My somewhat fickle palate seems to be temporarily drifting away from New World wines. I have been on a mission in the last few months to specifically hunt out bargain Burgundies.

So where is Burgundy?

If you are looking at a map of France, find Paris and drop a little bit south and east. This is Auxerre where the region starts. It stretches south in a narrow strip made up of several areas. North to south they are Chablis, Cote de Nuits, Cotes de Beaune, Cotes de Chalonnaise, Maconnaise and Beujolais. Cote just means slope or hill. Once you have reached Lyon in the south the region has ended. The grape varieties are mainly Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, then Gamay, Aligote and Pinot Blanc.

I am predominantly a red wine drinker. I love the more quaffable complex Pinot Noir and easy drinking Gamay found in Burgundy. The bottles are always difficult to decipher at first. Unlike New World wines, you normally just get the region on the label not a whisper of the grape variety.

Terroir is everything in France, in other words the French 'sense of place' and geographical region is all important.

Far south in Burgundy you end up in Beaujolais (although there is debate as to whether this is part of Bourgogne) which is mainly the Gamay grape. Georges Duboeuf is a well known large Beaujolais producer I seem to drink lots of.

So with this flurry into the Old World I had my cousin over to dinner the other night and purchased a bottle of Fleurie (a Beaujolias, so the Gamay grape). He in turn produced an Amarone, a wine I have not had in a long while.

Amarone looks innocuous enough from the label. It plainly declares that it is a Valpolochella (from the Veneto region in North east Italy), and I always associate that with light fruity wine made from a blend mostly of the Corvina grape. This could not be further from the truth.
My Fleurie had just stepped into the ring with Mike Tyson.

Amarone is made from dried grapes. They are allowed to basically turn into raisins on straw mats or drying chambers before being made into wine . This accounts for the power of the wine. At 15% plus, it is a big hitter.

We polished off the Fleurie before the meal and then drank the Amarone with the food. It was delicious - deep, dark and dangerous. Amarone literally means the 'big bitter'. It was rumoured to have come about by chance when a producer was trying to produce sweet Recioto wine and ended up fermenting the dried grapes too long, turning all the sugar into alcohol.

Interestingly, Hannibal Lecter actually drank Amarone with his fava beans in the book, not Chianti as depicted in the film.

In truth my real 'big bitter' last week was the CAMRA Cambridge Beer festival with over 200+ real ales to sample. There was some wine on offer from a local producer at Chilford Vineyards which was deep and heavy, but would still have been knocked for six by the Amarone.

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