I split a fantastic bottle of 1996 white Burgundy with my friend Dave on Thursday night. As a 40th birthday gift, Dave took me to Veritas, a restaurant in Grammercy renowned for its wine list--enumerating a purported 196,000 bottles--that focuses on great French wines. We asked the sommelier for a white Burgundy for $250 or less. I drink in the cumulus. This was the cirrus.
The bottom of the cirrus, actually. Examining the wine list, which was as thick as a Dean Koontz, I was surprised to see that most white Burgundies were at least $200, though a few $150 wines popped up here and there. Many of these fine wines cost hundreds more. It seemed that $400 or so would make the selection process a little less, well, dainty. Plenty of wines were over a thousand dollars and there were numerous large format bottles. The list had the feel less of a restaurant's orders from various distributors and more of a private collection. Which, in fact, it is. The owners of Veritas built the restaurant around their pooled wine libraries, which were so large they realized they couldn't consume them in a lifetime.
When I was a kid I would have called a place like this a Fancy Restaurant. In fact, I did feel a little young in that room, and indeed, we were the freshest faces there. I was certainly the poorest, too. Mark Mothersbaugh and Bob Casale from Devo were enjoying a bottle of red a few tables down, so they must be doing okay. But if you begin taking wine seriously, the issue of price and class is unavoidable. Good wine is expensive, and expense itself is a kind of mythology in wine drinking. I had a bottle of $12 white Burgundy on Wednesday night and on Thursday I'm drinking a bottle of $250 white Burgundy. A rationalist would ask, is the second bottle $238 better than the first? Live long enough, I guess, and questions like that become dull. But it's difficult to escape musing on price and value when consuming a $250 bottle of wine, especially as the label sported a clearly discernible number, scrawled in black ink, in the top right-hand corner: 36. I imagine this bottle was purchased in 1996 for 36, what, francs or dollars? Must have been dollars. So we're paying for patience, too.
It's hard to tell yourself that you're going to drink this wine without considering that it cost $250 or that it once cost $36 and that it's inexorably improved over the past 14 years and maybe that means it's really worth what Veritas is asking. It's also difficult to ignore the perky sommelier, who exudes a sense of authority even though she's friendly, spunky, and recently 30 (she volunteered her age after learning mine). She not only helped us locate our bottle, but by dropping small bits of information here and there she seemed to validate the whole idea of expensive wine. In fact, perhaps her most winning move was professing not to know if the bottle we had chosen was drinking well. We had identified three possible bottles, and she could vouch for the first two but not the third, so she consulted another sommelier who knew this wine. In this context, not knowing became a sign of the care and precision authentic knowledge of wine entails. There are limits to the expertise of someone whose main job is to sell the wine listed in this little book, which names wines available just from this one cellar. Even she needed help. Wine was showing us the respect it was due.
And respect was due. The wine was, as they say, something else:
1996 Grand Cru Bâtard Montrachet Jean-Marc Boillot ($250)
In Burgundy wine, there are four classifications (I'm taking this from Neal Rosenthal's most excellent 2008 memoir Reflections of a Wine Merchant, though this is certainly not privileged information). Rouge or blanc country wine, the lowest, is simple wine made by local Burgundian winemakers, usually not for wide sale. Village wine is the next step up, and many affordable Burgundies are Village wines. The two haut classifications are Premier Cru and Grand Cru. As you can see, we were drinking Grand Cru. Dave and I have been friends since the mid-'70s.
The wine itself was much deeper and complicated than most whites I've had. The color was perhaps the most striking thing--golden and calm, rich and deep, but clear as well. Wine writers always talk about the way a wine captures light, and it was true here--the wine glistened and deepened in the light. It was a pleasure to gaze at, or through, the glass. The nose was fairly mellow. I didn't get a burst of typical Chardonnay flavors, though they asserted themselves more gently when we actually tasted the wine, which held little obvious fruit but lots of delicate flavors, including pear and what Dave referred to as "nectar" (I'm not sure if he meant actual nectar or if he was being metaphorical). The dominant flavor palette for me was a kind of vegetal woodiness. It wasn't oak or even the king of cedar "cigar box" flavors you read about, but a musky, loamy, forest floor flavor. I could feel this particular flavor sliding around in my mouth, though it's hard to name it, exactly. It was woodsy, not woody, and gave the wine an intellectual quality. Dave suggested during dinner that the wine was perhaps two or three years past its peak. Perhaps he's right. There was something a little loose about the wine, as if it were relaxing after holding in its breath all those years. I could even taste a slight effervescence, though that faded mostly after 20 minutes. But the finish was beautifully soft and smooth.
Thanks, Dave, for this experience. I'm happy that white Burgundies are out there, waiting. I'll be drinking this wine avidly till my death.
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