My friend J's stated plan, this past October, had been to staff a replacement at his cave in Paris and cruise down to Burgundy for three days of marathon solo tasting. All business, no sightseeing, no fancy meals, just serious professional tasting.
Then at the very last minute he must have been worried about getting bored, because he invited me along.
As luck would have it, I was able to take off work. It became a Bro-gundy road trip: we ate Pringles and listened to the recent Real Estate album on repeat in the car and had a nice bro picnic of sandwiches on a cliff in the Hautes-Côtes de Nuits before our first appointment. Then we went to meet a friend of J's, Axelle Machard de Gramont,* winemaker at Domaine Bertrand Machard de Gramont, a Nuits-Saint-Georges estate that was, for me, a wonderfully atypical introduction to tasting in Burgundy.
