Refusing to Follow the Script: Jean-Marie Guffens
BY NEAL MARTIN |
The Cut-Price Wedding
Let me tell you two things about my nuptials. First, our entire budget was a fraction of most couples’ expenditure on flowers alone because neither bride nor groom had two pennies to rub together. The catering came courtesy of supermarket Marks & Spencer, the wedding dress was sewn together by a nimble-fingered friend, and the reception was held at Leigh-on-Sea Sailing Club, in a first-floor bar with beer-dappled, threadbare carpet and Formica tables that looked funereal should a puff of cloud blemish the sky.
Second, it was one of the best weddings ever – 100 points.
Having serendipitously chosen the sunniest weekend of 2005, we were gifted a glorious vista across a yawning estuary teeming with seagulls and kamikaze kite-surfers. The DJ moved his wheels of steel onto the outside deck, which was immediately packed with friends and family linked arm in arm, wailing like strangled cats to Jefferson Starship’s irresistible “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” The M&S prawn sandwiches were wolfed down, and the congregation, sweltering in the summer heat, naturally slaked their thirst with wine. This resulted in inebriation on an epic scale. For sure, the fermented grape juice had been cheap, but boy, was it delicious. And now, today, the man who made that fermented grape juice was sitting opposite me, 14 years, 5 months and no more marriages later.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, may I present to you the irascible, the indefatigable, the one and only Jean-Marie Guffens-Heynen.
I fell in
love with Guffens’ wines during the salad days of my wine career. The catalyst
was a winemaker dinner at Ransom’s Dock in the late 1990s. How the audience gasped
at the unrepeatable anecdotes and the spray-graffiti of expletives! Guffens has
always been a walking, talking exclamation point. But playing the enfant
terrible makes you look a fool if not backed up with wines that deliver.
Guffens’s wines do not deliver. No, they over-deliver. They represent some of the best value-for-money wines not just in Burgundy, but in France.
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The outspoken Jean-Marie Guffens has spent almost four decades making superb Mâconnais wines. This retrospective would always be entertaining. But what do Blade Runner and Pink Floyd have to do with it?
