, Andrew Jefford: ‘Just go there. Look around. Stand in the landscape’

Here’s why. I’ve loved wine for 50 years. If I’d done nothing but sit at home and drink it, that love would have been a consuming hobby, a lifelong infatuation. What wine and I have is more than that. We have a serious relationship, by which I mean love based on respect and understanding. Agreed, wine has been my work… but you can have a relationship of this sort, too. Just go there. Look around. Stand in the landscape. As the vines stand in it, remember, winter and summer, 24 hours a day, year in and year out.

Simple things like the relationship of the sky to the land beneath will then strike you with overwhelming force. Compare the Médoc, for example, to the Côte d’Or. The Médoc is hugely open – nothing interrupts the horizon. The land rises and falls like a gentle ocean swell. You gaze down to the vast estuary to one side; you’ll discover (as you head for a shellfish feast at Arcachon) the vaster Atlantic to the other. It’s a place of light – and of watery exchanges, of constantly moving air.

Whereas in the Côte d’Or you’re constantly aware of a brooding, superintending shoulder of stone and soil dominating a low, wide valley. The heft of the hill is ubiquitous. Ventilating side valleys come and go. The forest on top of the hill rises and falls – and soon you’ll be puzzling over why vineyards start high in some places and lower in others.

This Article was originally published on Decanter

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