Clos Des Mouches 2002, Joseph Drouhin
12th April 2008
More than once in these posts I have voiced doubts about the stories surrounding the names of certain wines and grapes, most recently Château Chasse-Spleen and Pinot Meunier. Enjoyable as these tales are, they often sound more like marketing inventions than genuine traditions, and even the more plausible ones sound decidedly odd.
One place that throws up more than its share of such stories is Beaune, in Burgundy. Although none of its wines has Grand Cru status, Beaune makes several of the region’s best Premier Crus. My own favourite is the Vigne de l’Enfant Jesus. Apparently its name derives from the fact that the vineyard used to belong to a Carmelite convent. The nuns, it is said, were so struck by the wine’s silkiness that they declared “It slips down the throat as easily as the Infant Jesus in velvet breeches.”
Charming, to be sure, but the more you think about this story the stranger it sounds. Why on earth should the Infant Jesus ever have wished to slip down anyone’s throat? I cannot think of a single biblical or theological reason for doing so. And even the inmates of a convent must have known that nobody in ancient Palestine wore breeches. Granted, after a bottle or three these poor cloistered ladies may well have talked the most embarrassing rubbish. But why any of their babblings should have been remembered the next morning, let alone immortalised in the wine’s name, is beyond me.
Similar doubts attach to this week’s wine. Clos des Mouches is not quite as silken as the Vigne de l’Enfant Jesus, but not far off, and hugely enjoyable. It is smokily perfumed, and its flavours of violets and black cherries are soft and lingering. But none of these qualities are suggested by its name.
A clos is a field or enclosure, and mouches are flies. In which case, you might think, the name must derive from the property’s earlier history as pastureland. Your mind’s eye might see a paddock in summer, heaped full of cow dung and glittering with bluebottles. If so, the wine’s makers, Joseph Drouhin, would be very cross with you.
Messrs. Drouhin will have you know that in the sixteenth century, beehives were kept in these parts. They say that in the ancient dialect of Burgundy, bees were known as mouches à miel, or “honey flies”. Thus, the name of this property means - and has always meant - “the enclosure of the bees”. To drive the point home, a line of bees floats across the left side of the label.
Of course bees are more picturesque than flies, and I am in no position to challenge the story. But I would point out that for all the talk about ancient dialects, Joseph Drouhin acquired this vineyard in the late nineteenth century, and Clos des Mouches only became famous in the twentieth. Once again, I can’t help suspecting that some clever marketing man has been at work.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the 2002 is well worth the $60 (£30) they are asking for it. There is also a white Clos des Mouches, even better regarded, and therefore costing rather more.
