Burgundy’s Monumental Corton Red Wine

There is a green forest atop the slope, which faces south-east and runs steep, up to 350m above sea-level, and it is a beautiful piece of country, the forest’s wilderness looking down on vineyards that have been making some of the very best wines on earth for a very long time. It is Corton, and it is in Burgundy, this part of the region probably best known for the tight bind its Chardonnay wines tie to the hearts of those who drink it, but for me it makes the best red wine in the world.

The Pinot Noir from these red Corton vines are wines that could by some, even knowledgeable wine people, be termed as being very “unlike” Pinot Noir. For they are the kind of red wines with which Burgundy was associated before the region’s boom times, pre-1980, days when the area’s wines were associated with intensity and force and strength. Then, power dominated, as money and price does today.

Auberon Waugh, son of the great British novelist Evelyn and a wine writer of ferocious honesty and rigid conviction, said that from the 1980s red Burgundy changed, as the producers suddenly became chasing cherry and floral flavours.

But Corton runs true to its legacy and origins and reputation. And I love the sterner, more dramatic and bigger reds made there, as I was reminded at the end of last year when I chanced upon a wine, the having of which going down as one of my most memorable.

The wine was from Burgundy producer Faively, the Clos de Cortons Faively vineyard, theirs exclusive, and it was from the 1999 vintage, making it 25 years old at the time of the experience. I found this age a disheartening factor, as this means that if I was going to truly experience their true potential, the couple of young Burgundies I still have stashed away would have to remain unopened for an uncomfortably long time.

To say the 25-year-old Clos de Cortons Faively was sublime is like saying Sandra Bullock is well-built or that Maria Callas had been quite a good singer. For this wine’s ability to harness one’s sensorial experience with the deep-rooted inner workings of emotional cords able to create emotion and love, made it an experience, one branded into the current consciousness with a red-hot poker. Leaving an impression that I would have been so much poorer, as a man, if I had not been blessed to partake therein.

The cork was long and ochre and slid from the bottleneck with the sigh of a nun seeing Michelangelo’s David for the first time. I poured the wine into a decanter, as I was showing it unsighted to friends, and it ran black and red into the glass vessel, leaving wet rivulets the colour of rose-petals on the glass walls. An aroma filled the room, not a perfume, but a chilly breeze scented by cracked apple-wood, haybales and organic earth tilled by a slightly sweaty Frenchman eating saucisson sec.

It lay moody, dark and troubled in the wineglass, the wine wondering who had dared to stir its quarter-century’s slumbering and, what’s more, had ripped it from the hills where the Emperor Charlemagne first planted vines 1200 years ago, daring to transport it to the southern land of South Africa.

Closer to the nose, the wine is monumental, two sniffs and the tears pricked with the aroma of life and time; earth and history; thunder and sun; wilderness and the genius of civilisation. Considering the decision of allowing the liquid to enter the mouth was one of apprehension and thrill.

Then it exploded.

Everything I had thought and talked, told and wrote and bragged and – on grappa-fuelled occasions – had sung about wine, all this came true in one sip and one swallow. It was taste and flavour and presence I could hear and see, as well as – most importantly – feel.

The tannic thrust was resounding, like an axe cleaving the steel-helmeted skull of a Saracen warrior, and it was sheer beauty as the tannins collected the flavours and tastes, scooping them up and planting them into the senses of he was having the wine.

Bramble-berries, wet with the blood drawn from the fingers pricked by the plants’ thorns. Ripe, warm wild strawberries salted by fat dripping from a raw goose liver. And this Pinot Noir was not showing forest-floor, it had dug down, going deep and drawing flavour from the thousands of roots probing the mysterious regions of earth ancient and damp and dark, and indeterminably deep.

Structure? Palate-weight? Mouth-feel? Quite frankly, I could not give a flying Faively fuck. It was a wine transcending the need for such peculiar and petty analyses, for like I who was drinking it, these are too small to be considered in the immensity of what it was offering.

I am haunted by Corton.