Burgundy wine

You want to know something with a wider context.

But it put the idea in my head, and I'd been out to Les Grands Jours de Bourgogne, the every two years big Burgundy festival, and I found myself sitting at a table with a couple of masters of wine, had a few drinks and talked about writing a book.

And they're like, yeah, don't do that.

There's no money in it.

But many Japanese, they go and they study in Bordeaux.

Then they started to get a bit more domain-style wineries where they wanted to grow their own grapes, which wasn't possible initially because of land ownership laws.

They trained in Burgundy and from there, Geisenheim and Vienna.

So that's a bit closer to their climate, which is quite far north.

So I think

I mean, for me, it's sometimes when I drink Burgundy, I have a Burgundy by now, I mean, people crucify me for this when I say this, but I have a Burgundy at the moment, the same problem like with Chablis and with Champagne.

I like acidity and I find it getting often too ripe and too fruity, especially when we go in the, let's say, low and medium price segment.

The top producers on the best sites really manage very well, but the medium price segment really gets too jammy, too bold, too... unstructured because the acidity lacks, right? And this is what I really, really like here.

It reminds a little bit of drinking Burgundy, of course, very much like an art style, like 20 years ago, maybe 20 years old, right? And this is really, I think the essence where global warming makes it difficult, of course, as you say, But of course, we hope that for some more vintages at least, ZR can produce something like this, right? Yeah, I think

we give our best.

And as I said before, we try to use other wine sites which are a little more shadowed.

So I got connected with an importer who specialized in French wine.

He was doing only high-end stuff, mostly Burgundy and Champagne and Rhone Valley wines.

And I brought this whole portfolio of French country wines, which were just becoming popular.

This is back in the late 90s.

Italian white wines deserve its own kind of, probably book.

Maybe that's something we could talk about later.

But no, it's something that when I ask people, when I'm speaking about wines in general from across the world, I'm always asking, hey, what are the iconic white wines that come to mind, right? And so there's always white Burgundy and there's always German Riesling and there's even, you know, New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, just because it's what people recognize, it comes to mind first.

And I think in so many ways, Italian white wines can kind of be a little overwhelming in terms of what there is.

don't know like what...

Okay, so let's just say Burgundy, they plant so dense because they want the vines to struggle.

Each vine has to struggle to get nutrients, to get water.

So I don't know why they would restrict the number of plants per hectare or whatever.

It's special.

The most important point here, you, like, anonymous rich guy...

So are you saying that at 50-something bucks here, we opened your eyes to something special that ain't Burgundy or Bordeaux?

Yeah.

You mentioned it's a third the size of France.

I did just a little rough guesstimating that if you look at Burgundy, just like the core Burgundy, so not Chablis, not Beaujolais, they're making around 200 million bottles a year.

And then if you look at Victoria and you exclude the really warm, irrigated Murray Darling and Swan Hill, you're looking at 46 million bottles.

Yes.

Approximately.

And so actually even just Burgundy itself actually makes three times as much wine.

And that's all Pinot Chardonnay and maybe a few other things.

And then you say Victoria is so big, but it's actually... a very small amount of wine getting made across so many different styles.

But I like from France...

the traditional wine from Bordeaux, Borgogna, or Champagne, similar.

But I like also the most little production.

One of the production of France is made with a similar wine, like Sagrantino, the Giconda with Tannante.