Volume 26: On Wine Salons

a glimpse into what i've been doing for the last 8 months

The first time I saw Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette was a few weeks before my nineteenth birthday. I had gone to Paris to escape Virginia’s late winter rain and to rediscover a will to live that had washed away in the deluge. I couldn’t have known at the time the ways in which I would fall in love with Paris nor the role it would come to play in my life. That I would return to it over and over in the years that followed for school, for work, and for my love of wine and bread. But I left Paris that spring more alive than I’d ever been before, an early sign that the tides always turn.  

The Bal du moulin hangs in the Musée d'Orsay which was, at the time, hosting an exhibition of Degas’ extended archives along with its permanent collection of Impressionist paintings. I loved the ballerinas and I loved the waterlilies, but I was enchanted with Renoir’s renderings of the city in spring. To stand in front of the Bal du Moulin is to understand the way things change. It has something to do with the way the painting captures youth and daylight and joy on its cusp. Renoir’s painting was first shown at the 1877 Salon, one in a series of gatherings for artists at the time to showcase their work and exchange ideas. And though the Salons of that era eventually came to an end, their legacy obviously endures. They are credited with forging movements and giving rise to some of the most influential artists in history. Legacy sharpens in hindsight, but I have often wondered if the impact of Salons could be felt at the moment they occurred. If it’s possible to recognize change when one is in its midst.

I got my answer on a Monday in late June when I attended a natural wine salon natural wine salon at the Frederic Cossard’s estate in Saint Romain, a small village in heart of the Côte-d'Or. Wine salons have become increasingly popular in regions all over the world as a way to provide visibility for smaller or new-on-the-scene producers. Just this month, New York hosted two of the world’s biggest fairs, Karakterre and Raw Wine. But in the quiet corners of the world’s most prolific winemaking parts, salons happen in every season and on varying scales. At Cossards’ salon—named, seemingly arbitrarily, Wine Shot—about a dozen of Burgundy’s newest and most promising producers gathered to sample their wines. And it’s perhaps this intimacy that makes you feel like you are bearing witness to something distinctly at its inception, like being let in early on a secret. Wine salons, like the art Salons before them, serve to foster an exchange of ideas amongst creators and consumers. But maybe more importantly, they are also a way of experiencing time at its edge. From the dim and damp cellar of Cossard’s estate, sipping wine aside stainless steel tanks and Georgian qvevri, it seemed so obvious that the future of Burgundy’s wine will be distinct from its past. 

Frederic Cossard himself emerged as an early leader of this new era. Unlike many the region’s beloved legacy producers, he’s not the descendant of any notable vignerons. Instead he came to winemaking on his own, starting from scratch in the early aughts and learning as he went. His wines, poured from bottles marked with hand drawn labels, were zippy and bright, unmarred by barrel and time. He’s most known for his expertise as a négociant—someone who buys grapes from other growers for wine rather than harvesting them themselves—and he told us the story of the first time he drove from Vaucluse with a truckload of Grenache as he poured us a glass of Ploussard from the Jura. The other producers there sampled wines which tasted, similarly, of something new. When I asked Lothar of La Chaume Des Lies how he thought his wines would age, he laughed. His oldest vintage is from 2021, and so it would be at least another decade before he could offer a perspective on the matter. 

Even in their youth, so many of the wines I drank were wonderful. Some were more experimental than others, like the beer from Le Chaudron that is fermented using the lees of Chardonnay, the result of which tastes neither of beer nor of wine but also kind of like both. Others paid homage to a not so distant past of Burgundian winemaking that gave way to much more structured wines. For example Lothar and his partner Margaux were trained under Pierre Fenals of Maison en Belles Lies, whose wines—all of which are spectacular—represent an older school of natural wines in Burgundy that err on a side more traditional. And although it’s still too soon to tell which wines will emerge as a symbol of the zeitgeist in the way of a 19th century painting, it can be said for certain that something is afoot in Burgundy. But if you want to know what this particular moment in tastes like, here are some of the wines from Cossard’s Wine Shot and their winemakers you’re going to want to try.

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La Chaume des Lies, Hautes Côtes de Beaune 2022

La Chaume des Lies was founded in 2021 by Lothar and Margaux, a couple who met when they were working for Pierre Fenals of Maison en Belles Lies. Although they are one of the newest domaines in the Côte D’or, their wines are made from old vines and shaped by the age-old ethos that great wine begins in the vineyard. This 100% Pinot Noir is made from 80 year old plantings on a small, sun drenched plot in Côte de Beaune. On the nose it bursts with notes of cherry and earth, on the palate with red currant and clay. But it has an acidity and tannins that have the restraint of expert winemaking.