The most enjoyable moments I spend with winemaker friends are usually those that having nothing to do with wine. The Saturday before last, I made it down to Burgundy for a village fair in Auxey-Duresses featuring the Auxey Morons, a group composed of my friends Chris and Lucie Santini (of négociant maison Santini Collective) and Matt McClune (of Saint Romain Coffee Company), along with Tom Kevill Davies (of The Hungry Cyclist Lodge) and Jack Dancy (of Trufflepig, a Beaune-based travel agency). Here they are performing Traffic’s 1967 hit “Feeling Alright.”
The village of Auxey-Duresses is notorious for being home to zero organic estates, let alone natural wine estates, with the result that zero wine worth drinking was available for purchase at the concert. Food was limited to fries and sausages. It was, nevertheless, surely one of the premier social events of the summer, enlivened by the sterling company of Andrew and Emma Nielsen, Jon Purcell of Vin Noé, Christian Knott and Morgane Seuillot of Domaine Dandelion, Jane Eyre, my friend Icy Liu of Becky Wasserman & Co, and sundry other friends and acquaintances from around Beaune.
It helped that we enjoyed access to Purcell’s wines (he stores his bottles in Santini’s nearby cellar). Purcell’s recently-bottled 2021 Bourgogne rouge is a stylistic left-turn, and an accidental breakthrough of sorts. Pale, borderline rosé-colored (despite twelve days’ maceration), just 10.5% alcohol, it nonetheless packs an impressively ample rhubarb-raspberry fruit alongside its racy green acidity. Perhaps the first red Burgundy I’ve tasted that recalls the work of Tom Lubbe at Matassa.
FURTHER READING
Dining on the Wine Trail: Saint Romain Coffee Company
Meet The Auxey Morons