I always loved field trips when I was a kid. I retained so much more from actually doing something or being somewhere than from a book. I think it is why I love travelling so much. I’m learning and I’m learning in a way that it will stay in my long-term memory. So much of what I learned in university through undergrad and grad school is gone. I recently cleared out the garage and found 75 page research papers on topics I remember nothing about. Books full of highlights I never remember seeing. It all went into the garbage or to charity. Years of learning, lots of money and time to learn what I learned, forgotten. Whether or not that money and time was well spent is for another blog. I do, however, remember all of my school field trips and the subjects. I remember all the nature centers my parents dragged me to on our summer camping vacations. I remember what I had to learn to get my Junior Park Ranger badge.
My trip in June to Burgundy was just that, a really cool educational field trip. It is when I am in a wine region that I learn and retain so much more than I could from any book. It was in the town of Mercury that I stumbled onto a wealth of learning at Chateau de Chamiery. Chateau de Chamiery is best known for their monopole wines. They have 93 acres of vines (37.7 hectares) and about 8 acres of that is monopole vineyards. That’s a pretty big deal. I had no idea why.
What on earth is a monopole wine? I have to tell you, I never payed attention to whether or not that was on the bottle and even if I had, I would of had no idea what it really meant. To understand why monopole wines are a big deal and what it means you need to know (look at me learning) about how vineyards work in Burgundy. In Burgundy, unlike other regions I’ve been to like California, Washington, Portugal, Argentina, etc. it is very rare for one vineyard to have wines made by only one winery. We do see this in California, but it is expressed differently and isn’t exactly as transparent. Gap’s Crown (which I’ve blogged about) for example is a vineyard whose grapes are bought by several wine makers, each wine maker lists Gap’s Crown vineyard on the label, but they don’t say that there are many Gap’s Crown wines. I know that in California some winemakers negotiate to be able to farm the grapes that they are buying, but this is not always the case. California or US wines do not say anything on the label about the grapes not being exclusive to that winery. We do have single-vineyard designates, but that means that all of the grapes in that bottle come from the same vineyard. It doesn’t mean that those are not used in other wines or by other wine makers. I digress. In France, it is very typical that one vineyard is farmed by several different wineries. In Burgundy, it is typical that the different rows of the vineyard are farmed by different wineries who each have grapes in the named vineyard. So a monopole wine is a wine made from a vineyard, area, etc. that is controlled by a single winery. To have a wine made from one winery is so much more the exception than the rule in France. That is what makes visiting Chateau de Chamiery a must. You’re going to get to try wines from vines that you can’t get anywhere else! Pretty cool, huh?
After leaving Chateau de Chamiery with my new knowledge about monopole wines I went wine tasting and saw a wine that said Quasi-monopole. Something is either a monopoly or not, right? When I asked the tasting room guide what it meant he said he didn’t know. After some research on Google (which, of course, did right then and there) it turned out that a Quasi-monopole means that the winery controls 99% of the vineyard.
Now, every time I look at a French wine label and I see these terms, I’ll forever remember what they mean. I wish I could get a student loan for this kind of learning!
