Wines and Winemakers in the Heart of Burgundy, and Wine Talk: An Enthusiast’s take on the People, the Places, the Grapes and the Styles. He is working on a second edition of his Côte d’Or book. Raymond Blake and his wife, violinist Fionnuala Hunt, own a house in Burgundy where he regularly leads tours of the region, and he joins us now from his home in Dublin.
Natalie MacLean (00:06:22) – Welcome, Raymond. I’m so glad you could be here with us.
Raymond Blake (00:06:25) – Thank you, Natalie. Delighted to be here with you.
Natalie MacLean (00:06:28) – Thank you. All right. I’m sure I have an accent, but I love your accent, your brogue. As I mentioned, just before we got started, my grandmother was a Brophy. And those resonances are coming back to me. That’s good. All right. So before we dive in to your wine career, tell us how you met your wife.
Raymond Blake (00:06:44) – That’s a good story. I got plenty of mileage out of this. My wife is a violinist, professional violinist. At the time, she was the leader and artistic director of the Irish Chamber Orchestra. And they were going to play perform in the Barossa Valley Music Festival in Australia, where the concerts would take place in the barrel halls of the various wineries, the supporting wineries. So one of her backroom people thought, we’ve got lots of publicity from the music side of things, but maybe we could get a wine writer to do something in advance of this in the Barossa Valley.
So I was contacted and asked, would you like to interview the leader of the Irish Chamber Orchestra? Now I immediately thought, that’s a bit dull, unworthy. I’m not so sure about this and I reluctantly agreed. And then I went off. I was traveling a lot, wine region. I think. I went to Argentina, and I got back safe in the knowledge that they would have forgotten about it, but of course they hadn’t. There was a message on the answering machine why don’t you come and meet Fionnuala? So I went anyway, and I met my contact, Imelda. So I saw Imelda. I’m Raymond and I’m here to interview Fionnuala and she said, oh, she’s fine. I was just coming behind you. And I look behind me and I said, is that her? There was nothing dull, unworthy. The interview went really well. The only question I actually asked was I’m very close to copy deadline at the moment, so if I needed to check anything with you, could I have your home phone number?
Natalie MacLean – He suggests.
Raymond Blake (00:08:03) – And yeah, it’s very devious. So yeah, we we went out for a couple of weeks and that was that. We married and we’ve been fantastic ever since.
Natalie MacLean (00:08:11) – Oh, what a lovely beginning. Ah, wow. And how did you announce your engagement?
Raymond Blake (00:08:16) – You mentioned that I was a schoolmaster in Clongowes College there, and I loved my time there. And it was a boarding school. You tended to get to know the boys better, and I had a what we would call a six year class, the final year in secondary school. That would be 17, 18 year olds. And I was really very fond of these guys. So I marched into class math class one 9 o’clock one morning and they’re all half asleep, and they’re not really interested in doing math. And they sort of, you know, and I said Tim, put away your books. We’re not doing any math today that got their attention. They’re nudging one another and all the rest of it. And I opened up my case, and I took out a bottle of Champagne, and I said I’m getting engaged and I want you to celebrate with me.
Raymond Blake (00:08:56) – They went mad. Absolutely mad. They were jumping up and down, shouting and roaring. Later on that day, a teacher said to me, who’d been in the next classroom. She said, you know what? I thought they had attacked you and we needed to go and rescue you. So we I had six glasses with me, poured it out, celebrated. It was just fantastic. They were the first people I told apart from my family. So.
Natalie MacLean (00:09:17) – Oh, and how old were the boys?
Raymond Blake (00:09:19) – They were 17. 18. So I had said to them can you keep them can you keep a secret? And they were all leaving the classroom then after the class period and they said, oh, you don’t want us to tell that you’re getting engaged? I said, tell the whole world, just don’t tell them you were drinking in class. I said, that’s the secret.
Natalie MacLean (00:09:35) – Exactly [laughter] And then they go into their Phys Ed class or something, stumbling onto the field [laughter].
Raymond Blake (00:09:39) – Exactly. Yeah. Still, I still bump into these guys. It’s the only thing they remember that I ever told.
Natalie MacLean (00:09:43) – Oh, wow.
Raymond Blake (00:09:43) – Which is great.
Natalie MacLean (00:09:45) – That reminds me a little bit of the recent movie The Holdovers. I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet with Paul Giamatti, and he has to stay behind during Christmas, and it’s a private boarding school, and four boys are staying because they can’t go home for the holidays for various reasons anyway.
Raymond Blake (00:09:59) – Yeah, yeah. Of course he was in Sideways, wasn’t he was the lead actor.
Natalie MacLean (00:10:03) – Yes. Yes. He was in Sideways.
Raymond Blake (00:10:03) – That’s right. Yes yes yes of course.
Natalie MacLean (00:10:05) – And the same director Alexander Payne has done this movie.
Raymond Blake (00:10:09) – Yeah, yeah. Because I’m regularly in touch with Rex Pickett, who wrote the book Sideways, upon which the film was based. Mad, keen Pinot Noir man. We’re trying to get him to Burgundy. That’s the next project.
Natalie MacLean (00:10:20) – Has he not been?
Raymond Blake (00:10:21) – He wants to take Miles, the character, to Burgundy. Do you know what I mean? In the sense that, say, he wants to write. He’s done Sideways. And it was a vertical and he’s three books anyway. And he’s been to New Zealand. He’s doing one in New Zealand. It hasn’t been published yet. So I’m there saying, come on, we’ve got to get him to Burgundy. So I’m working on that in the background.
Natalie MacLean (00:10:39) – Yeah, you would think that’d be a natural. When I interviewed him for the podcast, he had has Sideways vertical. I said, if you go to Australia, you should call it Down Under and continue the theme of directions [laughter].
Raymond Blake (00:10:50) – Exactly, exactly. Yeah [laughter].
Natalie MacLean (00:10:51) – So maybe you’ll call that for New Zealand anyway. So how do you and your wife celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day in Burgundy?
Raymond Blake (00:10:57) – We bought a house in Burgundy back in 2006. We were very fortunate to do so before the economic downturn. Our timing was perfect, you might say. But we thought to myself, we need to get to know people and you don’t want to just fast forward it a little bit. So we decided to have a Saint Patrick’s Day party, and we invited the mayor and we invited our neighbours, invited winemakers, the bank manager, inevitably the restaurant owner and all sorts of people.
Some Irish people came out and I decided we would have food from Ireland and drink from France. We had smoked salmon and brown bread and Irish butter and that sort of thing from Ireland. And then I thought what wine should you serve? Because if I serve this guy’s but not this person’s? So I said the obvious one to serve that everyone will accept is Champagne. So we had Champagne and it turned out to be fantastic. There were people, there were neighbours of ours from our village that we invited who met one another for the first time because they were in our house. They got to know one another because they’d come to our house. But it was funny because I had driven out and in my car, my wife was going to flew out afterwards, so I brought a suitcase out for her, which allowed her to bring a suitcase full of the brown bread, the butter and all this sort of thing. And when she opened up the suitcase, it looked like those drugs busts where there’s all the cocaine, isn’t there? The packets and everything. It looked just like that, I said. Luckily, nobody asked her to open that up.
Natalie MacLean – [laughter]
Raymond Blake – So it went really well. And we did that for a couple of years. I’m sure we’ll do it again, but it was a great way of, as I say, leaping into the community.
Natalie MacLean (00:12:29) – Brilliant, I love that. So how did you get into wine writing? What was the transition there?
Raymond Blake (00:12:34) – It’s a good one. I was really keen on wine. I’ve been for all of my life, really. And I formed a little wine club with some friends. We paid standing orders into a bank account, and we splashed out on bottles that we couldn’t really countenance the purchase of except as a joint purchase. And then there was an ad in the paper. Saw an ad in the paper looking for a wine writer for a new publication to come out in Ireland back in 1997. And I used to always say to my pupils, I always said, if you’re doing something like they try to stand out a little bit from the crowd, get noticed. I said, don’t dye your hair pink or anything like that, but stand out a bit from the crowd somehow. And now I was listening to myself saying, how am I going to stand out from the crowd?
So I wrote to the publisher and I didn’t really apply for the job at all. I asked him out for dinner. The phone rang almost instantly. The phone rang and he said to me, he said, I’ll meet you for dinner. He said, every freeloader in Ireland is looking for this gig and one of them invited me for dinner. So I went for dinner. Anyway, I choreographed it down to the last, and at the dinner end of the dinner I said to him, what’s the story? Have I got the gig? And he said, oh, I couldn’t tell you that. But I sensed a sting here. And he said, no, my wife decides these things for me. Oh, I said, he said, tell you what. We meet again in a week’s time. My twist, he said. And my wife would be, I said, okay.
Same again. End of the meal. And I turned to her and I said, do I have the gig? And she says, yes, you do. She said, and do you know why? I said, tell me. Because your shoes are shining, she said. That’s why [laughter].
Natalie MacLean (00:14:08) – You never know [laughter].
Speaker 3 (00:14:09) – You never know. You never know.
Natalie MacLean (00:14:12) – I love that story. It’s great. I was going to say this editor complaining about freeloaders applying for the job, and then he goes out for a free dinner. Anyway.
Raymond Blake (00:14:20) – It’s very well put. I dare to say he was the ultimate freeloader, but [laughter]. Yeah.
Natalie MacLean (00:14:26) – [laughter] Good for you. And how did you become fascinated with Burgundy specifically? I know you write about other types of wines, but Burgundy holds a special place in your heart. Why is that?
Raymond Blake (00:14:36) – Absolutely no question about it. Plenty of people will have heard of the English novelist Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, and about the early 80s, about 40 years ago, there was a television adaptation made of it. And it’s long. It’s 10 or 12 one hour episodes with Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews. Laurence Olivier was in it. John Gielgud. It was a beautifully produced. It was just absolutely magnificent when I started watching that and I just was totally taken by it. And then I read the book and there’s this magnificent passage in the book about Burgundy. It starts off, I rejoice in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? And I just went, I can read it out to you if you want…
Natalie MacLean (00:15:18) – Yeah. Yeah. Do you have it there?
Raymond Blake (00:15:19) – I have it here yet. And the one thing I’d have to tell you, if people are taken by this and they go and buy the book and they say, that’s just not as colourful as what Raymond read out. It was only in the early editions. Evelyn Waugh then decided that he’d gone a bit overboard, was a bit purple, the prose was a bit purple, and he throttled it back a bit. So the paragraph in subsequent editions, you can see this is an ancient copy of the book.
Natalie MacLean (00:15:45) – Oh yeah. Loved.
Raymond Blake (00:15:46) – Yeah, loved. The pages are stained like. But anyway.
Speaker 3 (00:15:49) – Yes.
Raymond Blake (00:15:50) – I rejoice in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? The pathetic fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries, every language has been strained to define its beauty and had produced only wild conceits or the stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew. That mankind, in its long passion, had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St. James’s Street in the early years of the war, in the first autumn of the war, sorry, it had faded and softened in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the clear accent of its prime.
Raymond Blake (00:16:35) – And that day, as at Pirates with Rex Mottram years before, it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope. That’s what got me into Burgundy [laughter].
Natalie MacLean (00:16:49) – Wow, I love that. Mic drop. Oh my goodness. In the same book. Is this the part where they say it’s a naive little something or and they go on like it’s a hound or it’s a gazelle or something…
Raymond Blake (00:17:02) – A nymph striding. You’re absolutely right. Yes. Because what happened was they’d gone to Sebastian’s family home and they were basically raiding the cellar, and they found a wine tasting book, and they were there pouring out their wines and drinking them down and saying, this is all. It’s, as you say, a gazelle and nymph in the woods or whatever. And then they got all mixed up on the glasses, got confused, and all the rest was, yes. So yeah, you’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right.
Natalie MacLean (00:17:26) – Yeah, it does enliven the senses and then it completely confuses them if you keep going with enough of it.
Raymond Blake (00:17:32) – Exactly, exactly.
Natalie MacLean (00:17:33) – That’s great. I love that. Now tell us about how you came up with the title of your first wine book, Breakfast in Burgundy, which I just love.
Raymond Blake (00:17:42) – Breakfast in Burgundy. Yes. As soon as we bought the house, I said to Fionnuala, I said, I’m going to have to write something about this. So I started to keep a diary and was doing lots of visits and all the rest of it, the usual stuff. And I was in Pommard early one morning, January morning, bitter cold morning visiting […]. And the winemaker there at the time was Benjamin LaRue, who since moved on. Very well regarded. And as we left he was just seeing me out on this bitter cold morning. I got this smell. I said, what’s that? It’s like cooking or something going on, but a winey sort of smell as well. So he said, although the mobile distillery is in town, just around on the other side of the church. So I go around and there’s this. It looks like a mobile. It looks like a miniature oil refinery on the back of a truck and back of a trailer.
And I started finding out what was going on. Now, one of the residues of red wine making is what they call the Marc. M A R C. We would tend to say Mark. The Marc. So that’s the pips, the skins, the stalks and so forth. And there’s quite a bit of alcohol left that this is after they press it. There’s a significant, a certain amount, not significant amount, of alcohol in that. And what they do is they load this into these big copper cylinders on the back of this truck I was telling you about close them up, pump steam through at high pressure and temperature and extract the liquid distillate. And that’s then the Marc de Bourgogne, which is a seriously intense spirit.
Natalie MacLean (00:19:02) – Is it like grappa?
Raymond Blake (00:19:04) – It is. It’s exactly the same. Yes. It’s just like grappa. Yes, but they don’t want to let anything go to waste. So the scalding hot residue coming out a quarter of a tonne at a time is thrown onto the back of a trailer, and then they bury these steel dishes down into it covered in foil. And they’ve got much of a chicken, and they might have big sausages, knuckles of pork, all sorts of things. And they cook the meat there for about an hour and a half. Take it out. Someone goes off to the boulangerie, comes back with the baguettes. Someone else goes off to their cellar, comes back with a magnum of wine. And one of the guys said to me, will you have breakfast with us? Hence, Breakfast in Burgundy.
One of the greatest breakfasts ever. You couldn’t describe it. But the one thing I’d always say I remember was you stuffed a baguette full of a big sausage or something, and you’re chewing down on it. And of course, the juices are running down. You’re running down your chin and you don’t care. It’s just so wonderful. So that’s how I got the title Breakfast in Burgundy.
Natalie MacLean (00:19:58) – Oh, I love that. It truly sounds like a moveable feast, especially on the back of a truck [laughter]. But that sounds marvellous. My goodness. So every summer when you return to Dublin from your home in Burgundy, you bring back lots of great wines with you, of course. But what would surprise people about what you bring to Burgundy when you’re arriving there for the summer? And why do you do it?
Raymond Blake (00:20:20) – Yes, people at home are always amazed when I tell them this. I love wine. Any good wine, I love it. I love the great thing about wine, the thing that keeps me permanently interested in wine, and which is I’m always telling people, is the great diversity and variety to be found in wine. Whether it’s different regions, different winemakers, different grapes, different vintages, it just goes on and on. And if there’s good wine made all over the world. All over the world, there’s good wine made great wine made in many places as well. And I like to tell people about this. So I bring Australian Riesling, I bring American wines. I bring, I think I have some Canadian wine in the cellar as well. I bring Vintage Port. I have wines from about 10 or 12 different countries in our cellar in France. And then the only thing you have to do when you’re serving them up is choose your audience carefully, because some of them are going to be a bit blinkered and not interested.
But there was one time when I got three winemakers came along with their wives, and before dinner, we sat down in the garden. And I put four bottles of Riesling on the table from four different countries, and I just said, lads, I introduced them and I said, no, just serve yourself. Just take a little, do whatever way you want to do it yourselves. It was fascinating to see. Because these in some instances, they’d never tasted the wine before or the grape, even particularly with Australia with the Hunter Valley Semillon that happened. And you would see them, they’d pour themselves and they’d retreat back to taste the wine and then come back and say, oh, that’s very nice. And I’ve done this many times. I do it all. I said we’d pull stuff out of the cellar with a degustation du monde, a tasting of the world, and it works wonderfully. They love it. They love it.
Natalie MacLean (00:21:54) – And what gave you the idea to do this in the first place? What motivates you to do this?
Raymond Blake (00:21:58) – I think coming back to what I said there. The fact that I’m desperately keen always to spread the wine gospel you might say. I want to let people know, have you heard about this? Have you tried that? When I see people saying, for instance, oh, I think if a married couple once I know here where basically if he drank Cabernet Sauvignon and she drank Sauvignon Blanc and that was that. And I remember going to their house one time bringing a bottle of it was a Hunter Valley Semillon actually, and I explained what it was. And I remember she took one sip and said, I don’t know, that’s okay, I’ll have the Sauvignon. And I thought, come on you must have a bit of curiosity, a bit of interest. So I’m always trying to spread the word. So that’s what prompted me to do it. That’s what prompted me to do it.
Natalie MacLean (00:22:38) – And is that part of your manifesto like in your book, your wine enthusiast book? Is that what you’re trying to do?
Raymond Blake (00:22:45) – I think so, yes. Also what I was trying to do there in my book, Wine Talk, which you can see behind me there, sometimes I think we’ve become a bit too formal or even a bit sort of prissy, dare I say, about wine. Sometimes I think we need to be careful. People in our position need to be careful that you’re not being too dogmatic in instructions or advice that you give, because then you make wine off putting. If you’re saying to people, oh, you must get the temperature right, or you must get the glass right, or these sort of things then people say, oh, wine is complicated. I think I just have a cocktail.
And bear in mind, loads and loads of people are now drinking fancy pants cocktails with lurid colours, glow in the dark, whatever they might be. So we need to be careful that despite the best motivation, we must also have a good method. We must make sure that the method matches the motivation. If our method of getting across the wine message is in any way intimidating or offputting or too challenging for people, then we’re going to lose them. And I always say in my position where I don’t do professional tastings for Master of Wine study. Or any of the events that I do are in what I call people’s downtime. It might be a dinner that I’m speaking at. That’s out of office hours. It might be a tasting straight after work, whatever it is, but it’s out of office hours. It’s their downtime.
I always say they don’t want a lecture, they want a story, and I tell them stories. I tell them about how I met my wife or whatever it might be, and then say, by the way, you know what we’ve got in our glasses? And I might say something like, oh, the winemaker here, he curses like a trooper and smokes like a sailor and whatever. That’s my manifesto. And I take a bit of a swipe, but I don’t like to hear say, for instance, the MW and the MS people saying how difficult their exam is. Because if you say that too often, then people are going to be put off. It’s not going to encourage them. That’s my own take on it. I think wine has to be fun, really. It has to be fun to begin with.
Natalie MacLean (00:24:42) – It sounds like your approach to wine is informed by your former days as a school master. Is there anything other than making it fun and accessible that you took from those days, or your training in how to be a teacher that now translates well into how you quote unquote, teach about wine?
Raymond Blake (00:25:01) – Glad you asked me that because particularly with regard to Burgundy and getting across a complicated message without making it a confusing message, I honestly think that my background and experience as a teacher stands me in good stead there. Because frequently, if you’re, let’s say, teaching maths or something, you break it in little increments, bit by bit. You don’t tell them what’s coming around the corner. You make sure they feel comfortable with this first, and then you say, there is another little thing we must also allow for here. And that is particularly the case with Burgundy, which is immensely complex. So the key there is that, yes, I acknowledge the complication but then don’t pile confusion on top of the complication. And I think it helps me, as I say, my background there. So I’m constantly trying to just keep it simple.
I always try as well like. I’m a great believer in not just piling up wads and wads of knowledge. I always say to people, if the accumulation of knowledge doesn’t lead on to insight and understanding, it’s a bit of a waste. If you’re learning about wine, the ultimate test is can you go home to your spouse or partner, whoever, or to a group of friends And can you then explain it to them? Because if you can then explain it to them and they get the message, then you understand it. But it’s really important that you get understanding and insight and not just a heap of knowledge. And that’s what I try to that’s what I try to do.
Natalie MacLean (00:26:25) – Absolutely. There’s some old adage about learn it, do it, teach it, and then it will sink in.
Raymond Blake – Yes.
Natalie MacLean – I love that. And not that we want to scare everyone off, but why is Burgundy so complicated in your opinion?
Raymond Blake (00:26:40) – Geologically. I suppose you can blame the geology in the sense that it’s as I think it was Hugh Johnson described as like a multi-layer cake which has been sliced across. So people often say, how come just if you cross from one side of the road to the other, things change completely. One is Premier Cru and one is a more humble designation or something like that. There’s such a topsy turvy geology lying just below the surface there, that it’s possible to have these micro parcels of vineyards, tiny little garden sized plots, and when you go and taste them and say, somebody’s cellar and let’s say you’re tasting everything is the same, the vintage is the same, the grape is the same, the winemaker is the same. The only difference is where did the vines grow? And that becomes an a masterclass in how this sort of thing works. And I think that explains the complication initially. Now I have to say, the human race has come in there and added a fair bit of complication on top. And sometimes I’m trying to explain things to people. I was writing this morning. I was writing about. I’m going to keep this as simple as I can. But in Clos de Vougeot, very famous big Grand Cru vineyard in Burgundy.
Within Clos de Vougeot. Now, these are informal names. They’re not officially used, but there are different plots with different names. Very few of the producers actually use the names on their label, but they can do they can say Grand Cru, and then the sub name below it. The sub name on the little plot of Clos de Vougeot, which is close to the Musigny vineyard, which means it’s just across the road. Musigny, one of the most celebrated Grand Cru in Burgundy. The plot in Clos de Vouget closest to it is also called Musigny Now people look at that and say, hold on a second, it’s Clos de Vougeot Musigny. It’s two Grand Cru. I said, no, it’s not actually. Just look really carefully and you’ll see that the Musigny on Clos de Vougeot label is spelled M U S I G N I. Whereas Musigny proper is spelled M U S I G N Y. Trying to get that across…
Natalie MacLean (00:28:49) – World of difference.
Raymond Blake (00:28:52) – Oh yeah. Or another one, which is tricky enough. All the hyphenated names in Burgundy started with Gevrey-Chambertin. So Gevrey, the village of Gevrey decided that it would elevate its status, its visibility, by adding on the name of its most celebrated vineyard, Gevrey-Chambertin. And then it went on Chambolle-Musigny, Puligny-Montrachet, and Chassagne-Montrachet. Because the Montrachet vineyard straddles the boundary between the two villages, the two communes. And then somebody would pipe up and say, okay, so that’s the hyphen thing. So the first thing is the name of the village. The second thing is the name of the vineyard. I say, yeah, and they say, so Chevalier-Montrachet is a village and vineyard, I say, no, I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me that.
Natalie MacLean (00:29:41) – [laughter]
Raymond Blake (00:29:42) – Because in Chevalier-Montrachet of course is a Grand Cru vineyard, because what’s happened there is the Chevalier vineyard, which is contiguous with Montrachet has attached. It’s done the same trick as Puligny. And the same thing happens in Gevrey-Chambertin. They are getting to that level.
Natalie MacLean (00:29:59) – So definitely we all need to get your books because you’ve just given us enough complication [laughter] to say, okay, yeah, I probably should dig down into this. On the other side of it, Raymond, it reminds me of the English language itself. There are many exceptions, but as you grow and read more and master the language, it’s also infinitely satisfying because of those exceptions.
Raymond Blake (00:30:22) – That’s right. Of course. It might be trite to answer when people say, oh, does this complication not annoy you? I said, no it keeps me in a job, for heaven’s sake [laughter].
Speaker 3 (00:30:32) – Yes. [laughter].
Raymond Blake (00:30:33) – It’s crazy. I do love the fact I’ll never know at all. Anytime people say to me, oh, you’re at the wine expert, I say, no, I’m not. I’m the wine enthusiast because there’s somebody out there more expert than I am. But I’ve never met anyone more enthusiastic than me. So I always make that, like distinction, nerdy distinction. But really, that complication keeps you going, keeps you interested.
Natalie MacLean (00:30:53) – It does and keeps you interesting, too. You’re working on a revised second edition of your book on the Cote d’Or. Can you share with us a few of the major changes that have happened since your first edition, and that you’ll likely be including in this second edition?
Raymond Blake (00:31:07) – There will be certainly more about climate change in its broadest sense. I don’t just mean that what’s actually happening, but the response to it, because the response to it now I think is more sophisticated. It shows greater understanding of what maybe should be done and how to do it. In terms of viticulture, for instance, we’re seeing a lot of change in viticulture there. A lot of people now training their vines higher. I should stress to any of your listeners that I’m not a viticulturist so I’m not an expert on anything of this topic here. But for instance, training the vines. There is something that more and more people are doing now, pruning later so as to try and avoid the spring frost.
Natalie MacLean (00:31:47) – How does training the vines hire help.
Raymond Blake (00:31:50) – And again, I did say I’m not a viticulturist. As far as I know, one of the people said to me that, you know, the vine is a climber, and by cutting it off like this, you’re completely unnaturally affecting it. Whereas if you let it climb up and then they bend them over at the top, it’s growing in a more natural fashion. I think it helps with the leaf canopy. I think maybe with the photosynthesis. I honestly don’t know the exact details. I have a friend – they’re actually going to taste one of his wines in a minute – If you ask him the question, you’d be there three weeks later in the middle of the answer. He’ll give you a chapter and verse on it, so that certainly wouldn’t change.
Natalie MacLean (00:32:26) – It reminds me a little bit, Raymond. In Prince Edward County, it’s one of the chilliest regions in Ontario, but they also have the limestone and they’re trying to do their own style of Pinot Noir there. They do hilling. If the vines are up higher, they’re trying to protect the vines from winter kill. But also, I would think frost settles on the ground often, so that if you are training them higher again, just guessing as a non-viticulturist, but there are reasons there for frost protection I would imagine.
Raymond Blake (00:32:53) – There’s all sorts of stuff.
Natalie MacLean (00:32:54) – So how else are they responding to climate change.
Raymond Blake (00:32:57) – An awful lot in with regard to viticultural practices. That would be the major change. But a lot of a number of winemakers have said to me, the vine itself is adapting quicker than we expected. So even recent hot vintages there. Which one was that? It was ’20 or ’22. Yeah, there were hot vintages there. And one winemaker was saying to me that if this had happened in ’15, it would be more of a challenge. Just seven years later, he’s saying that the vine is managing better than it would have managed back then. That’s certainly something.
Another thing, they’re just like they’re doing their damnedest to protect more than ever against the spring frosts this year. When I was there around April time, where they get the late spring frosts, where the vines have got tiny, delicate buds, I never saw so many measures in terms of the candles they set out all the time, but also big fans in the. Sorry. they called them candles and the French word is bougie, which translates directly into English as candle. We would say a smudge pot.
It’s like a sort of a gallon can which you light a little burner and you’d get about ten hours out of that. And they put them every ten metres in the vineyard. This is a sort of an older way of doing things. Now they have big fans mounted on the back of trailers they put out. They have big hot air blowers which are driven from gas. They’ve got a combination of the two where they’ve got a heat generator here, which sends up the hot air, which the fan then blows across the vineyard. This year, I never saw so much of that as previously. So they’re really fighting to do everything they can. So that was one thing.
But you mentioned another thing. You know, this is not just particular to Burgundy. Noticeable decrease in the use of oak or indeed new oak. Bigger barrels, which will cut down the ratio of internal surface area to volume. Lower percentage of new oak, but also different vessels. Some people are using porcelain vessels. But the most recent thing I saw, just for the first time over the course of the last year, are these glass globes. Extraordinary looking things, just big plump glass globes, which are the same about the same capacity as a standard barrel. And everyone seems to have a few of them. And I asked one guy he’d like, he just had a few of them in the corner of a fairly big barrel hall, winery, and I said, and what’s the effect they’ll have? What difference? He says, I have no idea, but we’re going to find out. [laughter]. It’s the first time I’ve used them. Was only using them a small amount. But these are now very much trendy.
Natalie MacLean (00:35:22) – Do they have any anticipated changes? There must be a reason they came into being?
Raymond Blake (00:35:27) – I think the whole thing is no oak influence first of all. But secondly, if looking outside of the wine, they’re saying that if we don’t have the forests, what are we going to do? That sort of thing. And I think some of them would say that making the glass globe is more environmentally friendly than making the oak barrel, but I can’t say for certain. It’s so new. I’d be going back again at the end of January to do more research. I do a one week blast around visiting various domaines. And that’s one question I’d be asking as many people as I can, because that’s really that’s an unfolding story that I don’t actually know the exact answer to your question, and I’m not sure anyone knows, to be honest. But one guy did say to me, he said, we look at every we don’t know what’s coming down the track. We have to look at every possible way of doing things,. he said. Just regardless of sort of the effect. They’ve got stainless steel barrels now as well, like barrel shaped stainless steel vessels.
Natalie MacLean (00:36:17) – Wow. I guess it’s just looking for less oak impact. Inert.
Raymond Blake (00:36:21) – You’ve probably seen the big concrete eggs. The latest thing I saw was big, big stainless steel eggs just the same, but made in stainless steel. And the whole idea of the shape there, you probably heard, is that it creates a natural, stirring motion of the lees within. The egg shape creates a natural sort of circulation of the lees, stirring the lees, which is more gentle than batonnage, which is a bit rough with the stirring up the lees to get the nutrients out of the spent yeast cells. So you now make them in stainless steel as well.
Natalie MacLean (00:36:53) – Obviously it’s difficult and expensive to make Pinot Noir in Burgundy, but why is it considered the holy grail among winemakers and not say Bordeaux or Champagne?
Raymond Blake (00:37:03) – I think because of the challenge more than anything else. If you think about it, I always say to people that the biggest difference between Bordeaux and Burgundy is not the fact that they use different grapes, but that in Bordeaux, almost everywhere they use a blend of grapes, and in Burgundy they use a single grape. And again, it’s something to do with the grapes themselves just at the moment. But imagine the way that affects your whole winemaking philosophy and what you’re able to do if you’re in Bordeaux and you’ve got your Cabernet Sauvignon, your Merlot, some Cabernet Franc, whatever like that, you can compensate a bit. You can have a greater input in the winery to create your finished wine.
Whereas things are stripped a bit bare in Burgundy. You got your Pinot Noir coming from a very specific site, not a big hectare vineyard. It’s a very specific site and it’s a more delicate grape straight away. It’s thinner skinned and all those sort of things. So I think it’s seen as more as I said, my wife’s a violinist. It’s maybe like playing like a soloist rather than playing as a member of an orchestra, something like that. She probably would tell me I’m talking rubbish now if I say that. But something like that.
Natalie MacLean (00:38:11) – Yeah, it reminds me of having all your stock in one company, not a diversified portfolio. So that makes sense. I like that. Good. I was intrigued that Andrew Jefford, a British writer, described Burgundy as the Bach of wine, not Beethoven. I would have thought it would be the reverse, that Bordeaux would be the Bach. And then. But why did he go with that? Do you think?
Raymond Blake (00:38:34) – I’m almost with you on that point. Because I wasn’t sure. I can see why he would like. I should say, by the way, these are my two favourite composers without any shadow of a doubt. They stand like they are monumental influences in the whole of Western culture. Fantastic. And I love them both. Bach is perhaps coming back to what I said there about Pinot Noir and everything, a lot of the things that you can do in Bordeaux are stripped away in Burgundy. You’re more laid bare as it were. Bach’s music. I mustn’t use the term simple. I have to say it’s deceptively simple in the sense that if you listen to it, it’s a pure, elegant sound. It’s the sort of thing that you would foolishly say oh I could have written that when you.
Natalie MacLean (00:39:19) – There’s the da da da da.
Raymond Blake (00:39:20) – Yeah, there’s hidden complication beneath Bach’s music. Maybe the richer sound of Beethoven’s music is what Jefford was responding against, in the sense that maybe he felt that it was more like the Bordeaux. I don’t think I could go one way or the other. By the time Beethoven came along, the orchestra itself, the makeup of the orchestra allowed for greater richness in the sound. Bach was writing just for strings. Whereas other instruments that come about in Beethoven’s time. I think it’s probably to do with that deceptive simplicity. And I stress deceptive because it’s not simple.
Natalie MacLean (00:39:55) – It’s a good way to put it. Absolutely.
Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed our chat with Raymond. Here are my takeaways. Pinot Noir is considered the holy grail of wine because it’s so difficult to make, and not easy to disguise with oak or other wine making modifications if things don’t go well during the vintage. Number two, what makes the region Burgundy so difficult to understand. Well, as Raymond observes, geologically, if you cross from one side of the road to the other, things can change completely, and that’s reflected in the wine. And then you add in the human element, which complicates everything all the time, as well as different naming conventions, and no wonder we’re all confused. And number three. What would surprise and delight you about how both the wine and the region have changed in the past five years? Well, Burgundians are now training the vines differently, and they’re using fewer oak barrels. Instead, they’re using new types of vessels like glass globes and stainless steel barrels. All of this has a profound impact on the wine and its taste.
In the show notes, you’ll find the full transcript of my conversation with Raymond, links to his website and books, the video versions of these conversations on Facebook and YouTube live, and where you can order my book online now no matter where you live. You’ll also find a link to take a free online food and wine pairing class with me, called the Five Wine and Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner and How to Fix Them Forever. That’s at nataliemaclean.com/class. And all of this is in the show notes at nataliemaclean.com/273. Email me if you have a sip, tip, question, or if you’ve read my book or are in the process of reading it at [email protected]
If you missed episode 52, go back and take a listen. I chat with Matt Cauz about visiting Burgundy and tasting Barolo. I’ll share a short clip with you now to whet your appetite.
Natalie MacLean – I’m asking the questions the reader would love to ask, but that person is not going to get in to see Domaine Romanée-Conti. And the only reason, by the way, Matt, that I would get in to see Domaine Romanée-Conti is that Aubert de Villaine and his like, recognize how many readers I bring with me. It’s not me, it’s the readership that I bring with me. And so I’m trying to ask the questions they’d be dying to ask. And even if they were there, maybe they’d be too embarrassed to ask. So I’m a very, very nosy person, but I’m also very shy. And so writing has given me the cover of being able to ask people things like, well, what is your greatest failure? What did you learn from it? Those kinds of things that can be uncomfortable if you just sort of turned to someone at a dinner party and started down that road.
Natalie MacLean (00:42:58) – You won’t want to miss next week when we continue our chat with Raymond. If you liked this episode or learned even one thing from it, please email or tell one friend about it this week, especially someone you know who be interested in learning more about the wines and region of Burgundy.
It’s easy to find my podcast. Just tell them to search for Natalie MacLean Wine on their favourite podcast app, or they can listen on my website. Thank you for taking the time to join me here. I hope something great is in your glass this week, perhaps a Cabernet? No. A Chardonnay? Hmm. Well, yeah, it could be Chardonnay, actually. But can I say anything else but a heartbreaking, beautiful Pinot Noir. You don’t want to miss one juicy episode of this podcast, especially the secret full bodied bonus episodes that I don’t announce on social media. So subscribe for free now at nataliemaclean.com/subscribe. Meet me here next week. Cheers.
