Category: Pinot Noir

Older bottles of Burgundy can certainly be a test of your patience, even after they’ve been carefully left somewhere cool and dark for over a decade, waiting. First the cork was a dreadful piece of tree bark. Carefully turning a good quality corkscrew only led to the middle of the cork collapsing into fine particles and dust. Fifteen minutes of patient digging got most bits out, leaving a small plug that dropped into the neck. Good thing it was so reductive it needed a double decant through a strainer to get the last bits. The first sniff and sip after leaving it to air was, as Billy Connolly once said, like a fart in a space suit, a particularly sulphurous one too. Quite a bit of spritz as well from dissolved CO2. Oh well, not tonight then. Twenty four hours of more breathing and then muttered expletives. Still a little smoky but an incredible density of warm ripe Pinot Noir heaven. Intense, fresh wild strawberries, cherries, liquorice, and chalky earth that bounce around the olfactory bits for what seems a very long time. Like a stairway to heaven, it made me wonder. The sheer concentration coats the mouth with flavour and what flavour. It’s as if the best summer fruit at its most perfectly ripe has been preserved with precision until now. The tannin and acidity were, of course, the perfect foil to carry and then freshen. Once in a while a bottle makes you remember how Burgundy can touch the sublime. Even if it means even more patience.

13% alcohol. Cork, foul but did its job, just. The cost forgotten.

96 points, could have gone 97 if less recalcitrant, the wine not I.

Goodness, maybe that’s the first long French name I’ve carefully typed without a single accent or circumflex. It’s red wine too despite the deluxe Chardy address. Seems Chassagne was prime Pinot soil before vine eating bugs arrived and the world’s infatuation with white Burgundy took hold. This is deeply coloured, just starting to lose some saturation. Good fruit density with smells and tastes of wild strawberry, kirsch cherries and quality chocolate earth. Builds well as it rests in the palate before ending with fine and still fresh acidity and cocoa tannin. The only unwelcome guest in the flavour party is some oak which grates as if it’s been badly seasoned perhaps and tastes a bit of old nuts and stale spice. Delicious grapes though, les gars Bachelet.

13% alcohol. Cork. Was about $45 pre arrival direct import.

93 points.

Côte d’Or aristocracy in a glass, something to lose one’s head over. My one and only bottle from this famous estate. It opened a bit off puttingly smelly like any twenty year old who’s just awake after the party that was vintage 1999. Lurking in the middle of the first mouthfuls was a core of deep, intense liquorice flavour that suggested a good bit of ventilation might improve things. A brave double decant and the perfume got sweeter, a little caramel and autumnal but some faded wild strawberry with a ferrous, bloody lip edge was visible through the mist. As the evening wore on and food in the form of a potato and truffle flavoured pizza arrived, the smells freshened and a deep, fine, and well, downright elegant purity of fruit emerged. The cut of perfect acid and iron filing tannin leaving a mouth just watering for more. In no way large scaled but lithe, the fruit a complex of that wild strawberry perfume, kirsch, a fine cocoa sprinkle and that earthy iron. A later reference to Remington Norman’s bourgeoisly informed “Great Domaines of Burgundy” notes that Champans does contain a lot of ironstone amongst the clay and limestone rubble. Well, there’s a coincidence. One of those bottles of Burgundy, well out of reach these days, that shows what caused the infatuation in the first place. Oh well, back to earth.

13.50% alcohol. Cork. Was about €50 in Paris some years ago.

95 points.

Back in 2000, a simple call from a Paris station public phone in bad, halting Français was all it took to arrange an appointment with this wonderful Chambolle address. In the days when a Burgundy obsession was at least extravagantly affordable rather than a ludicrous billionaire’s foible. Lucky for me it was a rainy afternoon on the Côte d’Or and Madame Barthod was happy to stay in the cellar and pour tastes rather than be amongst les vignes. An unforgettable tour of Chambolle’s Premier Cru from barrel showed that Pinot can be even more tasty before it’s bottled. Anyway, the sight of a Bourgogne for 30 euros in that tempting basement of Lavinia was a chance to revisit good times. As meticulously clean and made as ever, gentle scents of wild strawberries, cherry and the smoothest limestone and clay swirl into a precise mouthful of just ripe fruit, a tingle of bright acidity and a trail of silky tannin. No huge weight or bombastic extract despite a bit of cold soak perhaps, just a well pitched melody. As good as many producers’ village level efforts. Some trophy bottles of late 90s and early 2000’s Burgundies have gone off to auction for jaw dropping prices to help fund other indulgences but there’s one, and only one sadly, 99 Barthod Charmes that’s going nowhere but my glass.

13% alcohol. Cork. What price great Burg these days?

91 very stylish points.