10 Things I Learned By Working La Paulée de New York

Last week, I had my second experience working La Paulée, the annual Burgundy festival organized by sommelier Daniel Johnnes. The Paulée now alternates location each year between San Francisco and New York, and—having worked in San Francisco last February—I was curious to see what small bits of Burgundy wisdom the reputedly bigger, wilder, even-more-gratuitous iteration in New York might be able to supply. Here is a sampling:

1. La Paulée didn’t start with Daniel Johnnes.

The roots of the festival exist with the old, common practice of harvest celebrations in France, and in Burgundy the idea took the form of “three glorious days”—Les Trois Glorieuses—in the third weekend of November, with Saturday being a banquet hosted by the Confrerie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, Sunday an auction at the Hotel-Dieu in Beaune, and Monday an opulent lunch at the Château de Meursault. The latter was the party in its original form—La Paulée de Meursault. Winemaking great Jules Lafon officially began handling the event in 1923, and it became a yearly tradition, with vignerons, workers, and Burgundy fanatics coming together, all bringing loads of wine, and making a melee of the thing. Daniel’s version started in 2000 as tribute to the one in Meursault, and each year it serves as a high-water mark for serious eating and drinking.

2. There have been three basic stages for America’s experience with Burgundy producers.

Smaller specialized dinners and tastings happen all week during the Paulée, but the first event bringing the core team of traveling sommeliers together with their New York counterparts was on Thursday evening, at the Standard Hotel adjacent to the West Side’s Highline. Last year was a similar routine, the weekend kicking off with a pretty riveting lecture by Volnay hero Guillaume d’Angerville, during which he spoke at length about the causes of the extreme drops in yield over the last few vintages, as well as the various attempts to solve them (one of which included tales of some manner of dust cannon designed to block the creation of large hailstones by abundantly providing a smaller base around which the stones might form—thereby making lots of harmless hail instead a short fusillade of the really damaging stuff).

This year, the opening lecture and tasting was delivered by Charles van Canneyt of Domaine Hudelot-Nöellat. Whereas Guillaume d’Angerville cut the ideal silhouette of the aging gentleman—slender, tall, and wool-suited; so much resembling actor Ian McKellan that in my memory the image of a resonant, coiffed Magneto has now entirely replaced the real man—instead, young Charles van Canneyt gave the impression of a vigneron still working into the meat of the role. Charles took over for his grandfather, Alain Hudelot, in 2008, making him only the second generation for the surprisingly young domaine, which was created in 1964 by the marriage of Alain to a granddaughter of Charles Nöellat. An intense, drawn-out family dispute ensued over both her dowry and the distribution of some of Charles Nöellat’s prized holdings around the Côte de Nuits, particularly those in Nuits-Saint-Georges and Vosne-Romanée (in no minor part involving rows of Richebourg and Romanée-Saint-Vivant). By 1978, however, the dispute was resolved and the domaine was ready to fill out an identity.

That tale of family wrangling is a common one in Burgundy, as noted by co-panelist Doug Barzelay, who also introduced Hudelot-Nöellat as an example of the third wave of very fine domaines that have made their way to US market. Initially, most of these small growers’ work was absorbed into the larger négociants, and the négociants dominated what was available until roughly the middle part of last century, when really just a handful of smaller domaines—those of Michel Lafarge, Roumier, Mugneret, and the aforementioned d’Angerville—were able to break out from négociant domination and gained renown on their own. Hudelot-Nöellat is a member of the larger group that followed in their wake.

It is a lesson that while the families of Burgundy appear quite eternal (the Hudelots have been in Chambolle for many generations, just as the Nöellats have in Vosne), many of the domaines we venerate as classics are actually temporary beings, entities undergoing constant change, and in their current state might be younger, less concrete than one might think.

3. Some producers are very good at surfing through vintage weirdness.

On Friday, at Colicchio & Sons, a restaurant just two cracked, ice-wrinkled blocks up and over from The Standard Hotel, I was assigned to pour for the second shift of The Verticals Tasting. The “vertical” implied here tends not to be interpreted all that strictly. The vintages presented differ from producer to producer, and they rarely follow in successive order. For instance, Chisa Bize of Domaine Simon Bize presented at ten-year intervals: 1988, 1998, and 2008; and the Lafarges poured 2005, 2007, and 2009 versions of their Volnay 1er Cru “Les Caillerets.”

The pressure created by Burgundy’s disastrous yields in the last few vintages had clearly begun to weigh on the minds of many producers, with many including either difficult-to-sell vintages (like 2003) or fairly abundant ones (like 2009) in their lineup, regardless of how they were showing (the 2003s largely under-furnished with acidity; the 2009s maintaining their ongoing flirtation with being a little mute). My assignment was the table of Domaine Lignier-Michelot, the less-famous cousin domaine to that of Hubert Lignier. Virgile Lignier had made two gutsy selections of his Morey St. Denis 1er Cru “Faconnieres”—2004 and 2005 (they were followed neatly by 2006). As you may know, the reds from Burgundy in 2004 have gained a reputation for being rife with green “potting soil” aromas and flavors, and the 2005s—a vintage of stout, hunkered wines—have served as the highest examples of Burgundy’s capacity to hibernate entirely.

“I wanted to show that it was still possible to make a good 2004,” Virgile told one taster. He explained that meticulous selection of individual berries at the sorting table made the difference in that particular wine—he discarded thirty percent of the fruit that made it onto the table. The wine was among the best 2004s I’ve tasted, lean but remarkably pure compared to most examples of the vintage. It didn’t stop a handful of tasters—most of whom were sommeliers—from writing the wine off as “hmph…2004.”

The 2005—most examples of which have been relative black holes (and here showing from magnum, no less)—surprised even Virgile. Virtually the only thing he said to me the entire time we poured together was, with the standard wan shrug of a vigneron, “The 2005, it is pretty good.” With that also came a subtle, happy bounce of his head.

4. Strangely, sommeliers are now tracked by their own press.

There was a woman at the verticals tasting who is writing a book about sommeliers. A taster alongside her took a stab at the title: “It’s Rise of the Sommeliers, right?” to which she replied, “Yeah, something like that,” with shades of misgiving. I would guess her hesitation had to do with the way the fellow said it, a tone that subtly endowed the title with an incidental image of android wine experts machine-gunning the planet.

5. New York sommeliers have a collective experience of great producers and vintages that never fails to be impressive.

While a few of the sommeliers working the Paulée—myself included—were visiting from far-flung places, the overwhelming majority had been sampled from New York City’s best restaurants, and while it goes without saying that New York is an exceptional place with an unusually gifted wine marketplace, it’s worth noting that something incredible is observable within the sommelier community of that town.

I’d gone to dinner with a handful of sommeliers, half of which work in New York City. I was struck by the their easy navigation of not only the names and styles of premium producers, but also of aged examples of the wines.

“Yeah, the ’90 is good, but the ’91 is showing better. I’d rather have that for the money,” one of them said, referring to the Cote-Rotie wines of Gentaz-Dervieux, an extremely rare and deeply revered producer, the flow of which stopped over two decades ago, when Marius Gentaz retired.

“Yeah the ’91 is better,” confirmed another.

The fact that two people around the same table had ever even tasted Gentaz was unlikely, but the notion that this was a table where people could compare various vintages of one of the world’s rarest wines—and with authority—demonstrates an obviously amazing level of access to prized bottles, but moreover that discussion serves as a glimpse into the way a collective instinct has developed in that community. Those sommeliers work in such proximity and with such discuss-able bottles that the flow of information is non-stop, and word travels fast.

The effect is the creation of what feels like a kind of collective New York somm-brain that is active as its own cultural phenomenon in that city. It is a kind of repository of information on a wonderful, teeming universe of the great, classic producers and how their wines from an array of deep vintages are currently performing. Those sommeliers have access to these wines by virtue of the simple fact that they are actually able to sell them. The demand exists—as does the means and willingness to pay for it. Whether that sommelier community’s own enthusiasm and skill created that demand, or whether the demand—and all of its concomitant bonuses of tasting, allocation, etc.—gave rise to their ilk, one cannot really tell. It’s rather chicken-egg.

6. When it comes to the nuts and bolts of service, even a roomful of the best sommeliers in the world still need to be told to do the sensible thing.

Saturday brought the two major events of the weekend, a grand tasting of the 2012 vintage followed by the Gala Dinner, an intense production augmented by a sizable disco ball, a stage, and a concert-scale PA system cued up with a live, bassy version of “Sympathy For the Devil.”

Between the two events, our charge was to organize and polish a staggering amount of glassware. The third wave of glasses that came out had just been washed, and they—along with the racks—were dripping wet. A small mob of sommeliers descended upon them with cloths.

Having no empty racks, and very little handy table space, we began putting the newly polished glasses back into the slots we pulled them from. This seemed a little weird, because the racks themselves were wet, but that felt like a necessary evil.

“You can’t just put them back in! These racks are soaking wet!” The voice was that of Rajat Parr. It was the second time I’d seen him call out a really obvious technical mistake. “You have to dry the inside of the racks and then put them back in.”

What makes a truly great sommelier? Well, for one, it is the insight to see and execute what will enable great service. In other words, just doing what makes sense.

7. Michel Lafarge now has 65 vintages under his belt.

At the beginning of the Gala Dinner, having hefted a Salmanazar all the way from rear of the room to the center of the spotlighted stage, the disco ball casting white dots around the otherwise darkened room, Daniel Johnnes paid glittery tribute to one of the more compelling faces in the room—that of Michel Lafarge. Now hunched and snowy-haired, thick with age and many decades of vineyard work, Lafarge seems to physically carry those vintages in his person, and the last few have surely not been easy. The Lafarges lost 80% of production to hail and rot in 2012. At the grand 2012 tasting, they had to show 2011 instead. From the stage, Daniel said his congratulations, the spotlight moved upon Michel, and there was raucous, unrelenting applause.

8. Faiveley makes a Musigny that is among Burgundy’s most rare bottles.

The collectors who attend the Gala Dinner end up supplying most of the wines. It is an epic BYOB. Each table is also dotted with one or two vignerons, and these usually bring special bottles of their own, too. One of the vignerons at my team’s table was Erwan Faiveley, and he had brought something very special: a bottle of his family’s Musigny. While Faiveley might usually be considered a fairly large, somewhat ubiquitous domaine, their Musigny holding is the smallest in the Grand Cru—roughly 400 vines yielding just a half-barrel of wine. The aging barrel is custom-made by François Frères, and the vinification is intimate: 7-9 buckets of fruit, each layered with dry ice, foot-trod, and slow-fermented. Each vintage, Faiveley produces between 150 and 170 bottles of the wine. Our bottle was number 11 of vintage 1999. It even had sommeliers Patrick Cappiello and David Gordon—our grizzled veteran leaders—scrambling for a taste.

9. If you work with older bottles, it’s really necessary to own the following two tools:

This is the Durand. It combines the conventional corkscrew worm with an Ah-so. You’ll never break another cork.

This is a cork retriever. It is for when you’ve pushed the cork inside the bottle. It is a work of great genius.

10. La Paulée: slaughterhouse, schoolhouse, or maybe both.

All of the bottles for the Gala Dinner were collected in a back room, where they had been organized according to the guests’ assigned tables. We logged them into inventory sheets so that nothing would go missing in the shuffle. Many of the bottles were extremely valuable, so security had been posted at the door. A sommelier’s first look around a room like this is pretty dizzying. There are exactly zero other places in the world where you can see and taste this much rare and expensive Burgundy. DRC, Jayer, Coche-Dury—all in greater abundance than they reasonably should be.

A sommelier’s second look around that room, however, raises the question of whether there might be diminishing marginal returns—whether, within a given space of time, it is better to taste more great wines, or fewer.

Very great, very expensive wines are weird, stressful things. They inspire all kinds of odd behavior among wine lovers. One of these tendencies is to open the really special bottles in the presence of many other special bottles. On one hand, it is an act of opulence—some Dionysian version of making it rain—but the tendency also has to do with the fact that wine lovers usually want to drink the special bottles with other wine lovers, and those other wine lovers are going to bring special things, too. And so the circle grows, and pretty soon it’s an orgy.

The problem with that tendency is fairly obvious: the wines don’t get the attention and patience they deserve. One moves from one special bottle to another—reducing the particular value of each individual bottle—while at the same time keeping expectations high. Those high expectations adjust one’s sense of perception (whether to sharpen it or set it up for disappointment, one cannot say).

But, for the sommelier, there is a certain benefit to this behavior, and it is the same effect as that New York somm-brain.

As massive as the wine world is, and as inaccessible as pieces of it might seem to be—rare bottles, far away growing locations, impossible-to-find vintages—wine as a topic actually is finite. Only by experience—normally coming at a dribble—can sommeliers chip away at the mammoth unknown, thereby making the whole subject feel manageable. By tasting a slew of great bottles, all in different places of their life and performance, the interpretive mind begins to see tendencies, to establish an instinct for aging arcs, for individual bottle condition, for producer idiosyncrasy. By the main course of our own Gala Dinner, I myself had begun to notice a certain dimness among practically all the reds. It was strange, and consistent, one of those mysterious behaviors of Burgundy. My friend Stevie Stacionis, who—like me—neither works in New York, nor gets to taste wines like this on the regular, walked up and said, “Huh. The reds really aren’t showing.”

It is precisely how the New York sommeliers can, without pretense, have a casual discussion of ’90 versus ’91 Gentaz. Talent be damned, the great gift is experience. And the Paulée is nothing, if not exactly that.