Forced substitutions

If the wines we love are unaffordable or in short supply, the solution isn’t necessarily simply to seek out alternatives made with the same grapes, argues David

Williams

Ihaven’t tasted as many 2021 Burgundies as I’d like to. In part, that’s because there aren’t all that many around: volumes were down by as much as 75% for some producers, thanks largely to the freezing conditions that stopped newly budding vines in their tracks at the beginning of April 2021. But it’s also because that very scarcity has pushed prices even further out of the reach of both my own pocket and that of all but a very few of our readers.

It’s a pity because the wines I have tasted are really rather lovely, with the cooler conditions that prevailed for those vines that escaped the frost producing wines that are very much closer to what I think of as the paradigm of Burgundy than they have been in recent warmer years. The wines are lighter, fresher, keener, racier, more chiselled and defined than the 2020s I tasted.

But then, “it’s a pity” is what I’ve been saying, like a joyless, handwringing religious puritan, about Burgundy every time I’ve tasted the new vintage en primeur for years now. I’ve started to bore myself with the same old lament about how these wines used to be affordable to the likes of me, a treat maybe, but not a significant portion of my annual salary. It really is time I stopped moaning and accepted that we do not live in my fantasy libertarian socialist state, where rations of the very finest wines are issued in a winelovers’ lottery rather than to the highest bidder with the best connections. I should, instead, accept that Burgundy is largely pour les autres, and switch to one of the many viable replacements instead.

The trouble for me is that I’ve always found the hunt for substitutes a little too literalminded, a seemingly obvious solution that almost always leads to unsatisfactory results. Wine is not reducible to its basic components. It’s not as simple as saying Burgundy is made from Chardonnay or Pinot Noir, and that, therefore, to get the same kind of experience you simply need to find a Chardonnay or Pinot Noir made in a similar way in a similar climate at a less fashionable address.

There are, it’s true, many Chardonnays, and at least some Pinot Noirs, being made in various places around the world that are very close facsimiles of great examples of the grape from their original region. I dare say I’d confuse them, in a blind tasting, for the “real thing”. But they won’t fill a Burgundy hole, for the simple reason that they’re … well, they’re not Burgundy.

No doubt there are some wine drinkers who are looking for a style or set of flavours and are happy with that no matter where it might come from. But in my experience, most wine lovers are at least as interested in wine as a form of proxy travel. We’re not so much concerned with having an experience of the flavours of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir as we are with knowing what Chardonnay or Pinot Noir taste like from Burgundy and – as we become more interested – from that part of Burgundy, and that producer, in that year.

This isn’t just a Burgundy thing, by the way, or even just a wine thing. I have a similar problem with the Spotify algorithm, which has never worked out that the reason we like a song or piece of music isn’t always because it’s from a particular scene, genre or configuration of instruments and a certain kind of voice. More often it’s down to a whole lot of other, often ineffable things to be found in both the listener and the musician.

I like Prefab Sprout, but not for the reason Spotify seems to imagine I do: the lush 80s production (in fact, I hate the lush 80s production). I started listening to Prefab Sprout because the band’s songwriter Paddy McAloon had a wistful way with a melody that appealed to me when I was 14 – and I listen to them now to get lost in waves of bittersweet nostalgia and remember my lost youth.

But even if Spotify, or some wine equivalent, were able to find a way of precisely anticipating my next favourite thing, I’d still have a problem with this tendency of thinking of wines as fundamentally interchangeable.

It’s fine to know – it is in fact fascinating and essential context – that the Oregon Chardonnay you are drinking was in some way inspired by and made from the same grape variety as Burgundy. But for the winemaker, there’s something limiting – something almost servile and overly deferential – about always referring back to the motherland, while, for the drinker, it puts a cap on the imagination and stops us giving credit where it’s due.

There are many moments when I would relish a bottle of one of Timo Meyer’s Yarra Valley Pinot Noirs or Thomas Bachelder’s Niagara Chardonnays, in other words. But I find I get a whole lot more enjoyment once I forget about their debt to Burgundy and enjoy these superlative wines as representatives of their own places, made on their own terms.