Overwhelmed by great Pinot + Chardonnay at Grand Jours de Bourgogne

It was a pinch-me moment.

Yesterday, as I stood in a quiet, regal, artwork-lined room on the first floor of the Château du Clos de Vougeot, I had one of those rare realisations that life is indeed very good.

It’s not hard to feel enthusiastic when you have a lineup of thirteen 2016 vintage Clos Vougeot wines in front of you. Great red Burgundy will do that. But I kept thinking (and not thinking too loudly, this room felt hallowed) that the starry-eyed, fresh-to-the-wine-industry Andrew of the year 2000 would have never ever dreamed that I’d be at this point.

And all this week, I get to do variations of this Burgundian dream over and over again (just with different flavours)…

I’m here for the Grands Jours de Bourgogne, a biannual wine trade event based in Burgundy (locally called Bourgogne), with each day featuring regional tastings covering different parts of this 230km French wine dreamland.

There’s a small contingent of international journalists here (and a large contingent of international trade), all attempting to do justice to a fierce schedule of tastings that spans from morning to night, with a few cheeses in between.

It all started on Sunday with an entree event in Auxerre (which the locals call ‘oss air’ and I’ve always butchered as ‘ox air’), the far-northern Burgundian satellite appellation, and ends on Friday with a Côte de Beaune extravaganza. There’s tastings covering everything from Bourgogne cremant to explorations of vintage Pouilly-Fuissé, plus a look at local marc and ratafia. There are few stones unturned.

For me, what makes this so bloody exciting is the access. At every tasting, every day, there are iconic Burgundies of all the colours pouring like water, with four-figure selling Grand Cru fineries only mentioned on wine lists, open and ready to go. Indeed, at lunch time, it’s easier to get a glass of wine than to find anything watery.

The biggest challenge with this event is how to attack it. My French is woeful, many producers’ English is not much better, and the sheer volume of magnifique wines on pour is frankly overwhelming. At Monday’s Chablisaganza alone, there was a mindbending 159 producers, and given that most had between 3-6 wines open, that’s a shedload of things to try and get around.

That’s the clincher with events like this – I’m scratching the surface at every themed tasting (the picture above was from the Côte de Nuits tasting with a lazy 84 producers) while jostling with a group of Russian importers with slings for their wine glasses, typecast American bros who thrust their glasses at winemakers mid-sentence, and a pack of wine influencers with selfie sticks. I’m there tasting fascinating wines I’d like to spend an hour with, not the minutes I have (time is the enemy), while perpetually missing the table of aged wines that is at every tasting. It’s first-world problems on dexies.

I’ll lay out some of the wines and experiences in the days to come (usually when I wake up at 5am in my jetlagged brokenness), because hot damn these things need to be shared. I don’t think I’ve had many times in my wine life when I’d happily class as ‘please, please give me more’ on the famed Australian Wine and Drinks Review ‘Would I Buy It’ scale.

In the meantime, I need to go and start my Tooth Mousse regimen for the day. There are wines from 156 Mâconnais producers to try in t-minus 45 minutes (and counting).