Chef Daniel Boulud raises La Paulée de New York founder Daniel Johnnes in the air at the inaugural event in 2000.
As the annual celebration of Burgundy wine known as La Paulée kicked off its 25th anniversary gala in New York this spring, an eager mix of winemakers and collectors filed into Pier Sixty, the cavernous event space on the Hudson River, toting precious finds from their cellars. Every one of them had brought wine to share. As they inched up to the check-in table, dinner seating assignments were doled out and bottles taken in.
In the “war room,” the main staging area at the back of the house, a brigade of sommeliers processed the deliveries—tagging, uncorking, chilling, and tasting through every bottle. “It gets pretty harried, pretty crazy, pretty quickly,” said La Paulée’s Director of Operations Raj Vaidya, leading a behind-the- scenes tour.
Some 50 sommeliers from across the country, many among the biggest names in the business, had signed on to work the event, happy to pitch in unpaid, given the wines pour—and taste—at what may be the world’s most over-the-top BYO dinner party.
With top Burgundies sometimes pricier than a new car these days, for many wine professionals many of the bottles passed around freely at La Paulée would be otherwise entirely out of reach.
Paulée de Meursault President Antoine Jobard pours from a jeroboam of his wine. Photo by James C French; Courtesy of La Paulee.
The cult of Burgundy that has exploded in the US over the last 30 years owes much to this annual bacchanal—catered this year by chefs Daniel Boulud, César Troisgros, and Jungyhun Park. What began as a small gathering of niche collectors and Burgundy winemakers in the spring of 2000 has blown up into a global phenomenon and spawned a consulting and events business with tentacles across the wine world. La Paulée (paulée refers to a traditional grape harvest gathering popular in the Burgundy region) isn’t just a banquet today, but a full week of affiliated dinners and tastings. And it has inspired countless imitators, with copycat events springing up in Singapore, Taiwan, and Australia, among other places.
For American Burgundy nuts, the New York galas, and their sister banquets in San Francisco, have become the social events of the year, known for their carnival spirit and the extreme generosity of their guests. Sharing is the name of the game here. Large-format magnums and jeroboams are quickly drained as they make their way across the room, the table-hopping growing more frenzied as the night wears on.
At the New York gala this year, Jay McInerney, the novelist-turned–wine columnist, wobbled through the crowd clutching a magnum of Domaine Dujac, with a frayed label, from 1979. “This is the rarest wine in the room,” he boomed, pouring out tastes. “I have no idea when or where I got it.” A young collector approached with his own baller bottle. “I’ll trade you my La Tache for your Dujac,” he offered.
The New York La Paulée didn’t pioneer its raucous, BYO format, but it did introduce it to a world beyond Burgundy. The ticketed American event is modeled on the invite- only La Paulée de Meursault—the original French La Paulée—a BYO harvest feast for winemakers and their friends held in the village of Meursault since 1923.
Daniel Johnnes first imported the concept while running the wine program at Montrachet in Tribeca. He had been traveling to Burgundy since the 1980s, where he fell in with a tight-knit group of winemakers who organized long wine-soaked dinners whenever he visited. At one dinner, in 1991, he floated the idea of flying the whole gang to New York for a Burgundy dinner. “In that period, we didn’t travel,” recalls Jean-Pierre de Smet of Domaine de L’Arlot, the sort of ringleader of the group. “So, the idea seemed completely crazy, but we said, of course, of course. It was a crazy idea—to fly all the way to New York for a dinner—and we loved it.”
Now an annual tradition, Johnnes is tossed into the air by the team of chefs led by Daniel Boulud. Photo by Lisa Gallo for La Paulée.
The dinner, in the spring of 1992, was a huge hit—among both paying guests and the winemakers they mixed with. It was the first kernel of what would become the New York La Paulée, held eight years later in a banquet room at the W Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Aubert de Villaine, the enigmatic owner of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, poured his wines there that year—and has been a loyal supporter of the event ever since. “There were 12 producers in all,” recalls Johnnes. “Daniel Boulud agreed to cook, so we had some star power, and we got about 70 people. I lost a lot of money, but it felt great.”
Johnnes moved from Montrachet to Daniel Boulud’s New York restaurants in 2005, where he oversaw the wine program while building a sideline business, Pressoir, around La Paulée. That enterprise soon came to eclipse everything else. Today Johnnes and his team work as consultants to the Boulud empire while organizing wine celebrations across the country, transferring the La Paulée format to other wine regions with La Fete Champagne, La Tablée (focused on the Rhône), and the new Convivio del Vino (expanding to Italy for the first time).
The arrival scene at Castello di Solomeo. Photo courtesy of Castello Di Solomeo.
And last fall Johnnes’s organization moved further afield, with La Paulée Solomeo, an invite-only extravaganza mixing wine, fashion, and food, in designer Brunello Cucinelli’s company town in Umbria. The two-day event officially marked the new vintage of Cucinelli’s own wine project, Castello di Solomeo, but was really a celebration of French and Italian luxury, mixing friends of the fashion house with some of the most celebrated winemakers in France, brought in by Johnnes and his team (the Krug Champagne and Château Lafite Rothschild were free-flowing). There was no BYO component to this Paulée, but the convivial spirit endured. “They liked the concept of a Paulée, the broader meaning of a paulée, which is bringing people together,” said Johnnes, of Cucinelli and his team. Plans are underway to bring the event back next year.
At the Castello di Solomeo Welcomes La Paulée Festival, guests enjoyed iconic wines from Champagne Krug, Château Cheval Blanc, Château Lafite Rothschild, and Champagne Delamotte. Photo courtesy of Castello Di Solomeo.
And Johnnes’s Pressoir business continues to evolve as the ultimate Burgundy champion, bringing a new generation of professionals to the region through a sommelier scholarship program, and building bridges to young winemakers there, to ensure the party goes on. “It’s really the time now that the baton is being passed,” he says. “It’s going to happen to me sometime too. I want to ensure a future for my team as well.”
