One of the wine drinker’s holy grails is good, cheap Burgundy. By “good” I mean typically Burgundian; something with the fleshy, gamey quality of successful Pinot Noir. By “cheap” I mean under $15 in the US or £10 in the UK.

“What you want is impossible,” I am always told, usually by people who sell the stuff. “Pinot Noir isn’t Cabernet Sauvignon. It’s a much harder grape to get right, in Burgundy or anywhere else. Any Pinot Noir costing less than $25 is a waste of money, no matter where it’s from.”

On the whole I’ve found that to be true. Most cheap Pinots are disappointing: thin, rough-edged, pleasureless. If you are determined to pay no more than $10, you would do better to spend your money on almost any other grape.

But just occasionally someone will come along and tear up all the rules. In this case the man’s name is Alain Corcia.

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In my item on Condrieu I mentioned successful Viogniers from places other than the Rhône. I have now got round to sampling this one, from Middleburg in Virginia, and I recommend it warmly.

Its makers, Chrysalis Vineyards, have been in business for only a decade. They have all the exuberance of youth. “We are new, excited and energized,” their website tells us breathlessly, “as we combine the best of modern techniques with the traditional hand-crafted winemaking methods of the Old World.”
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Uruguayans often describe their country as the Switzerland of South America, presumably meaning it is stabler and more prosperous than its neighbours. That’s fair enough, I suppose, though the point grows tiresome with repetition. A Uruguayan lady of my acquaintance used to say it almost every time I ran into her. One day she caught me in a sardonic mood, and I asked her why no one ever called Switzerland the Uruguay of Europe. She never said anything about Switzerland to me again. In fact she never said anything at all.

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“Good place, Portugal,” said a colleague recently. “I’m thinking of moving there.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Weather’s OK. Food’s good. So’s the wine.”

That last bit made me perk up. It was over twenty years since I had drunk anything Portuguese, but I could recall the last bottle clearly: an indifferent mass-market rosé. Half-way through it I was struck down by a kidney stone. The pain was shattering. For twenty minutes I writhed on the carpet, yelping like a dog and spewing out rosé-flavoured vomit. Finally an ambulance carted me off to hospital.
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One must always be careful with dry whites from Bordeaux. Far too many of them are sour, ill-bred nasties, guaranteed to leave your breath smelling like a drain. They are the unhappy result of decades of government subsidy, a system which debased much of the region’s wine and cheated everyone else both as taxpayers and consumers. (”Screwed front and back”, as a friend of mine put it.)

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