In Beaune, They'll Drink to That
Burgundy Town Celebrates the Grape With Wine and Whimsy

By Robert V. Camuto
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, October 15, 2006

Harry had a point.

Sitting there among 600 merry dinner guests in black tie and dinner gowns in a 15th-century vaulted fort lit by candles, the Cleveland labor mediator and Bronx native couldn't help but revel in the sheer hedonism of it all.

As the main course arrived, Harry Graham explained to the 13 others at his table, including me on his right: "You could not have this meal in the United States. The cholesterol police would be all over us."

This main course, delivered with military precision by a battalion of white-jacketed waiters, was a steaming ball of lightly creamed venison stuffed with foie gras and wild mushrooms. It was accompanied by the fourth wine of the evening, a red Burgundy from the cellars of the dinner's host, the Beaune Hospices. "In fact," Harry continued, "if my doctor -- we'll call her Doctor X -- could see us now, she would cast us into perdition."

This famous Sunday night candlelight dinner, held the third Sunday in November, is one of the climaxes of an annual weekend-long bacchanalia here in the heart of wine-growing Burgundy. Parades, marching bands, cork-pulling contests and silliness on the streets take over the entire town, making this one great party -- and excuse to visit.

Forget every notion you have about stuffy charity-social affairs. The weekend is a running Burgundian hullabaloo and a lot more fun and less pretentious than most wine events I've been to on both sides of the Atlantic. That evening at the candlelight dinner, a local folkloric group had already led us through an array of drinking songs, including a curious folk song called "Drink Another Shot," with the lovely refrain:

I love ham and I love sausage

I love ham -- it's good

But I like even better the milk of my nursemaid.

Just in case you haven't gotten the picture: These people like to party. Wine, food and their consumption -- perhaps more so than in any part of France, or the world, for that matter -- is the mother's milk of this culture.

This weekend in Beaune is to wine lovers what Disney World is to fans of anthropomorphized rodents. Beaune is, to many, the world's greatest wine town, set in a magnificent countryside of tiny villages with impossible names. Amazingly, the whole affair has kept a small-town feel. Anyone can watch the auction without bidding on casks of wine (usually limited to the trade and high rollers). Thousands come just for the action that takes place in the streets and in the winemakers' and merchants' cellars that form a system of catacombs below Beaune. I arrived on near impulse and lucked into purchasing my ticket to the dinner -- at about $150, a bargain when you consider everything -- at the last minute.

We had already been through pumpkin soup accompanied by a Pouilly Fuissé (2000). Then we'd savored scallop ceviche with black truffles, washed down by another Pouilly Fuissé, a 2002. Next up was the lobster ravioli accompanied by a Corton-Charlemagne (2000).

After switching to red wines with the main course, Harry began to howl. "What does my doctor -- I mean Dr. X -- know about having a good time?" he asked rhetorically. " Nothing! If she were here she would be sitting in the corner eating a saltine cracker with no salt!"

Despite medical advice to the contrary, this was the second year Harry had made the journey to Beaune with Joyce, his wife of 40 years.

There would, of course, be many more wines that evening. We guests were able to order bottles from a list of fine Burgundies that were poured into an array of glasses set before us. To me, it was a fantasy come true -- an expensive wine list where no one looks at the prices.

It was not until 1 a.m. that a New Orleans-style jazz band came onto the small stage. Right there in the middle of this historic place, with examples of the hospices' medieval tapestry collection looking on, the crowd started drumming on the white-linen-covered tables with dessert spoons and whatever other silver was left. As 2 a.m. approached, the band struck up "When the Saints Go Marching In," and it seemed the place would explode.

Roll Out the Barrels

Beaune is a well-kept, prosperous town of 23,000 that once a year doubles in population as visitors stream in for auction weekend, timed for when old barrels are being moved out of cellars for the new wine to go in. On Saturday afternoon there was a semi-marathon, and by the time it was winding its way through such nearby famous wine villages as Pommard, Volnay and Meursault, Burgundies were flowing on every street corner, sold from the many food and wine services set up in the town.

Even if there were no wine, Beaune would be well worth the visit. A medieval town surrounded by ramparts and fortresses, it's dotted with ancient dovecoted residences, mysterious courtyards and acres of subterranean tunnels, all dating to the powerful dukes of Burgundy, who in much of the 14th and 15th centuries controlled a large swath of territory up through Amsterdam.

I arrived on a Friday morning, when things were still calm. My first stop was the architectural masterwork and Beaune's dominant symbol: the old hospital, known as the Hotel-Dieu. A masterpiece of Flemish-influenced architecture, the Hotel-Dieu is a palatial Gothic building in stone, wood timbers and a colorful patterned tile roof that supports more than 50 weather vanes. It was built to care for the sick and dying in the mid-15th century by the chancellor of Burgundy, Nicolas Rolin, who saw the project as a sort of palace for the poor that would get him a flight up on the stairway to heaven.

Since 1971, the Hotel-Dieu has become a cultural center and museum. The star of the collection is a nine-piece altar painting, "The Last Judgment," by Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden, classified as a national historic monument. A large, moving mechanized magnifying glass controlled by an attendant allows visitors to examine the microscopically fine brush details of the painting.

I also enjoyed the well-conceived displays of medieval medical instruments and techniques that seemed to rely on bleeding, more bleeding and major bleeding.

The hospice's old pharmacy has examples of some of the medicines of the day, such as crawfish eyes and dung beetle powder. A large ceramic jar labeled "Theriaca" once contained a general panacea made from opium and, of course, wine.

Yes, fermented grape juice is the river that floats Beaune's boats and helps pay for the upkeep of the Hotel Dieu. Over the centuries, the hospice has accumulated donated vineyards; its winery produces the wines sold at auction, and the money helps fund the hotel and the hospice's other charitable operations.

Saturday morning, I headed down to the town's labyrinthine cellars, which are to Beaune what "Pirates of the Caribbean" is to the Magic Kingdom. The Caves Patriarche are crassly commercial and thrillingly essential.

Patriarche's caves, first excavated under the direction of the Sisters of Visitation in the 13th century, cover about four acres under the streets of Beaune. Narrow vaulted passageways with head-thumping thresholds hold several million bottles stacked on simple wood battens.

The main attraction here is the ambiance, but as part of the self-guided tour, visitors walked from candlelit room to room, where sommeliers awaited us with a series of 10 wines to taste -- the oldest of which was Corton Grand Cru (1960), being poured from a magnum.

Patriarche -- which is both a wine producer and a retailer with extensive holdings in Burgundy -- was more than happy to break the spell by posting prices of everything we tasted. The Corton magnum was about $470.

By the time I reemerged into sunlight, Beaune was in full swing. In a public hall and in the city's main squares, vendors sold some of the most delectable festival food I've seen: paper plates full of escargot, cured meats, foie gras and raw oysters. There were cheeses from all over France and Burgundy wines being sold by the bottle or glass -- in real wine glasses, mind you, not plastic cups. In the Place Fleury, men and women competed in a timed bottle-uncorking competition, in which hundreds of contestants in groups of four attacked 30 bottles apiece with simple "T" corkscrews. By midafternoon, the streets were clogged with thousands of revelers, flag throwers and every sort of oddball musical troupe.

Going Once, Going Twice . . .

The Beaune Hospices wine auction, held across from the Hotel-Dieu in what was once a covered market, is a whole different scene. In 2005, it was taken over by Christie's, which introduced international bidding through the Internet and phone connections in the hall. It begins after lunch Sunday and can last for hours, right up until the candlelight dinner.

The auction is open to the public, and anyone can bid on the wine, sold by the barrel (about 300 bottles) for an average of about $5,700 in 2005. With transportation, bottling and other costs involved, the auction itself is not really for novices. The Americans you bump into in and around the auction tend to be types who live large.

They are guys like Henry Bernis Alsobrook, a New Orleans lawyer who began collecting wine while a student at Tulane in 1948 and later became a member of the Order of the Knights of the Tastevin, the Burgundy-promoting club founded in 1934 with the motto "Never in vain. Always in wine." Summarizing the auction that evening, Alsobrook said in a confident Louisiana drawl, "I bought three barrels today . . . wanted to buy four, but it got too expensive."

We were off to dinner and many, many wines. I would tell you how many, but I'm afraid Harry's doctor would come after us all.

Robert V. Camuto last wrote for Travel about Dijon, France.