Burgundy. The very name has a rich, plump ring to it — and this November, its richest, plumpest citizens will be jamming themselves into Beaune, the region’s perfectly formed wine centre.
They’re going for the world’s most celebrated wine auction, which is why it’s essential that they’re rich. But there’s also a dizzying round of banquets, tastings and general guzzling, which explains the plumpness. It’s almost automatic in Burgundy — where you may leave the lunch table just in time for dinner — and nowhere more so than in Beaune.
Within its circular ramparts, this little place (population: 23,000) exhales an ancestral prosperity. Wine wealth has coursed through it since the Middle Ages, and still does. The grey-white stones are buffed up, wrought-iron railings pen off wine merchants’ mansions, lovely Renaissance frontages conceal lovelier courtyards — and, in the early-evening autumn glow, folk pack into enough chocolate shops and charcuteries to make Beaune a capital of cholesterol. Dinner-table disputes focus on the best place to buy your jambon persillé. The passage of time is registered in vintages rather than births, marriages and deaths.
Difficult, then, to believe that there have ever been needy people in a spot where depri- vation means making do with an Aligoté rather than a Meursault. But apparently there were, at least in the 15th century, and it was to help them that Nicolas Rolin, chancellor to the dukes of Burgundy, put up the extra- ordinary Hôtel-Dieu — part hospital, part refuge, entirely magnificent. Naturally, Rolin’s real motives weren’t altruistic. After years of taxing the poor until the pips squeaked (and gathering for himself Bill Gates-style wealth), he feared an uncomfortable time in the hereafter. The Hôtel-Dieu was his bargain with God for a safe passage.
No matter. The result was the same, and the institution has been maintained by charity ever since. Over the centuries, gifts and bequests have endowed the Hôtel-Dieu (or “Hospices”) with 150 acres in some of Burgundy’s finest vineyards. It is this wine that is auctioned each year on the third Sunday in November, the proceeds still going to the local hospital — even though it moved from the Hôtel-Dieu to modern premises 30 years ago.
Bidding kicks off in the market hall on the town’s central square at 2.30pm. It’s always in the presence of someone more or less famous — last year, it was the French film star Jean Reno — and always subject to contradictory pressures. Merchant bidders might want to do the decent thing and better last year’s £2.5m receipts for the charity, but they’re also aware that Beaune prices set a trend for the whole of Burgundy. If they bid too high, they’ll likely be paying over the top for other wine supplies throughout the year.
But that’s business, and it’s all over by 7.30pm — when matters move, as they generally do in Burgundy, to a banquet. This one is in the original Hôtel-Dieu next door. There will have been another the night before, in the Château du Clos de Vougeot, with a third at Monday midday in the Château de Meursault.
Meanwhile, for those understandably peckish in between, or without a berth at the banquets, the town is athrob with opportunities to drink wine, eat local Charolais beef and otherwise grow red enough in the face to fit in. This is Beaune’s big party weekend. Everyone’s holding out a glass, to the accompaniment of street music and parades. And inevitably, for this is France, there’s a great deal of dressing up in silly clothes.
The Burgundians can, in short, talk ethereal wine stuff with the best of them, but behind the veneer of culture — the sniffing, the swirling, the chateaux — there’s a pleasing gleam in the eye. It’s perceptible in Beaune at any time...when you stop over, for instance, en route to the ski slopes.
The magnificence is built on wine (quite literally: millions of bottles are ageing in underground galleries) and enjoyment. It makes visiting an altogether juicier experience. After a couple of days there, I was walking mainly in curves — which is, in fact, no bad way to tackle the sinuous cobbled streets.
Starting point has to be the Hôtel-Dieu, whose vast, multicoloured, glazed-tile roof makes you wonder whether you haven’t drunk yourself into a gigantic version of Hansel and Gretel. First sight of it as you emerge from the entry porch is one of the more gobsmacking moments available in France.
Inside, it’s been restored to its former glory, with dimensions and an attention to decor that I don’t recall in many NHS hospitals. Then again, patients paid for the privilege with substantial blood-lettings and treatment by syringes, still on display, that were quite big enough to give an enema to the London sewerage system. In these circumstances, Rogier van der Weyden’s magnificent Last Judgment triptych, commissioned for the hospital by Rolin, probably proved less uplifting than he intended.
Across the centre, the Duke of Burgundy’s palace is a grand ensemble of galleries and towers, but the Musée du Vin within, like most wine mus- eums, is dustily uninteresting. Best stay outside, where you can contemplate the enormous wooden winepresses — they’d crush a rhino, never mind a few grapes — without paying.
