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02/24/2000 Archived Entry: "Wine Buy: Domaine Bourdon Macon-Villages"

Leave it to our Carol Berman, Food Talk sommelier, to find the perfect, clean expression of Chardonnay at an affordable price. I took my first sip of Domaine Bourdon Macon-Villages 1998 (about $8.99) and thought, “Now here’s the reason the whole world looks to the French when it comes to wine.” It has the elegance, integrity and style that are the hallmarks of French wine, but for only a fraction of what one expects to pay these days.

To me (and Carol), this is what Chardonnay should be, unencumbered and made heavy or clumsy by aging in oak, which is so much (too much) the style these days. Indeed, I was shocked to learn from Carol that oak chips are put into some California Chardonnays to give them the vanilla-y aroma that the masses of Chardonnay drinkers consider the flavor of Chardonnay. When this whole business of oaking-up Chardonnay began in California, in the early 1970s, I was out there learning about California wines. One day I was talking to a winemaker, an older man who had spent most of his 60-something years as a journalist in Europe, drinking French wines, and he said, “If you like the taste of wood, go suck a tree. I won’t be putting much oak in my wine.”

The Domaine Bourdon Macon-Villages is what the French, who often use the same words for wine as they use for women, might call a racy wine. It is sleek, crisp, with a bouquet of green apples and a lingering earthy taste. It gets its special depth of flavor and finesse because, as Carol explains, it is made from vielles vignes, old vines. Those vine roots go way down into the soil and draw up the taste of the land in which the vines thrive. This is called gout de terroir in French. It is also a single vineyard wine – so it truly has the taste of the place. The name of the vineyard, “Les Pierres Dorées” is on the label, right under the words Macon-Villages, which is the legal French appellation controlée for the wine. Macon-Villages means that it is wine from Macon, an area of southern Burgundy, and that it is from, literally, villages that produce better grapes than you would find in a wine labeled more generically “Macon” without the word “Villages” attached to it. (The same rule applies, by the way, to Beaujolais and Beaujolais-Villages.)

The most dominant white grape of Burgundy is Chardonnay (the most dominant red is Pinot Noir), but because French wines are mainly named after the geographic area they are produced in, as opposed to the grape they are made from, you won’t find the word Chardonnay on the label.

If you have trouble finding this wine at your local store, it will help to tell your wine merchant that it is imported by Michael Skurnik Wines, Syosset, N.Y. If your wine merchant says he can’t or won’t order it for you, he’s not a good merchant. Go somewhere else.