Spend some time around Mâcon to discover lesser-known, better-value fine French wines

The closer we get to the UK's departure from the European Union (29 March 2019), the longer grows the lists of unknowns. Assuming Bencard employment unaffected, one of the biggest worries in our household is what will happen to French wine imports.

Optimists in the leave camp insist trade will continue as normal. I expect that inexpensive, everyday wine will always find its way to British tables from somewhere. But since Burgundy lay directly in the path to our holiday, we thought we'd take the "better safe than sorry" approach on the good stuff. The cellar is now topped up with fine wines that will peak in the next two to seven years. If the post-Brexit economy does go to hell in a hand basket, at least we'll be serving some great wine at our dinner parties. We'll also have our memories of discovering two wonderful new (to us) wine regions: the Mâconnais and Northern Beaujolais.

The Mâconnais is Burgundy, but not as most people know it. The region's most famous wines come from a stretch of magical road on either side of the charming town of Beaune. (I've writing several times of this region in the past; just search "Burgundy" for more.)

This year, we had two objectives: Rounding out the high quality white wine in our cellar and continuing my husband's efforts to convince me that light reds deserve as much love as their big, bold cousins. This region was a great place to accomplish both, at much lower prices than in the two famous côtes to the north.

BASE CAMP
We based ourselves in Mâcon for three nights. The town that gives its name to the region is a thriving administration centre, more modern and less charming than Beaune. It does, however, gain ambiance from lying next to a broad, placid and picturesque stretch of the River Saône. In the old part of town, buildings are painted in cheery pastel colours; it's as if you've drifted over some invisible line into The South. There are doubtless scores of boutique hotels and vineyard-based accommodation in the area, but we went for practicality. The Mercure is on the river, affordable, a pleasant walk from the town centre, with comfortable rooms and plenty of parking. While the web site says they have a restaurant, it's really only a banqueting facility for group tours. A ten-minute stroll takes you to the best place to start your explorations in the region, whether or not you're staying at the Mercure: the Maison Mâconnaise des Vins.

This complex along the D906 main road comprises the offices of the local association of wine growers, a shop representing local growers that offers a range of tastings and a restaurant.

A large dining room and a broad veranda for al fresco meals serve up local specialties with ... naturally ... an impressive wine list. (American visitors will be amused to see that the main building's white, columned front gives it the look of an antebellum mansion, saying Macon, Georgia more than Mâcon, France.) We've always believed that the best way to understand local wines is to go to a good local restaurant and let the waiters help with introductions via food pairings. The Maison didn't let us down. In fact, we were so delighted we ate here two of our three nights in town.

Burgundy is famous for its Charolais cattle and their beef dominates the menu here, from tartare to grilled fillets and unctuous, marrow-filled bones. That gave us the excuse to try two reds new to us: Saint-Amour, one of the Beaujolais Cru, and Mercurey, a Burgundy from the Côte Chalonnaise. The former, with its fruity, smooth and slightly spicy profile, was to be our favourite discovery of the trip. We needed to taste the whites as well, of course, so chose our starters accordingly from an impressive range of salads, terrines and foie gras. It was here that we first encountered the range of wines that fall into the category of Pouilly Fuissé and started to explore what we might like to buy.

The shop below, of course, makes that easy. Curiously, however, the place doesn't seem to be attuned to foreign tourism. There's a regular flow of locals picking up stuff for their own consumption, but the fact that any information beyond the basics came to us in French limits the market. Fortunately, between the two of us we can get by fairly well, so were able to use our experience here as basic training before heading out into the fields. And, thankfully, for a bit of buying on our last day, after we discovered just how challenging tasting would be.

Thanks to a blazingly hot, sunny and dry summer, the 2018 grape harvest is, on average, two weeks early. Makers are ecstatic at the concentrated sugars in their fruit and are predicting one of the great vintages. So rather than catching makers with time on their hands as they waited for that final ripening, we drove past fields buzzing with pickers and tasting rooms closed tight. "Je suis vraiment désolé, c'est la vendage" was the phrase of the moment.

DAZZLING WHITES
The fact that Burgundy makes great whites should come as no surprise. Mersault, Montrachet and
Chablis are legendary names. Pouilly Fuissé belongs amongst them. It's also Burgundy, also made from Chardonnay, but lesser known. This is possibly because there are no Grand Cru in the Mâconnais. Officially, it's because the growers here never bothered to apply when the formal designations were being made. According to local stories, it's because this part of France was below the German occupation line in WW2. In an attempt to get locals on side, German High Command had excluded Grand Crus from the wines that occupying forces were allowed to commandeer. Thus there was a scramble in occupied territories to give every field they could justify the top classification. Below the occupation line, there was no need ... and farmers had better things to do.

Given that French classifications rarely change once set, a fluke of history means that the wines of this region are forever excluded from the official premier league. That's a great thing for the buyer, who can find the same qualities of Burgundy's bigger names ... including the ability to mature to complex richness ... at a much smaller price.

Start at L'Atrium in Solutré for an introduction to the region. This shop represents 450 growers in the area and, most importantly, offers structured tastings to introduce you to differences in terroir. The generic term of Pouilly Fuissé, it turns out, covers five "climats" (villages and their surrounding area), each of which have slightly different qualities in their finished wines. Moving from northwest to southeast, and from highest elevation to lowest, these are Vergisson, Solutré, Pouilly, Fuissé, Chaintré. The more famous Fuissé was our favourite, but we also like the Vergisson and the Pouilly.

L'Atrium plain labels a representative set of wines from the climats for their tastings, regularly changing producers, to give you typical flavours. You can buy these, or take advice from them and buy from their stock of other producers. We kept exploring, in search of a vigneron open despite the vendage.

It took a while to find one, but we had a glorious drive en route. This is a much wilder, more dramatic landscape than the gentle slopes of Northern Burgundy. Great rock escarpments jut up from the valley floor. Roads twist through deep forest. Villages cling to steep hills. The rock of Solutré stands at the heart of the region, both a popular destination for hikers and a dramatic element in the landscape that you can navigate by.

By sheer luck we stumbled into Pierre Vessigaud's tasting room while looking for someone else. This was exactly the kind of maker we were looking for: the fifth-generation producing here, one of the first in region to go organic in the mid-'90s, working across multiple climats in the AOC and with a vineyard in Saint-Amour, still hand-picking their grapes and dedicated to high-quality, boutique production. Vessigaud provides Pouilly Fuissé to BA's first class cabins, and ended up being the producer from whom we made our largest single purchase of the trip.

They also pointed us towards L'O des Vignes in Fuissé for lunch. Set in a pretty, early 20th-century farm house on the village's main street, there's a choice of two options here: a Michelin-starred restaurant at the back,  where the original interiors have been transformed into something surprisingly sleek and modern, or a classically traditional wine bar facing the street with oak tables and menus on blackboards. Having just shot the days budget Chez Vessigaud, we opted for the wine bar. Good, but unexceptional, traditional food with a great wine list. I suspect we missed out by not going to the full restaurant, which had tables available and was offering an intriguing multi-course menu. We noted that this was a restaurant with rooms, and it might be an ideal place to stop off on some future visit.

LIGHT REDS
By not bothering to pursue grand cru registration, you can argue that the makers of Pouilly Fuissé undermined themselves with a lack of ambition. In the Beaujolais, you might say they suffer from too much of it.

In the 1980s the Beaujolais Nouveau marketing campaign exceeded everyone's expectations, and suddenly the world was drinking far too much bad, young wine that never should have crossed the vigneron's threshold. By 2001, a backlash against Nouveau saw producers destroying more than a million cases, since nobody was buying and this cheap and cheerful stuff doesn't age. Later in the decade, mega-producer George Deboeuf ended up in court on a charge of mis-labelling after older vintages were mixed in to make a bad 2004 harvest taste better, while other producers were hauled up for illegally spiking their production with sugar. Beaujolais' reputation was at its nadir.

The region has been fighting back by getting serious buyers to focus on its ten cru. These are the most acclaimed wines in the area, grown in the foothills of the Beaujolais mountains and all produced from the notoriously tricky Gamay grape. (Treated well, it can be sublime, but in less talented hands it's often thin and bitter.) Tellingly, the cru tend not to put Beaujolais on their labels and are legally not allowed to produce Nouveau.

The cru, from the lightest to the heaviest, are: Brouilly, Régnié, Chiroubles, Côte de Brouilly, Fleurie, Saint-Amour, Chénas, Juliénas, Morgon and Moulin-à-Vent. The first three are generally thought to be good for three years in the cellar, the next three for four years and the last for up to 10, though some Moulin-à-Vent is considered as good as Burgundian Grand Cru and could mature for up to 20 years.

While Beaujolais is an enormous region, stretching more than 35 miles, the cru are all clustered together in an area just over the border from the Mâconnais, making this a logical inclusion addition to a Southern Burgundy trip.

Having learned our lesson with the harvest, we concentrated on restaurants and wine shops for our tastings and found that our favourites were Fleurie, Saint-Amour and Juliénas. With time running short, and cases of the last two already in the boot, we headed to Fleurie to taste more.

Fleurie is a pretty little town about half way up a big hill, with a church at the crossroads, a tiny market on Saturdays where locals sell bread, produce and crafts out of the back of their cars, and several shops offering tastings from multiple makers. We stumbled into La Maison du Cru Fleurie, primarily because they have the good fortune to share a door with the local tourism office.

La Maison is a small place representing just 25 of the scores of domaines making Fleurie. Each day, a different domaine has control of the shop. And though they're happy to recommend and sell you other producers' bottles, you'll really be focusing on whoever the luck of the draw gave you on the day you come in.

Fate dealt us a good hand. The Domaine de Chante-Terre not only has a surprising range of wines from across their relatively tiny (6 acres) vineyards, but had a son of the household with enough English to explain the variations in terroir and vinification that led to differences in what we were tasting. We fell in love with their 2017 gold-medal winning "Florence et Jacques Colin", the wine so good the makers put their own names on it. We learned that they're passionate about making traditional, elegant wines from their 60-year-old vines, with a blackcurrant nose, flowery minerality and a raspberry coulis finish.

While I couldn't have come up with that myself, the description fit. Light yet flavourful, fruity yet well-rounded, and should be even better in a year or two. We also fell in love with the price. At £11 a bottle it was some of the cheapest wine we bought the whole trip, even though it was just as good, and had similar aging potential, as the more expensive Saint-Amour, Juliénas and Mercurey already in the boot of the car. Had we come to Fleurie first, I suspect our purchasing profile would have been very different.

THE DANGERS OF REPETITION
Our least enjoyable day was, ironically, the one we'd forecast to be special. Five years earlier, on our first trip together to Burgundy, my husband and I had stumbled into a small restaurant in a relatively-undiscovered village in the Cote de Nuits to have not only one of our favourite meals of the trip (review here), but to discover our favourite Burgundian red. Restaurant Au Clos Napoleon has loomed large in our memory ever since, while every bottle in the case of their own-label Fixin that we brought home both improved with age, and reminded us of a magical day.

We thought we'd do it again. We failed.

Remembering a cosy, almost-empty place, we didn't bother to book. Mistake. Clearly, in the five years since our visit this spot has been discovered. And heavily refurbished into something far more trendy and fashionable than our memory. It was packed. No tables available. We should have come earlier. (It was 1:45.) But we could still buy wine at their shop down the hill, which was due to re-open from their lunch break at 2.

So we wandered down the hill we'd just hiked up, stopping at every place that served food looking for options. (He wandered. I limped. Entranced by the view on the ascent, I'd tripped, scraped my knee badly and twisted my ankle. I was in pain and just wanted to sit down for a bit.) No food available anywhere. Second mistake: forgetting that the French are inflexible about their lunch time. If you don't eat between noon and 2, you're out of luck. Sadly, they are not as rigorous about returning to work as they are about enforcing dining times, because by 2:15 the vigneron's office for Au Clos Napoleon was still closed. Hungry, angry at myself for not planning better and in increasing pain, we called quits on Fixin and headed towards Beaune, looking for other food options. Of which, in that whole 18 mile stretch, we saw none.

Ironically, we were saved by another memory from that 2013 trip. There'd been a McDonalds by the Mercure where we'd stayed. Yes, on the day I'd been anticipating a long, lingering Burgundian blow-out, I lunched at McDonalds. But not, I admit, McDonalds as we know it. This one had table service and a menu de chevre. I think the franchise around the world would benefit from goat's cheese salads and wraps.

So what had we been doing that saw us turning up so late in Fixin? We'd spent the morning at the Cassisium in Nuits-Saint-Georges. A sister facility to the Imaginarium wine experience we'd so enjoyed last time (more here), this modern, hands-on museum tells the story of one of Burgundy's other great products: cassis. Turns out that back in the 19th century, before demand for Burgundian reds became so great that every inch of arable land was given over to vines, Burgundy produced almost as many black currants as grapes. Black currants and Pinot Noir flourish in the same conditions. And though there are records of the fruit being used for cordials and medicines back to the Middle Ages, it wasn't until the late 19th century that the industry took off. Knocking back boozy fruit distillations became incredibly popular with fashionable types who liked to hang at the Moulin Rouge and buy Monets, and Burgundy's sweet yet alcoholic Creme de Cassis was a favourite. The Mayor of Dijon, one Canon Kir, created a cocktail by mixing it with local white wine and serving it at all government functions. The rest, as they say, is history.

As the Imaginarium does with wine, the Cassissium mixes sights, smells, films and games to take you through the history of the drink, then lands you in a tasting room to sample. Védrenne is the company behind the museum, producing more than fifty different crèmes, liqueurs and syrups as well as regular and super-concentrated Cassis. You can sample them all here, although sugar content will kill your palate after about six and too much enthusiasm could land you in a diabetic coma. Suffice to say, if you appreciate the mixology behind a good cocktail, this place is a playground. 

And so we played. And bought. And then we wandered over to the tasting room at the Imaginarium. And got into some interesting conversations with the staff about the French buying Californian vineyards. And then we discovered a Burgundian sparkling red. And suddenly is was 1:20, and we really needed to get to lunch, and then we parked in the wrong place, and then I fell, and then ... there was no room at the Clos.

Oh, well. There are no bad times, only good stories. If I had it to do over again, I would have made a reservation and watched the clock. Or, maybe, I would forget the whole idea of recapturing Fixin and would have investigated Brouilly instead.