The
BURGUNDY WINE
Institute
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The Burgundy Wine Institute is a 'glass-in-hand' exploration of the world's most complex and confounding wine region.
In collaboration with Elden Wine and the BIVB Ecole des Vins, the Burgundy Wine Institute is based in Beaune in the heart of the Burgundy's Cote d'Or.
We offer a range of intensive
tasting-based courses to meet the needs of Burgundy lovers, whether amateur
or professional. From traditional cellars to controlled-condition tasting
rooms, from the vineyard to the winery, our program takes the student into
the real world of
Burgundy Wine.
We contend that there is no other way to understand Burgundy than to walk the vineyards with the people who make the wine, and to line up bottles and taste with those who shape Burgundian culture.
Classes are small, and limited to fifteen participants.
All of our programs have at their base intensive introductory sessions with the Ecole des Vins de Bourgogne, the continuing education branch of the BIVB, whose impressive staff of instructors includes oenologists, geologists, chemists, technicians, university lecturers and master tasters. These first sessions take place at the BIVB facilities in Beaune, in professional tasting rooms, designed and equipped for optimum sensorial analysis. You will leave these early courses well prepared for the field work that lies ahead.
Burgundy Wine Institute field sessions are based around experts from various segments of the wine world. We’ll travel, for example, with a ‘courtier’ from client to client to learn about barrel tasting young wines. Or perhaps a morning session in a restaurant with a ‘sommelier’ to learn about combining food and wine, in preparation for a guided ‘degustation’ over lunch. We’ll meet and taste with all strata of Burgundy producers from small single-handed domains, to the vanguard ‘negociant-eleveur’ wineries, and on through to the mega-negociant houses that control the market and cover the planet.
We’ll walk in the vines, and climb down into the cellars; we’ll see barrels being coopered, and we’ll join in the rhythm of the winery year.
Because every aspect of the wine world influences every other, the Burgundy Wine Institute teaches skills intended to help you piece together the big picture.
And once you are there, you are in. Burgundy will no longer seem daunting and confounding, but rather a place you have made you own. And every cork you pull will carry you back.
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For the past twelve years Elden Wine has been telling you that it is possible to train your palate, and learn to appreciate Burgundian culture as a Burgundian does…..even from a distance. But the
truth is, it’s difficult to get good source material in a world where
wine writers shape opinion, and the distribution system supports them
right to the point of purchase. If you have a wine merchant whom
you trust and whose palate is similar to yours, you are one of the Most wine
lovers, however, find Burgundy wine very much ‘hit or miss’. The problem
is that one good ‘hit’ of Burgundy will keep you coming back.
So what’s the solution? How do you avoid the ‘misses’?
PHOTOS: THANKS TO MIKE LONG and |
