One Saturday morning recently, at an hour when I'd usually be flicking through the Irish Times or unconscious, I was on a pilgrimage. Church bells from the nearby village pealed quietly. Ahead was a large stone cross; to the right a slender wooden one, marking the outer limits of a squarish plot of ground. The name was on the wall, discreetly chiselled into honey-beige limestone. La Roma nee-Conti. The most famous, the most revered and probably the most fabulously expensive vineyard in the world.
It is less than two hectares - miniscule for such a mammoth reputation, but utterly typical of Burgundy, a region with so many subdivisions, so many tiny vineyard holdings, that a wine map of it induces a migraine. I've put off venturing far into Burgundy for years - deterred as much by the complexities of its 60 appellations as by uneven quality and scary prices. But this three-day visit organised by the BIVB - the area's wine promotion board - has finally done the trick. Since I got back, I've been sitting late at night, poring over doorstopper tomes like Clive Coates's Cote d'Or and Anthony Hanson's Burgundy, without so much as a glass of the precious stuff as a reward. This is serious.
It is easy to fall in love with the whole package - the place and the wines. The place partly because of the very fragmentation which makes the geography of Burgundy so maddeningly difficult to master. It's a long necklace of tiny villages - some spaced out on a filament of old roads, the rest threaded tightly together in the centre like a brilliant string of precious stones. You'll find the producers of some legendary bottlings operating with maybe just one family helper in a cellar not much bigger than a garage. And the wines - ah, the wines.
Three days were just enough to scratch the surface, whet the appetite. Flying into Lyon and driving north, we dipped first into the southernmost white wine region, the Maconnais, where gently undulating vineyards alternate with sunflowers, wheat and fields of Charollais. Worth looking out for if they happen to filter into Ireland are the wines of Domaine de la Soufrandise in Fuisse, where Nicolas and Francoise Melon use a high proportion of grapes from old vines to prouce an exuberant MaconFuisse and various characterful PouillyFuisses. We saw how the Melons and Hubert Laferrere in Lugny are following the approach of using grapes affected by noble rot to make their dry white wines richer.
From here it was a 150-mile drive north to Chablis, Ireland's favourite region. I hadn't realised just how wide the spectrum of flavours is - pungently mineral, citrussy, smoky, creamy, nutty, honeyed, depending on the very different soil types in this land of fossil-encrusted limestone as well as variations in winemaking. We tasted an array of styles - some vinified in stainless steel, some in oak - at Domaine Laroche, an old company which has grown into one of Chablis's largest, most professional producers (100 hectares!) under the driving force of Michel Laroche, its perfectionist fifth-generation president.
Then on to the village of Prehy, where Jean-Marc Brocard and his son Julien produce an extensive range of traditional Chablis, with no oak and a down-to-earth approach. "We're not intellectual enough to know about technology," says Mr Brocard. "We just use our eyes, our noses. . . our instincts." Maybe we should drink to that.
Now into the red zone. A day and a bit in the Cote d'Or - that 30-mile strip of Burgundy's finest grand cru and premier cru vineyards - feels rather like spending just five minutes at Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. Crazy. Tantalising. It was logical to focus on Beaune, the town that has been a wine capital for centuries, harbouring among its narrow streets the fine old houses of the leading negociants. Traditionally, Burgundy's merchants were mainly engaged in buying in, from countless growers, grapes or wine which they blended and bottled. These days many of the big names also own and manage the vineyards which produce their top wines.
First stop Latour, where three-quarters of the negoce business is based on white wine, and three-quarters of the wines produced from the company's own domaines are red. Bypassing the modern winery on the edge of town, we drove out past the famous hill of Corton, up through the tiny, slumbering village of Aloxe-Corton to Chateau Corton Grancey. Here most of the Latour domaine reds are vinified in a wonderful cellar where the sixth Louis Latour houses his private cache of 200,000 bottles dating back to the 1860s in conditions of cool, damp, cobwebby perfection.
At Bouchard Pere et Fils, the company with the most substantial vineyard holdings in the Cote d'Or, there was time to say a quick hello to Joseph Henriot, the champagne magnate who bought the firm in 1995. His commitment to quality is obviously shared by winemaker Philippe Prost - a delightful man whose openness and clarity contrived, for one fleeting hour, to make the intricacies underlying Bouchard's most complex and compelling wines seem simple.
To finish with, two extremes - polar opposites, even. So vast is the company of Boisset in Nuits-St-Georges, Burgundy's biggest by several miles, that the dozen wines tasted at dinner under a dozen different labels barely represented the spread of familiar names now under the Boisset umbrella: Pierre Ponnelle, Jaffelin, Charles Vienot, J. Moreau, Bouchard Aine, Mommessin, to mention but a few. Probably not wines to make your heart skip a beat - but companies like this are important because, through economies of scale, they can provide some decent Burgundy at everyday prices. It's the sublime stuff, though, at prices best forgotten, that constitutes the magic of Burgundy. In Gevrey-Chambertin, Bernard Dugat-Py and his wife Jocelyne have worked for over 20 years to transform a small negociant business into a domaine producing outstanding wines. They take no holidays, saving instead to buy a few more rows of vines each year - old ones, preferably.
Alas, the scale of production is so small - as little as one barrel or two barrels in some cases - that we're unlikely ever to see these wines in Ireland. And I, for one, couldn't afford them. (Even in France, the Mazis-Chambertin Grand Cru sells at well over £100.) But bottles like these are the essence of Burgundy - heady, sensuous, unforgettable.
"What are you aiming for in your wines?" one of us asked Dugat-Py.
"Pleasure," he said.
Simple as that.