BURGUNDY: The Purple Harvest Comes In

THE morning fog lifted. All along the Cote d'Or, the gorgeous Golden Slope of vineyards that tints eastern France for 30 miles, the autumn sun beamed warm rays on the deserted towns. Except for a pair of black-clad grandmothers gossiping on the cobblestones and a couple of overalled, rubber-booted winegrowers closing a deal over a jug of Burgundy in the Cafe de la Cote d'Or, everybody in Nuits-St. Georges (pop. 3,600)-men, women and children, the schoolmaster and even the cure-was out harvesting the new vintage in the heart of France's Burgundy.

"To speak of Burgundy," say the French, "is to speak of wine." The bulk of Burgundy's wine flows to the tables of Lyon, Paris and the world from the high-yielding southern slopes of Beaujolais. But the best of Burgundy, the lordly, full-bodied, velvet reds that made Rabelais shout "How good of God to give us of this juice!", the wines that George Meredith called "the best that man can drink," come only from a 12,000-acre belt of tiny plots stretching in either direction from Nuits-St. Georges along the Golden Slope.

There last week, as fast as they could fill their boat-shaped baskets with the honeycombs of tiny black Pinot grapes, the harvesters spilled them into mule-drawn carts. At Montrachet -whose wine, said Dumas, "ought to be drunk kneeling, with head bared"-around Beaune, at Meursault, Romanee-Conti, Vougeot and Gevrey-Chambertin-each hillside as famous in France as any of Napoleon's battlefields, it was the same. Off went the grapes, the best first, to be pressed in cellars at the foot of each small field. From the vats within these reeking temples of Bacchus rose the sibilance of juice astir in natural ferment. Once again began the special miracle which the mysteries of soil, sun, slopes and ancestral skills have annually brought to pass in Burgundy since the Romans first planted grapes on the Golden Slope. Andre Noblet, red-faced cellar-master of the Romanee-Conti vineyards, whose 4½ acres produce the world's most prized red wine ($11.57 a bottle for the 1953), sniffed, sampled and thanked heaven for at least three weeks of sunshine after the coldest summer in decades. Said Andre: "1956 is likely to be a small year-but almost half the wine's quality is in the work, and we shall nurse ours as we would our children."

Of the finest wines, produced from severely pruned vines, there can never be great quantities. The sad fact was, however, that a vine-killing winter and a rainy, grape-thwarting summer had turned 1956 into a bad year for all western Europe's winegrowers-a disastrous one for Bordeaux and West Germany, a poor one in both quantity and quality for Burgundy. The government has 'already given Burgundy producers permission to strengthen some of their poorer grades by chaptalization. a doctoring process devised by one Jean Chaptal for adding sugar during fermentation to build up a wine's alcoholic content.