‘Let’s just look at one or two of the most famous vineyards on this little scrap of land, Burgundy’s Côte d’Or, or Golden Slope, as it slinks down southwards on the eastern flank of the Morvan hills for about 48 kilometres before fading away to the west. Let’s try to drink in a few of the scents and flavours that might have inspired a thousand years of devotion. South of Dijon, the first fine site is Napoleon’s favourite, Chambertin – a great sweep of vines under the stern brow of the dark, wooded ridge. Why is this a wine for soldiers and military metaphor? Well, at its best, this wine alone will explain why the world has been driven to a frenzy trying to recreate red burgundy with myriad plantings of Pinot Noir, from the chilly valleys of western Canada to the mountains of South Island New Zealand. I suppose you mustn’t stop people from aiming high, but great Chambertin is a wine from another era, long before gratification was instant, a wine that has no interest in offering a joyous young mouthful of bright fruit; it’s a wine contemptuous of fawning critics who don’t have the patience or the knowledge to gaze into its entrails almost more than its heart, to ponder, to admit to a respectful, even reverential confusion – and to wait. Are the world’s young wine Turks up to emulating that? Young Chambertin is a wine full of grinding teeth and choking, rasping power. What fruit it is prepared to show is like rough sweet juice squeezed from the skins of sloes and damsons and tiny shrivelled black cherries, disdainfully coated with a slap of tar. So wait. Wait 10 years. Wait 20. Wait until you can barely remember the grim unfriendliness of the youthful wine. Wait until you yourself are mature enough for the shock of its majesty. Now you will discover a thick scent, a fume almost, coiling up from the surface of the wine, exotic, darkly sweet, even floral, but like the season’s sweetest rose trampled beneath a dashing captain’s riding boots. And let the wine linger in your mouth. It may still start out as dark as blood and bittersweet as liquorice and black cherries, but as the wine warms and you relax, the fruit relaxes too, towards the autumn warmth of damsons and plums pendulous with ripeness as the wasps swarm. Wrap this in black chocolate, smear this with the perfumed sweet sludge of prunes, and maybe draw a line through it all with the delicious decay of well-hung game. And now try to recreate- ate this in Australia’s Yarra Valley, or California’s Russian River Valley, or New Zealand’s Central Otago. It only took Chambertin a thousand years or so to sort it out. Off you go. Let us know when you’re done.’