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Pascal Marchand won't soon forget one of his first jobs as a "flying winemaker." The wine in question was actually made, in part, on an airplane. Two years ago, Moray Tawse, owner of Tawse Winery in Niagara, asked him to purchase a container of pinot noir from Burgundy and ship it to Toronto by air. The wine was to be bottled under the Tawse brand as a protest against new foreign-content allowances for wines labelled "Cellared in Ontario." (As a way to address the disastrously small 2005 Niagara yield, legislators had decided to temporarily let local bottlers import up to 99 per cent of their juice - up from 70 per cent - and mix it with just 1 per cent Ontario product.)

Mr. Marchand, born in Montreal but for more than two decades a distinguished winemaker in Burgundy, rose to the occasion.

He quickly dispatched a vat of top-quality red to his Canadian friend.

The wine was so fresh, in fact, it had yet to complete a chemical change known as malolactic fermentation, a natural transformation that turns crisp, apple-like acidity into creamy lactic acid, softening the wine's texture.

"I went to a grower, we put it in a tank and it was trucked to the airport and onto the airplane," Mr. Marchand recalled over lunch recently at his home in this bucolic Burgundian village. "It landed in Toronto and the malo was not even finished. It's one of the only wines in the world that did its malolactic in the airplane."

Suffice it to say, Mr. Marchand's subsequent consulting projects have been a tad more conventional, with the winemaker, not the wine, doing the flying.

Since leaving his job as winemaker for prominent Burgundy producer Domaine de la Vougeraie in early 2006, Mr. Marchand has spent half his time travelling around the globe. His client list now includes producers in France, Ontario, California, Chile and Australia, making him one of the most peripatetic and sought-after wine consultants on the globetrotting circuit. Most of them specialize in pinot noir and chardonnay, Mr. Marchand's signature grapes and the dominant red and white varieties of Burgundy.

Analogous to doctors who make house calls (though perhaps not as rare), flying winemakers tend to visit their clients for a few days at a time, dispensing advice on everything from plowing techniques and harvest timing to the type of oak to be used in barrel aging. Many of them, like Mr. Marchand, also field long-distance phone calls at all hours of the day and night. "Flying and phoning," Mr. Marchand said, "and e-mailing, but mostly flying and phoning."

Because of alternating seasons in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, Mr. Marchand, like his considerably more famous Bordeaux-based counterpart, Michel Rolland, maximizes his schedule by working harvests on both sides of the equator.

Often he crams several visits into a single sortie, as he did last week with a four-day soil analysis at Tawse and a trip this week to California's Sonoma coast to advise on a new pinot noir and chardonnay project started by noted Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon producer Joseph Phelps.

For Mr. Marchand, 45, the jet-setting lifestyle might seem an unlikely turn given how the journey began. As an avid student of French literature, he decided to take a year off in 1983 to enroll in a wine school in Burgundy as a way to immerse himself in the motherland's rural culture. An internship with up-and-coming star Bruno Clair led, improbably, to a job as winemaker at the then-underperforming estate of Comte Armand.The keener would stay on at the estate, or domaine, for 15 years, taking it to unprecedented heights and capturing those all-important scores from powerful critics. Robert Parker, the famed U.S. wine writer, would describe a 1990 red from his flagship vineyard, the Clos des Epeneaux as "awesome" and "monumental." The 1996 vintage of the same wine was ranked as No. 16 in the Wine Spectator's list of the world's top 100 wines. Mr. Marchand's reputation was sealed.

"The wines were not bad before, but I think it's fair to say that they weren't distinguished," said Allen Meadows, who publishes a prominent newsletter on Burgundy wines and a website at Burghound.com. "Pascal brought the domaine to prominence."

Mr. Marchand, whose shaggy hair and 5 o'clock shadow might suggest a Canadian hockey player, also became associated with a new generation of winemakers, among them Dominique Lafon, Etienne de Montille and Christophe Roumier. They all began driving quality in a region notorious for tiny producers resistant to change.

"Many winemakers went to talk to him to understand what Pascal was doing differently," Mr. Meadows said.

Those signature techniques, though not entirely original, are now commonplace at Burgundy's finest estates: organic farming, gentle grape handling, and dense planting combined with vigorous pruning to reduce fruit yields, thus increasing the concentration of the resulting wine.

Though Mr. Marchand left Comte Armand in 1999 and continued to garner accolades at Domaine de la Vougeraie, an estate owned by the large Boisset company, many Canadian wine aficionados may more closely associate his name with another Niagara winery, Le Clos Jordanne. A joint venture between Boisset and Vincor Canada, the property has been producing acclaimed pinot noirs and top-notch chardonnays for several years, owing much of its success to Mr. Marchand, who led the vineyard and winery operations, in addition to his duties at Vougeraie, until his departure from Boisset. "After working for other people for more than 20 years, I thought that it was time to do something really on my own," he said.

Mr. Marchand now entertains similar high hopes for Tawse, where he began assisting winemaker Paul Pender during the 2006 vintage. "There aren't many people who've been making chardonnay and pinot noir for 25 years," Mr. Pender said. "He's got experience like no other here [in Niagara]."

But the biggest motivation for Mr. Marchand's solo flight has been creating his own eponymous brand from his home base in Burgundy. The first release, Pascal Marchand Pinot Noir 2005, will be available in Ontario and Quebec in about two months at an expected price of about $30 a bottle (available only through private order from Mr. Marchand's importers in those two provinces, Vinifera in Ontario and Réserve & Sélection in Quebec).

"My idea was to make one wine where we could have a certain volume of production and which would be very representative of what Burgundian pinot noir should be at a good price," he said. "To get a good Californian pinot noir, you have to pay $60 or $70."

The label will also eventually include, among others, a premier cru from the village of Nuits-St-Georges and a more basic blend from Gevrey Chambertin that Mr. Marchand calls "unplugged wines." In other words, they were harvested, crushed and fermented entirely without electrical or motorized power.

And, yes, no jet engines either.

Reach Vinifera at 416-924-4004; Réserve & Sélection at 514-524-3993