The Burgundy That Isn't Trying to Impress You
I was nine years old the first time I saw Burgundy. I went back this past April, over my birthday, and the drive in did what it always does to me. The hills turn green and soft, the vineyards run up the slopes in long straight rows, and at some point you pass a little cluster of white cows standing in a field with bells around their necks. That is always the moment I know I'm back.
Most people come to this part of France for the wine. They're right to, and I'll never talk anyone out of it. But if the wine is the only reason you come, you'll drive right past the thing that makes this place what it is.
Burgundy isn't really one destination. It's hundreds of tiny villages, and every one of them is its own small world, with its own bakery and its own square and its own quiet way of doing things. Beaune is the town most people know, and it earns every bit of attention it gets. There's the Hospices with its steep patterned roof, the bakeries, the old merry-go-round still turning in the middle of town, and restaurants built down into centuries-old stone wine caves, a few of them holding Michelin stars. Beaune is wonderful. But drive ten or fifteen minutes in almost any direction and you'll come to places like Bligny-sur-Ouche and Lusigny-sur-Ouche, villages so small you could blink and miss them. Every one of them has a castle. I mean that literally. These little places, some barely a cluster of houses, each have a castle that's been standing for hundreds of years, and somehow the whole region still feels warmer than almost anywhere I've been.
My parents bought a tiny house in Lusigny when I was young, four hundred years old, and I've known these villages ever since the way you only know a place you grew up in, in pieces and in seasons. I used to sleep in the straw loft of the old barnhouse and wake to the sound of mourning doves, and it is still one of the happiest memories I have. For a few summers running, I worked for one of the best-known winemakers in Burgundy. On my breaks I'd lie down between the rows of vines and fall asleep in the soft brown dirt, with the heat and the smell of the leaves and the most complete quiet I have ever known. In high school I'd run up into the hills to stay in shape for track, and out there I'd come across Roman ruins, bits of old artifacts, and the spring where the Ouche river actually begins. My younger sister and I kept snails as pets and fed them lettuce from the garden, the same lettuce that would have ended up on our own plates. That is the kind of place it is. It gets into you.
There's a lot the locals know that visitors never find out, and I'll give you a few. On Bastille Day, these villages don't put on a show for anyone. Everyone simply cooks and gathers on the big lawn outside the town hall, which more often than not is an old manor or chateau, and they eat one long meal together outside. On Friday nights, some of the village centers have live music. And a surprising number of these tiny places have their own little museum telling the story of the village, sometimes a small gallery too. You won't know unless you go looking. So go looking.
If you ever find yourself heading there, here are a few things I always tell my clients. Rent a car, without question. The best wineries are often the ones out in the middle of nowhere, some of them hundreds of years old, down roads you would never take by accident. Everyone visits the big famous producers, and you should, they've earned their reputations. But please stop at the tiny ones too. Some of them you'll never have heard of, and I can still promise you the wine will be very good. Take the tour of the Hospices; it's one of the rare tourist things that is fully worth doing. Wear comfortable shoes. And eat out in the countryside, not only in town. I keep lists of the restaurants I love out there, run by chefs I've known since I was a child.
And I have to tell you about the people, because they are the real reason this place has never let go of me. There is a generosity here I have rarely found anywhere else. Strangers will take you into their own kitchens and feed you and think nothing of it. I have watched a winemaker pour grand cru into mason jars for visitors he had met an hour before, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Here, it is.
I've been lucky enough to have roots in a lot of corners of Europe, and I'll write about each of them here in time, all of them with love. But Burgundy is the one I keep coming back to, and I've thought a lot about why. I think it's because it isn't trying to be more than it is. This is a place where people live their whole lives, quietly, inside all of that beauty, and they do it with a grace and a kindness that has never left me. That, more than the wine or the castles, is what I want you to see.
