Robert Ampeau, an extraordinary anachronism among growers in Burgundy, died on December 5, 2004, of a stroke he suffered while working in his vines in Savigny lès Beaune. He was 83.
Ampeau was a legendary figure, and an admired colleague of the most important producers in Burgundy, including Aubert de Villaine, Lalou Bize-Leroy, Dominique Lafon, and Hubert de Montille, whose cellars all contain Ampeau wine. His death, however, was little noted in the popular wine press.
Though he continued to work until he died, Ampeau had gradually relinquished control of the estate to his son, Michel. The parcels they cultivated together in Meursault and Volnay are easy to identify, if not for the grass that grows between the rows to manage water uptake (Robert Ampeau was one of the first to incorporate the practice in Burgundy), than for the obvious fact that the vines are all pruned neatly, exactly forty centimeters higher than their neighbors,’ which is the height that their perfectly maintained, fifty year-old enjambeur (tractor) prunes them. The vines look like specimen plants; the enjambeur looks like a museum piece.
And the winery is always immaculate. Once, I arrived with my family in a brand new Peugeot 605 that I had just picked up in Tours. The car was a complimentary upgrade that the embarrassed rental agent offered us when the little Renault I had reserved couldn’t be found. I doubt that there were even 400km on the odometer, nevertheless when Robert came limping out to greet us (he had hip surgery shortly afterward), he was dragging behind a broken-down cardboard wine carton that he slid between the front wheels, to protect his pristine new pavement, just in case the engine leaked oil.
There was a familiar routine to tasting with Ampeau. Once greetings were exchanged we would clamber down the 26 steps to the frigid cellar under the house, where hundreds of thousands of bottles are crammed to the vaulted stone ceiling, and hundreds more lie in countless niches for small caches of older bottles, each labeled with a lot number scratched in chalk on a slate card.
Then we would be presented with the Ampeau matrix of available wines: eleven appellations down the y-axis on the left side of the page, and a dozen vintages across the x-axis along the top. Robert would ask, “Qu’est-ce-que vous voulez goûter?” (“What would you like to taste?”) Then he or his son Michel would ride off on an ancient one-speed bicycle carrying the requisite milk crates to gather up the bottles.
We tasted elegant wines from Meursault-Charmes, highly structured La Pièce Sous Le Bois, and majestic Perrières. And we listened as Ampeau recounted the history of the appellations and their names, of similarities between some vintages 20 years apart, and of the need to preserve acidity in the white wines so that they could age gracefully.
We tasted aristocratic Volnay-Santenots; sometimes lean, from vintages like 1980, sometimes spectacularly concentrated, cassis-like wines from vintages like 1976. He loved to talk about the weather, his neighbors, and wine tasting, though he rarely tasted with us, except to confirm that a bottle wasn’t corky. And he never denied a single request to taste a specific vintage; except once.
While visiting Ampeau in the mid-1990s, a friend and colleague noticed that the 1983s were still conspicuously absent from the price list. Unable to imagine why they had never been offered for sale, he asked to taste a representative sample. “Non, vous ne pouvez pas,” Robert told my friend, who wondered if he’d offended Ampeau with the request, but nevertheless asked, “Pourquoi pas?” Michel and Robert looked at each other… then laughed. “You may taste only one, if you insist,” replied Robert, “because all of the 1983s happen to be in the same cellar, and there are thousands of bottles of Auxey Duresses les Duresses 1983 blocking access to any of the others!”
Robert Ampeau never cared much about impressing the journalists (who sometimes visited, but mostly paid him little notice), and he was famously intolerant of self-important fools. One day, while sweeping the pavement at the entrance to his courtyard, dressed as always in his “bleu,” a big BMW, driven by a famous Michelin 3-Star chef pulled up alongside him. Down hummed the driver’s door glass, and the great man called to Ampeau from within (disrespectfully, using the familiar form of French as if he were addressing a servant or a child), “Est-ce-que tu connais la maison Michelot?” Ampeau, annoyed, pointed down the road in the general direction of Michelot’s place and muttered, “C’est par là.”
About 10 minutes later, the same BMW returned and pulled into the courtyard. The famous Maître Cuisinier emerged and again addressed Ampeau (again in the familiar form), “Est-ce-que tu peux nous faire déguster quelques vins?”
Ampeau looked up and replied, “We don’t do tasting here. Why don’t you (tu) try somewhere else?” So the great chef’s restaurant remains one of very few in Burgundy with no Ampeau wines in its cellar.
But Ampeau’s friends will mostly remember his good-natured, spontaneous generosity. Once, he took my daughter Kate, who was eight years old, and an avid collector of horse-chestnuts, milkweed pods, and other natural debris, on a bumpy ride through the vineyards of Volnay and Meursault, stopping at each of his parcels of vines to collect a perfect tiny cluster of hard, unripe grapes. Kate labeled each with the name of the vineyard it grew in: La Pièce sous le Bois, and Santenots, and Puligny-Montrachet les Combettes; and she cherished them along with the fossil brachiopods that she found in the yard behind the house we rented that summer in La Boussière sur Ouche.
For my fortieth birthday, Robert sent a mixed case of Meursault-Perrières, containing a single bottle from each of twelve significant vintages going back to 1952. Everyone in the group of visiting producers and friends, with whom I shared them three years later at a dinner in Philadelphia, were amazed by the wines. The only disappointment was a corky 1986, but the thirty year-old 1962 was a miracle of nature, and the 1952 was in better shape than I.
Invariably, if I expressed special admiration for a particular wine, a number of bottles would arrive on the next shipment in a case labeled: “Samples for Greg Moore.” Now I look forward to the bottle of Volnay-Santenots 1972, that I will drink every Christmas for the next several years.
Robert Ampeau was the proprietor of some of the most exalted vines in Burgundy, which he acknowledged was a great privilege, but he always described himself as un ouvrier (a worker). So it wasn’t surprising to hear that he was buried with no one but his wife and son present. When asked by his friend and neighbor Jean-Pierre Diconne why there was no funeral, Michel replied that it was his father’s wish. Robert had told him many times in his later years, that as a worker, it wasn’t his place to inconvenience others by obliging them to attend his burial.
