Modern Wine Fables – Burgundy: Appreciation

01 December 2015 By Rupert Millar

Kottabos – the noble art of throwing wine at things.

A game of skill and valour in Ancient Greece, the players would recline upon couches and flick the dregs from their kylix at a target. Hitting it boded well for the acquisition of that most desired by the player.

With this in mind, we now take aim at a few carefully chosen targets with three original blackly comic wine tales for the modern age. Featuring fraud, mass murder and the senseless waste of viticultural life on a grand scale, please enjoy responsibly.

And don’t get too many ideas…

‘La connerie.’

Robert, Comte de Morey, shook his head as he read the story. Another record for his wines at auction, that was the fifth in three months. It had been in Hong Kong this time. A rich, quite stupendously rich, Chinese (so the story went) had stuck his paddle in the air as soon as the lot number had come up and kept it there until the hammer came down.

It had cost him just over HK$23 million in the end – two million pounds. Two million and change for six bottles of the rarest most sought-after wine in the world – Robert’s wine, Domaine Comte de Morey’s Clos de la Peste Noire; the 1947 vintage in this instance.

The wine world could speak of nothing else and even the more mainstream media picked up the story and had people, like Robert, shaking their heads over their toast and cornflakes on Monday morning.

Two million quid for six bottles of plonk? Incredible.

It was also ridiculous. The most incredible thing was that despite many people knowing it was ridiculous it didn’t surprise anyone very much.

Those in the trade looked on it as merely the latest in an ever-growing collection of impossible records Domaine Comte de Morey’s Clos de la Peste Noire – or ‘DCM’s’ ‘LPN’ as it was often known* – had been achieving at auction. Those who followed such things like a weather-beaten skipper listening for storm warnings on the shipping news began to mutter darkly. Demand for ‘La Peste Noire’, was clearly getting out of hand. Grim warnings of ‘a bubble’ began to circulate.

Two months later, another auction, another record. This time US$1.8m for three bottles of the 1949. Surely this precipitated a crash? Apparently not. DCM stubbornly defied all prophesies of its demise and continued to climb on the secondary market.

Long regarded as the greatest wine in Burgundy, some said the world, for three successive years La Peste Noire was the top-selling wine by value at four of the five leading auction houses. A case of six bottles averaged £250,000 on the Win-x platform. Not bad for a former medieval plague pit.

This quirk of history aside, collectors couldn’t get enough of it – figuratively as well as literally, the tiny monopole, a mere single hectare of walled vineyard tucked away in a corner of the Côtes de Nuits only made 180 cases a year on average.

The collapse of the Bordeaux market and the vagaries of fashion was helping drive demand too. Demand for La Peste Noir had been climbing once the much vaunted bubble for Château Laflé had finally gone *pop*, to the delight of numerous experts and the misery of reckless speculators that hadn’t got off at Haymarket; and had been finished off by the Bordelais continuing to price their subsequent en primeur campaigns for a market that didn’t actually exist.

As Bordeaux floundered buyers looked elsewhere and Burgundy, horror of horrors, became ‘trendy’. The collectors abandoning Bordeaux like rats didn’t know much about Burgundy of course but they knew about price and they wanted the best – or rather the most expensive – Burgundy their ill-gained lucre could buy and their attention had quickly turned to the most expensive of all, Domaine Comte de Morey’s Clos de la Peste Noire.

To most casual observers this must have seemed like a triumph; a vindication of hard work and outstanding quality finally realised – and not before time too. But to Robert it was anything but.

The more the new money began to drive up prices, the more divorced from reality he sensed his wines were becoming and the more elevated even he became in the eyes of an adoring public. As the fame and price of La Peste Noire rose a collective madness started to infect anyone who came in contact with the stuff.

Everything about the wine and the vineyard gradually became imbued with fatuous and vapid symbolism. No longer was La Peste Noire just a great wine of Burgundy, to taste it was now a life-affirming experience, a second loss of virginity.

Robert remembered, not long before, when the annual presentation of the new vintage in London had actually been fun. People had discussed what they thought of the wine and there had been a general sense of bonhomie and excitement as what little wine there was to go around was dished out.

Now everything was frightfully serious and the tasting was conducted in near monastic silence. Attendees crept around as if in a mummers play, pointing and nodding reverently at the bottle and talking in whispers only when strictly necessary lest, heaven forbid, they disturbed someone in contemplative thought over their thimbleful of wine.

As for the act of tasting itself, the reactions ranged from furiously severe to comically bizarre. Most nursed their precious share for as long as possible, taking long slow sniffs from the glass, constantly sniffing and taking notes and then trying desperately not to sip the meagre serve in one go.

In the most extreme instances the moment the wine touched a pair of lips the eyes would close, the face underwent a series of orgiastic, gurning convulsions and the hand would wave as if the taster were quietly conducting an angelic host. For many this was the one time a year, perhaps the only time in their lives, they would ever taste La Peste Noire.

‘I could serve them poison and they’d drink it just as enthusiastically if it came from the right bottle,’ Robert sometimes thought to himself. ‘Most would never know if it was La Peste Noire or a Beaujolais they were tasting.’ And he would look around sadly before spying a nervous and impossibly young-looking journalist edging closer, notepad to hand and the word ‘ummm’ on their lips.

Tasting notes and reports became increasingly florid and egotistical, to the point one might be excused for thinking those involved had undergone a deep spiritual rapture rather than simply tasted a wine no matter how good or famous it happened to be. Robert began to tire of the portrayals of him as the winemaking equivalent of a noble savage while the cod-piety, faux philosophy and breathless aphorisms his wine was being subjected to made him bristle.

In one moment of bathos, a mail-out had gone so far as to describe the wine as ‘hand-crafted’. Robert had instantly written an angry letter to the merchant in question explaining he wasn’t making bespoke furniture.

He despaired and whenever he returned from a tasting fellow vintners would ask him: ‘Ca etait?’

‘La connerie,’ he’d reply. It’s what he always said now.

There was no stopping the rot though and it was so deeply ingrained in the wine collecting scene that no matter how hard Robert tried to convince people to drink it the more it appeared on the market and records and the demand kept soaring. La Peste Noire was outperforming the market after all, Win-x was recording 35%-40% returns inside of a year for ‘on-’ vintages. It was simply too tempting not to sell whatever you had and as Robert feared: the more it appreciated, the less it was appreciated. So unprecedentedly expensive was every bottle that it was quite simply the most valuable luxury product on earth and far too valuable to merely drink.

The bottles sat in their cases, in darkened, air-conditioned rooms and changed hands when the price was right at the click of a button. A unit in the machine.

‘La connerie.’

Another record. Somerby’s in LA had sold a case of the 1951 for US$8.5m. A trade journalist tracked down the buyer who acquiesced to an interview at the top of the menacing skyscraper in Singapore he called his office. He was, in his own words (and actually quite correctly), the biggest collector of La Peste Noire in the world. It was the label that had made him fall in love with wine in the first place he explained and besides, he could afford it.

And how much did he have? Oh, he replied, at least one case from every vintage since 1948. The interviewer quipped that it was going to take him quite some time to get through it all.

You mean drink it? Said the collector aghast. No, no, no! They were much too precious for that. He intended to keep them, untouched, forever.

At this point Robert had thrown his newspaper across the room, startling Tartine, the cat.

A little while later there was more news. A cabal of La Peste Noire collectors calling themselves the ‘Gang of Eight’ and including the buyer of the 1951, got together and declared that they would never drink their fabulous collections of La Peste Noire. Instead, the wines would remain in their cases, unopened and enshrined as the embodiment of winemaking perfection.

‘I can think of no finer testament to this sublime wine than the decision of its most passionate collectors to forever preserve its legacy and save it from the fate of lesser liquids,’ a spokesman for the group was quoted as saying. ‘While other wines will fade and disappear in time, the wines of Le Clos de la Peste Noire will live forever, the wonder of its label will stand as an inspiration to future generations and a monument to the greatest of all wines.’

This really made Robert angry. ‘Bordel!’ he cried as he read the news and banged the tabletop with his fist, overturning his coffee bowl. But this was too much! He considered now the appalling idea he had entertained in the London tasting room. Once he had considered it unthinkable but it was clear his wine needed saving and everyone else needed saving from themselves.

Rising slowly to his feet and with a gravity slightly lessened by his audience – his dressing-gown clad wife, Jeanne, and a nervous looking Tartine – he declared: ‘If they all they want are the labels, the labels are all they’ll get!’

Working furiously, thinking only of the task in hand rather than on the terrible repercussions he was inviting, Robert de Morey set out to fake his own wine.

At the presentation of the next vintage in London he was like a man in a dream. The trade assembled for their annual taste of perfection and Robert stood, quivering and abstractedly gnawing on his knuckle as the pale liquid was dispensed to the tip-toeing queue.

Robert tensed as the tasting commenced and it was only then, at that poignant moment as glasses were swirled, that he realised what he had done. He felt an enormous pressure in his chest. It was a betrayal of absolute trust, of his reputation and his family name. He was about to cry out, admit his guilt when, remarkably, nothing happened.

He looked around him at the gurning faces, the eyes closed in ecstasy. A few tasters seemed puzzled, the glass was held at an angle against their nose, first one side then the other. Then they nodded and made a note.

So overawed by the name and reputation of DCM, so unused to tasting it, with so little to actually taste no one had noticed or perhaps cared to notice the deception.

The tasting over everyone filed out past a speechless Robert, pressing his hand as if they were parishioners leaving mass and he the priest they wished to thank and remark on the loveliness of the homily, even though they had not even listened to it.

‘Ca etait?’ asked fellow winemakers back in Burgundy.

‘Incroyable,’ Robert mumbled.

He waited for the scores and reports. Surely they would reveal the critics’ suspicions, their contempt for the ‘wine’, for the ‘vintage’, the vineyard? For him. Yes, him most of all, the great betrayer.

It didn’t happen. The scores and notes hailed the vintage as a fine addition to the stable. ‘Ethereal’ one unambitious critic declared. ‘Soft and supple,’ claimed another. ‘Seemingly ready now, this wine will age for another 100 years,’ claimed a third.

Soon afterwards Robert declared that, henceforth, all bottles of La Peste Noire would be sold ex-cellar, for the standard rate of US$2.5m a case and only to a select group of collectors, like The Gang of Eight, who vowed never to drink their allocation.

The waiting list stretched into hundreds of names.

No one ever found out. The cases of ‘wine’ sat harmlessly in the dark, air-conditioned rooms. The owners might come and admire them from time to time or perhaps even open a box for greedy-eyed admirers to gaze on its contents – then close it again with a smile and a wag of the finger and reach for something else. And so, in this way, La Peste Noire became forever the greatest, most expensive fake no one ever drank.

Epilogue

Visitors were always welcome at Domaine Comte de Morey and, more to the point, always guaranteed a good lunch with lots of wine.

‘Delicious,’ they’d say as they got their first taste of the beetle-dark wine Robert poured for all guests, ‘what is it?’

‘Oh, just a little wine I make for my own personal consumption,’ he’d reply.

‘It’s not “LPN” is it?’ someone would say and everyone would laugh and wish it were, deep down.

‘No,’ Robert would reply with a smile and a small, slow shake of his head. ‘It’s just something to be enjoyed with friends like this.’

‘Well it’s nice,’ the group’s obligatory know-it-all would declare, ‘but it’s not LPN.’ And then he (it was always a ‘he’) would say something about the one time he’d had ‘LPN’ at the tasting in London and would wax lyrical about how remarkable it had been and finish by saying it was the greatest wine he’d ever had. And everyone would listen in silence wishing they too could taste ‘LPN’ one day.

And after a moment’s, extremely thoughtful and leaden silence Robert would offer a very Gallic shrug and remark, ‘they do say it’s the best,’ before launching into a brief but thoughtful lament that La Peste Noire was not more widely appreciated despite its fame.

Then he’d top up any empty glasses and go to fetch another bottle from his generously stocked cellar.

*It had been consensually agreed ‘by those in the know’ that continual reference to the estate as ‘Domaine Comte de Morey’s Clos de la Peste Noire’ was too much of a mouthful and liable to give copy writers repetitive strain injury, so ‘La Peste Noire’ was all that was required once the proper name had been written out in full the first time around and, likewise, Domaine Comte de Morey was usually shortened to ‘DCM’. Occasionally it might be referred to as ‘DCM’s Clos de la Peste Noire’ but it wasn’t strictly necessary as ‘La Peste Noire’ was the only vineyard ‘DCM’ owned and, therefore, the only wine it produced.