Author: Thomas Wilcox

St-Aubin may not be the secret source for white Burgundy it once was, but it’s not because of the quality. Soaring prices for Burgundy from its famous neighboring towns of Puligny, Chassagne, and Meursault mean that the spillover demand have nudged prices for St-Aubin well. But the quality has more than kept pace, and despite the demise of its anonymity, it’s still a source for exceptional value.

Most of the vineyards in St-Aubin are rockier and at a higher elevation than those in Meursault, Chassagne and Puligny. In an ever-warming climate this gives its winemakers an advantage in the perennial race to find freshness. Our source here, the Domaine Gérard Thomas, has performed magnificently over the past few sunny vintages — their wines are always fresh, clean, and full of energy.

We’ve already written about Thomas’s terrific 2019 Bourgogne blanc, an excellent everyday value in white Burgundy. Today we’re featuring their 2019 village-level St-Aubin, a considerable upgrade from the Bourgogne and a real bargain under $40. Jancis Robinson’s reviewer found a “lovely dusty layer over ripe citrus,” and called it “generous and creamy.”

Today the wine is just gorgeous, bursting with lush concentration normally only found in a premier cru. The nose shows hazelnut, sweet lemon fruit, and smooth toasty wood. The mouth is fleshy and full, with smooth fruit and excellent balancing tension. Serve with roast chicken stuffed with lemon, garlic, and thyme.

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Thomas St-Aubin 2019
bottle price: $38

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Red Burgundy is classically a study in finesse and understatement. Pinot Noir’s thin skin and clear juice enable remarkable subtlety, and at their best, Red Burgundies can be hauntingly beautiful. They’re rarely the loudest voice in the room, but often the most impressive. But as with most rules, there are exceptions.

Town that produces the boldest, most intense expressions of red Burgundy is Gevrey-Chambertin. And even among wines from Gevrey, the Domaine des Varoilles style is concentrated and rich. The winemakers harvest relatively late, and use a long cold soak to extract loads of flavor and texture from their grapes. The resulting wines are distilled, dark, and delicious.

Today we’re excited to release a new premier cru Gevrey-Chambertin from Varoilles, and one that you won’t soon forget.

Varoilles’s Gevrey Premier Cru Champonnet is a stunner in 2018. We usually bypass this wine for the domaine’s more famous monopoles of La Romanée and Varoilles — but this year it was impossible to pass up. The nose is sleek and muscly, with sweet oak notes mixing with blackcurrant fruit and chocolate. The mouth is long and gorgeous with notes of cassis and gingerbread, and a rippling current of seductive tannins.

Burghound was similarly impressed, finding “very good volume,” and a “powerful” pallet, “rich and caressing” with a “suave texture.” This wine has many happy years ahead of it, but the ripe fruit from a warm year make it enjoyable even today. Carafe it for a half hour while your roast lamb finishes in the oven.

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Varoilles Gevrey-Chambertin
1er cru “Champonnet” 2018
bottle price: $88

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In the dozen years since he took over his family’s domaine, Romain Collet has elevated its reputation as fast as any new generation we’ve witnessed. We’ve noticed it ourselves, but we’re not alone — writers from Vinous, Burghound and Robert Parker have noted a “higher level of refinement” and a “significant upsurge in quality.” Jasper Morris MW writes that Romain Collet “is moving towards joining the pantheon” in Chablis.

Last week we sat down to taste through samples of Collet’s 2019s, and once again the quality impressed us mightily. Romain has steered his domaine through a series of tough years, and despite hail, frost, heat, and blight, has yet to produce a bad vintage.

We’re excited to offer all the Collet 2019s with the release of next Sunday’s May Futures, but we’ve selected three premier crus to explore in a bit more detail today.

A big part of Romain’s success is his willingness to let each cuvée speak for itself, and no series better illustrates this than his premier crus. We’ve selected three of our favorite cuvées — all 2019s, all delicious, and all classic expressions of Chablis — but each honest and unique.

First Montmains, a cuvée raised entirely in stainless steel. The terroir for this wine is extremely low in clay, which contributes to Collet’s decision to eschew oak entirely. We found the 2019 fresh and delightful — plenty of dry lemon fruit, with hints of stones and shells on the finish. Jasper Morris gave 89-92, finding it “attractive and quite persistent.” Dry, unoaked fruit dominates here, with terrific tension.

Next Vaillons, located one valley west of Montmains. The Collets farm a very large plot here – 10 hectares – and the soils are particularly heavy in limestone. Romain raises this cuvée in a combination of stainless, old barrels, foudres, which add complexity rather than any notes of oak. The nose offers a hint of dry spice with the fruit, and in the mouth a touch of salinity focuses the wine’s minerality. The result is a wine that’s drier than Montmains, and one in which the stones dominate the fruit. Morris gave this Vaillons 91-93 points, noting “impressive intensity” and finding it “very persistent.” The 2019 is among the best vintages we can remember for this wine, a perfect balance of fruit and minerals.

Finally, for those who like their Chablis steely and bone-dry, there’s Forêts. From a subsection of the Montmains hillside, this plot is extremely steep and stony. This cuvée is vinified in cement eggs, which allow a long, slow, cool fermentation. We found the 2019 Forêts electric and vibrant, with muted fruit and a gorgeous fresh salinity. Morris gave it 89-92, finding “white fruit and saline.” Forêts is classically Chablisien, the most delicate and crystalline of the three, with terrific focus and chiseled texture.

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Collet Chablis 1er “Montmains” 2019:   $350/case

Collet Chablis 1er “Vaillons” 2019:   $350/case

Collet Chablis 1er “Forêts” 2019:   $375/case

 

Email Tom to reserve any of the three cuvées.

 

A wine made up of 50/50 Grenache/Syrah can take on many shapes. Grown on a flat plain in irrigated soil by a large-volume winery, the blend will be a cheap, unremarkable Côtes du Rhône. Grown just miles away in the legendary soils of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and the wine can be an ageworthy gem.

Today’s wine is the same blend, but follows neither of these paths. The Mas Foulaquier’s “Orphée” cuvée is made from grapes grown in the untamed soils of the northern Languedoc. The winemakers practice biodynamics in the vineyards and the cellar, and the result is an entirely different take on the blend.

The grape makeup of this wine is important, but only as a vehicle to communicate the vignerons’ philosophy, and their rugged terroir.

Foulaquier is an excellent source in Pic-St-Loup, at the northern end of the sprawling Languedoc. Their wines are natural, wild, sometimes funky, and always delicious. They also exhibit a completeness often absent in low-intervention styles — where some offer a single, interesting, unusual note, Foulaquier’s wines are a harmonious symphony of nature — perhaps Philip Glass more than Beethoven, but charming nonetheless.

Foualquier’s 2018 Orphée is terrific. The nose is dark and woodsy, combining wild berries, lavender, and sous-bois. The mouth shows black fruits and black licorice, with a juicy texture and serious finish. This vintage is slightly bolder and more substantial than usual — we always enjoy this cuvée young, and you will too, but we’re excited to see this one age too.

Pour this at your first backyard barbecue of the year.

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Foulaquier Orphée 2018
bottle price: $28

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Winemaker:   Where much red Burgundy tends towards subtleness and finesse, the Varoilles style is noticeably more intense. The winemakers harvest relatively late, and use a long cold soak to extract loads of flavor and texture from their grapes. The resulting wines are concentrated, dark, and delicious.

Appellation:   Varoilles is best known (and deservedly so) for their terrific village-level and premier cru Gevrey-Chambertins. They only began making a Bourgogne-level wine two years ago, but it’s an exciting addition to their lineup. And in 2018, a year of near-record ripeness, the wine is unusually good.

Wine:   The nose is very dark and spiced, with briary blackberry fruit, notes of woods, cinnamon, smoke, and a hint of ginger. The mouth is bold and smooth with a solid texture laid under intense masculine fruit. It’s not as long or as deep as a Gevrey, but there’s far more material than most Bourgogne-level wines.

Suggestions:   No need to cellar this — the 2018 red Burgundies are chewy and juicy, and with a carafe and a hearty cut of meat this is a ruggedly beautiful Pinot. If it lacks a bit of refinement and finesse, it makes up for it in character and charm. Give this some air, and enjoy now – 2023.

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Varoilles Bourgogne 2018
bottle price: $35

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The critical reception of the 2018 red Burgundies can be described as qualified enthusiasm. The best examples are said to be ripe, rich, mouthfilling, bold, and delicious — Vinous’s Neal Martin found “a sense of nascent joie-de-vivre” across the vintage. But wines picked too late can be overripe — “very ripe wines of highly variable quality,” concluded Burghound.

We’ve had similar impressions to the vintage, though, at least among our producers, we’ve found far more successes than flops. Most winemakers have been able to match structure to the abundant fruit, and none more successfully than Roger Belland. His reds are typically lush and precocious, and 2018 is no exception. But each is carefully balanced by minerals, tannin, and acidity.

We might not age them 20 years, but at least for the next 20 months we think they’ll be simply delightful.

Even amid a trend of warmer and earlier vintages, 2018 stands out: record breaking temperatures, an early budbreak, copious sun and high sugar levels. Many winemakers drew comparisons to 2003, but credited a very wet winter with 2018’s superior balance — same heat, less drought.

Belland’s 2018 Santenay 1er cru Gravières carries more weight than usual, but it’s bolstered by beautiful minerality and firm, polished structure. We were delighted with the mouthfeel of the wine — at once rich and ripe but long and tense. Burghound agreed, awarding 90 points, finding “poached plum, cassis, violet and plenty of earth,” and calling it “rich, supple” and “sleek.”

The 2018s may trend bolder than usual, but Belland’s Gravières is proof that in the hands of a careful winemaker committed to balance, they’re no less Burgundian.

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Belland Santenay 1er “Gravières” 2018
bottle price: $42

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