As I put together the final version of Le Bonheur est dans le Nez (this French title is a pun on the film Le Bonheur est dans le Pres - Happiness is in the country field) I'm posting snippets from time to time. Here is one from a sunny afternoon right at the start of my ride through Burgundy. I'd just spent a good hour with Aubert de Villaine, the charming co-owner of la Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, and wondered how I was going to "come down" from such an experience. I needn't have worried!
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I'd walked through here several weeks before with my Australian friend Chris Harris who needed a dose of couth before he set off back to the Antipodes after working in France for a year. We met a young woman called Margorie Bollet tying up the vines. It looked painstaking. She told us she was working for Dugat-Py. If their perfectionism in the vines was any guide, I knew that I should try to see them.

 
Bernard Dugat and Jocelyne Py horsing around on Solex. "Making wine is like great cuisine: you have wonderful material and you just have to bring out the best in it; you mustn't use treachery."

Like a long-lost friend, they invited me into their large dining room to share a bottle. Dugat-Py poses a problem. By working with old vines, seeking optimum maturity and being as gentle as possible (even resorting to pigeage by foot) they make wines which are powerful and profound with tight tannins but as smooth as silk. This shows that you can make wine which is 100% burgundy and pleasant even when relatively young. The next time someone tells me that Burgundy is traditional and takes many years in the bottle before it can be appreciated, I’ll be able to say "No it doesn't".

With his small wire-rimmed glasses and rather intense Left Bank look, Hervé Tucki struck me as a professor of literary criticism rather than a wine man. This impression was immediately confirmed when he said “I’m not a philosopher, just a self-taught guy” before launching into a discourse of such floating post-modernity that I was struggling within five seconds.

Herve Tucki in full flight

I had blundered into the interview by mentioning the size of the Chablisienne Cooperative, where he is the “brand ambassador”.

"Size isn't necessarily a constraint," he responds. "I prefer the word obligation. It's always a bit easy to say that we have disadvantages and advantages, but when we say that, we're saying nothing, because life is made of advantages and disadvantages, regardless of the situation. A Solex has its advantages and disadvantages. I’m careful of relativist discourses. Well, I am both a relativist for certain subjects, and I try not to be for others, because with relativism we manage to explain things that are inexplicable or detestable. Five minutes for Hitler, five minutes for the resistance and the score’s even. Even though, for wine, I am increasingly relativist... Things aren't black and white. In any event, the most interesting subjects are borderline ones. In the middle, everyone can have a point of view.”

A little stunned, I pulled out my notebook and scribbled furiously like a dutiful student. This was going to be more of a challenge than talking about oak and yields. He was already in full flight and, although my French is fluent enough, I’d need a few years at the Sorbonne before I could steer the thoughts of this non-philosopher...

Over the next few weeks I am going to post snippets of the final version of "Bonheur est dans le Nez" which I am writing (in English) at the moment. 

So, you can keep up to date with Solex's trip from Chablis and Sablet, and watch a book take form!

On the first day of my trip, I had a quite remarkable meeting with Anita, Jean-Pierre and Stephanie Colinot, who make some of the best-regarded Irancy, a fruity red wine made from Pinot Noir grapes. The village is in northern Burgundy, only an hour or so from Paris. Here is a slightly edited extract.
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The wonderful Jean-Pierre Colinot

We don’t start tasting yet, or even worse, talk about wine. Instead Jean-Pierre takes me up some steep stairs, though their creatively chaotic kitchen with an enormous stone sink to an equally chaotic main room with a terra cotta floor and big beams, to show me his real treasure. The names he rattles off sound like the entire French Royal Family. His large Louis XV bed is occupied by a very princely cat, which stretches as a means of checking me out without showing any actual interest. Cats can tell you a lot about a place.  In a corner, sitting behind a huge desk, with a dog taking up the back half of her seat and a baby balking in a cot by her feet on the floor, a blonde woman of about 30 goes out of her way to ignore us.

I’ve already been warned, several times. She’s the first daughter, Stéphanie, now in charge of the winery. “She was down in the diary to show you around,” Jean-Pierre had told me downstairs, “but she’s in one of her moods. Although she makes excellent wine... We had a fight on Friday, about nothing much, and ever since she’s been ignoring us and making faces.” He repeats this in front of her now. “And her younger sister is bright. She’s a notary, just finished her studies. Ten years, she’s done. She has a good character.” The real subject of the conversation doesn’t even look up. He disappears to fetch a Bible, printed just after the invention of moving type, and then a 13th century manuscript. He keeps darting into corners to pull out things to show me.


I take the opportunity to drop a card on Stéphanie’s desk.
“What, you’re riding down all that way, on a Solex?” she asks dubitatively, but with a smile that must have launched a billion male hormones over the last few years. The dog is still behind her, but the baby is on her lap and she is typing one finger at a time. The ice has broken. I’ll be able to call her later to get some facts.

Stephanie Colinot (at a wine fair the following weekend) melting the solar ice cap