I touched down in Paris and drove through the vineyards of Champagne en route to Burgundy. I'd been invited to attend the first Burgundy Educator Accreditation Program with the official L'Ecole de Vins de Bourgogne. There were four of us in attendance representing three markets, the United States, Asia and the United Kingdom.

There were two from Great Britain (two co-instructors at a wine school in London), a Chinese gentleman who lived and worked in Singapore and yours truly. It was a mini United Nations of sorts as our hosts were French, the official language of diplomacy and, this week, the official language of wine.

We were to be guinea pigs of a sort, the first to undergo an in-depth program to "teach the teacher" about the wines of Burgundy. There was a test at the end, and if we were successful, lovely diplomas. We gathered early each day with sharpened pencils, eager palates and inquisitive minds.

The first seminar of the day set the stage for the entire week.

Burgundy is complex, but not complicated. There are rules, and for every rule there is an exception. Nothing could be more simple or logical really. You just need to open your mind and wrap your head around this basic and fundamental truth. If you can intellectually span this great divide, you can delve deep into the heart of Burgundy.

The words were both an open invitation and a challenge. Could we stretch and grow? They wanted us to.

The French gifted the wine world with the concept of "terroir," a unique coming together of geology, topography, climate, vine and craftsmanship. This term, however, takes on a whole new meaning in Burgundy.

The region encompasses (from north to south), Chablis, Cote du Nuits, Cote de Beaune, the Cote Chalonnaise and the Maconnais.

Beaujolais is currently a red-haired step-child, living at home but with his own private entrance.

The distance between the two poles is approximately 200 miles and 45 million years.

Grows with fish

You see, Burgundy sits in the Paris basin, a geography best described as a pile of elliptical serving plates that stack from smallest to largest. The heart of this terroir is a granite massif that is 220 million years old. The northern part of Beaujolais rests on this soil, a soil that spills over into the southern part of the Maconnais in Pouilly-Fuisse.

From the Maconnais heading north, the soils, in ever more youthful rings, speak of an age when an emerald tropical lagoon deposited its shellfish and compacted these sea creatures into white and yellow marls. The dinosaurs wandered and were lost to the Jurassic 195 million to 160 million years ago. These long-forgotten layers of earth were raised to the surface in the Cote d'Or when the Alps were born. The little oysters of the Cretaceous multiplied, died and resurfaced as the white Kimmeridgean marls of Chablis.

It is for this reason that the Burgundians take great issue with putting "chardonnay" on their wine labels. Yes, the white wines of Burgundy are made from chardonnay (naturally, there are exceptions to this rule), but simply stating that the white wines of Burgundy are made from chardonnay perpetrates a grave injustice to what is uncorked.

The fruity and delicately floral chardonnay of the Maconnais, whose roots touch a geological history 195 million years old, is quite different from the rich and weighty chardonnay of the Cote du Beaune, whose essence is extracted from soils that date back 170 million years. And both differ markedly from the chardonnay of Chablis, which takes its verve and electricity from the small bivalves that lived 140 million years ago.

The concept of "terroir" was something the Cistercian and Benedictine monks embraced as they worked the Burgundian vineyards during the Middle Ages. Clever, observant and contemplative, they noticed differences in the plots of earth they tended and began to differentiate their holdings into a patchwork quilt of sites with specific names for point of reference and special names for plots of distinction.

Today, all the vineyard sites have names and some have been given premier cru or grand cru status, rankings that put them head and shoulders above all others.

A Burgundian knows how to differentiate. In Burgundy, this is a highly developed art. The level of subtlety and nuance the Burgundian vigneron can detect is almost incomprehensible to someone weaned on the bodacious bark of a critter wine (you know, those wines with the cute and cuddly animal labels).

Burgundian wines speak in a whisper. For this reason, they not only capture your attention; they capture your imagination. There are 33 grand cru vineyard sites and 570 premier cru vineyard sites in Burgundy.

Is it possible to have so many different expressions of chardonnay and pinot noir (chardonnay's red counterpart)? Bien sur.

The elegant and silken tannins and gossamer perfume of a Chambolle-Musigny is worlds apart from a spicy Nuits St. Georges. The deep blackberry fruit of a firmly structured red from Beaune is quite different from the earth and strawberry-rhubarb of a wine from Vougeot. This fractures into an endless and positively fascinating array of variations on the theme(s).

If Bordeaux is an intellectual wine, Burgundy is a wine of mensa level.

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