Dinner with Veronique Drouhin – meet your heroes

I first encountered the Drouhins six months into buying our house in the North of Burgundy on a rainy Saturday when we decided to drive the hour south of us to Beaune to look for some antiques and taste some wines. If you ever have the pleasure of a visit a la Maison Drouhin at the rue D’enfer, you’ll walk away with an appreciation of wine, Burgundy, famiily history and the history of the walls of Beaune which were once Roman fortifications. As we completed our tasting, Frederic Drouhin appeared and he opened a very special Clos de Mouches (it was someone special’s birthday) and two life long fans of the wine were born that day.

Fastforward to a few years later and the excellent team at BBR invited me to a dinner with the famous lady – how could I resist?I have to confess to being a fan-boy of hers for sometime, so I fear I may have gushed a bit, especially when I mentioned that my wedding reds were her la foret pinot noir bourgogne rouge – we both got a little querulous and hugged it out. We talked wine, Chablis, biodynamism and organic vinification and left our conversation before dinner having understood one another perfectly. It’s not often you meet someone you admire who lives up to expectations from afar, but Veronique surpassed them all – the only thing present more elegant than the wines she served that evening was Veronique herself. What a charming person.

The dinner itself was a well managed affair, hosted at Berry Brothers and Rudd in their Napoleon cellar, where Veronique continued to tell us of her early trials and tribulations at being the first of her family to set up wine production anywhere outside of Burgundy, but also in the US! The bottle after bottle of elegant chardonnay and pinot noirs on display spoke to the success of her Oregon adventure. I often drive down to Beaune to pick up cases of my favourites from Maison Drouhin (their Clos des Mouches, red and white, their Chassagne and their Chambolle Musigny). But I’ll be adding a trip to Oregon some time soon to explore these beautiful wines at their source. Her 20 year old Cuvee Lauren was haunting.

The wines were all really well paired but the older Pinot Noirs were what stood out to me – completely different terroir from my beloved Bourgogne here, but all the Pinot complexity, sous-bois and balance a burgundian palate requires – was there to be enjoyed. The evening converted me completely to the virtues of Pinot Noir from the new world, when made in the hands of a master, as these clearly were.