feature / wine and words / Hospices de Beaune


HOSPICES DE BEAUNE


by Judy O’Kane


The place looks nothing like itself. Stalls crowd street corners, dried trompettes, girolles, and cèpes stacked on harvest baskets. Wine labels


stretch into backlit lamps, christening candles almost, but lighter, as though they might float up across the square. Vendors huddle


around copper pots over open flames, their hands wrapped around vin chaud, evaporating in the November air. In the market,


the auction continues, bidders raise red paddles the size of table tennis bats, barrel after barrel supporting the Hospices


(the wines themselves hardly yet fermented). Upstairs, a TV camera is trained on tapestries hung for the occasion,


on celebrities behind tables along the stage as if taking testimony at a Senate hearing. Behind the camera


wine critics tap reports across Europe, Asia, the US. Beyond open Hospices tasting bottles: a tea urn by a white


plate laid out with petites madeleines, molded in the shape of a pilgrim’s shell, as though at any moment Marcel Proust


might present himself in the press room. In Bistrot Bourguignon the wines are showing more smoke, drinking darker, deeper.


A gilt mirror carves an archway


in the wall, confusing the real and the reverse. Outside, in the chiaroscuro, vendors’ faces


glow over copper cauldrons, medieval, almost grotesque. The whole place is parading itself, a carnival, circling


in celebration, chaos contained, the whole heaving mass of us heating and cooling, disappearing into the night.


Photography by Jon Wyand 116 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023


Picture Credit


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