Last weekend I was in lovely Palm Springs, California to help a friend celebrate his 60th birthday. It was a fantastic time with a slew of wonderful people. We ate well and, since they were all involved with the wine industry in one way or another, we consumed some wonderful wines.
While most bottles of wine cause some sort of reflection, a smaller subset encourage me to recall certain regions I have visited or, even rarer still, certain events in my life. On perhaps the rarest of occasions, a bottle of wine can take me back to a specific moment in time, which is one of the many reasons I consider wine unique and worthy of fourteen years and over 3,000 posts of blathering about it on this site.
Such was the case this past weekend when the fabulous wife of the birthday boy presented a wine from Les Hospices de Beaune. It was a glorious wine, a Premier Cru from Chassagne-Montrachet, which I thoroughly enjoyed. But it was not the wine itself that caused the reminiscing, but rather the producer. Or, more precisely, the event that the producer represents.
Les Hospices de Beaune is an annual event which takes place in Beaune (duh), a beautiful town at the center of the wine industry in Burgundy. It is essentially a week-long celebration of Burgundy wines (which I, and many, many others consider the best still wines in the world) and it culminates in an auction of newly made wines, still in barrel, from some of the best vineyards in the region.
Without getting too buried in the history, the wines come from some of the best vineyards in Burgundy, which had been donated over the years to Les Hospices de Beaune (a hospital, dedicated to serving the poor, founded in the 15th Century). The “winner” of any particular lot then finishes the wine as he/she sees fit. The proceeds of the auction benefit the ongoing efforts of the modern hospital and its model has been replicated countless times around the globe (Auction Napa Valley, Les Hospices du Rhône, and the Naples Winter Wine Festival come to mind).
I have been to Les Hospices de Beaune exactly once in my life, not quite a decade ago. Here is the story of how I got there and how it turned out to be one of the worst (and best) weeks of my life (Hint: I am pretty sure that I was one of the first to get COVID, back in 2018, before it was, well, COVID).
the drunken cyclist 