Author: Thomas Wilcox

Pascal Bardoux’s wines are just like the man himself: subtle, understated, and delightful. In a region where “le marketing” is king, Bardoux’s delicious, hand-crafted, well-priced cuvées stand out. A world away from shiny tasting rooms and glossy brochures, this is traditional, artisan Champagne authored by a humble farmer.

A blend of 60% Pinot Meunier, 30% Chardonnay and 10% Pinot Noir, Bardoux’s humble non-vintage “Brut Traditionnel” has the complexity and depth to match the finest bottles from Burgundy or Bordeaux. The nose shows plum, chalk, lime zest, and buttered biscuits; the mouth is dry, elegant, and smooth, with notes of apple and toast. Much mass-market Champagne fetches between $80 and $150 a bottle; Bardoux’s small-batch Brut Traditionnel doesn’t even crack $60 — twice the wine at half the price.

We can’t recommend this wine highly enough. Think of it as a refined, complex wine in its own right; it just happens to feature bubbles. Some of our favorite pairings include: sushi, triple-cream cheese (like Delice de Bourgogne or Brillat-Savarin), or gougères. A case of this in your cellar will add class to our summer like little else.

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Bardoux Champagne Traditionnel Brut NV
bottle price: $54
case price: $48.60 (use code BRUT)

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Everyone needs a pantry wine — something to open without too much consideration or care. Thirsty guests looking for something to wet their whistle? Pantry wine. Back home after a long weekend away, with no energy for anything but takeout pizza? Pantry wine. Playoff game go into overtime and you need just one more glass of something simple? You guessed it.

For many years our pantry wine (and that of many readers) has been Goubert’s Côtes du Rhône. It checks the three boxes every Côtes du Rhône should: refreshing, dark, and inexpensive. It’s low alcohol and crisp, making it tasty and balanced. The blend of six grapes classic Rhône grapes forms a rich, hearty, dark wine. And it’s inexpensive enough to pull out at a moment’s notice.

Winemaker Florence Cartier has improved this cuvée perhaps more than any other since she took over a few years ago, and the 2022 is her best yet. The nose is expressive and surprisingly refined, showing dark wild cherries, raspberries, and a hint of menthol. The mouth is both jammy and refreshing, with notes of white pepper, licorice, raspberry and plums. This likely wont be the fanciest wine in your cellar, but it might be the most useful.

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Goubert Côtes du Rhône 2022
bottle price: $19

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Roger Belland produces a dozen cuvées from around the southern end of the Côte d’Or, including from famous vineyards in Chassagne, Puligny, and Volnay. But it’s the wines of his hometown Santenay that often appeal to us most. Belland’s style is plump and juicy, with approachable tannins and beautiful aromatics – they never last long in our cellar or on a dinner table.

In 2020 his accessible friendly style is even more on display than usual, and these are some of the most drinkable Belland reds we can remember. Winemaker Martin Boyer has expertly balanced the lush ripe fruit of the vintage with clean freshness and stony precision. The result is friendly, delicious red Burgundy that’s at once complex and gulpable.

The Belland Santenay 1er Gravieres 2020 is fresh and lively, with exquisite floral notes and a fine mineral nose of stones and roses. The mouth is crisp and fresh with excellent length. There’s classic juicy 2020 fruit,  and the stony fruit is perfectly supported by careful tannins. This is floral and beautiful today, but the mineral intensity should carry it easily for years to come.

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Belland Santenay 1er “Gravières” 2020
bottle price: $49

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Chardonnay in Burgundy is capable of extraordinary complexity and subtle sophistication – at its best white Burgundy can outshine reds of a similar caliber. But the region also produces straightforward, delicious expressions of the grape; more tasty than tremendous.

And in the hands of a brilliant producer and a top vintage, even humble appellations can produce excellence. Today’s wine is proof: a 2020 Pouilly-Loché from Sebastien Giroux. This young, talented winemaker with a few tiny plots of vines in and around Pouilly-Fuissé. His low- or no-oak Chardonnays burst with density, minerality and length.

From a tiny appellation and a near-perfect Maconnais vintage, the 2020 Pouilly-Loché is simply a delight. The nose is clean and refined with notes of white flowers, citrus peel and almond. The mouth is silky and beautiful with perfectly balanced acidity amid notes of yellow fruit, ginger, and tangerine. Everyday white Burugndies are hard to find; this one is a gem.

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Giroux Pouilly-Loché 2020
bottle price: $29

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In most corners of France, the 2022 vintage was the hottest and driest on record. While this might not portend positively for the future, some wines have undoubtedly benefited. Particularly on the margins – regional level cuvées and lesser-known appellations – the extra heat has made ordinary wines quite impressive.

Christophe Bonnefond’s Syrah is one of the only wines in our portfolio with a “Vin de Pays” appellation, the broadest category in France. It’s always carried Bonnefond’s signature elegance and tension, most famously found in their terrific and well known Côte Rôties, but with less complexity and aging potential. It’s exactly the type of wine you’d expect to shine in a vintage like 2022…

…and you’d be right. The 2022 Syrah is downright delicious – bursting with cool blueberry and raspberry fruit, the tannins are juicy and delicious. At only 13.5% alcohol it’s not a bit flat or heavy – a gorgeous vibrant texture underlies the dark fruit and savory spice, making it as hard to put down as a bag of potato chips. Serve a bit cool outside on a patio or front step.

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Bonnefond Syrah 2022
bottle price: $25

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Particularly in the Maconnais, the 2020 white Burgundies have been almost universally terrific. The drought caused many chardonnay vines simply to shut down mid-season, stalling the production of their sugars and in the end producing wines with both a ripe concentration and tremendous energy. We’ve bought just about all the 2020s we could get our hands on, and they’ve rightly disappeared from the warehouse at quite a clip.

Nicolas Maillet is a well-known organic source in the Maconnais, Burgundy’s southernmost region. Maillet is a bear of a man with a quick smile and burly enthusiasm to match his impressive stature. His wines are characterful and charming, and still a bargain – William Kelley calls his Macon-Verzé “one of the Mâconnais’s perennial values.”

Maillet’s Macon-Verzé 2020 comes from vines on chalk-limestone soils, and offers beautiful tension, with terrific length and structure, and not a hint of wood. There’s a shimmering golden character to this wine that makes it irresistible. William Kelley found notes of “green apple, honeysuckle and orange blossom,” calling it “ample and lively wine that’s pure and mouthwatering.” It’s a perfect aperitif wine – a complete mouthful on its own. Serve it with anything and nothing.

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Maillet Macon-Verzé 2020
bottle price: $32

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Romain Collet is a mad scientist in the cellar. He’s matched each of his Chablis terroirs with a specific recipe of elevage vessels – a combination of stainless steel tank, concrete egg, clay amphora, and wooden barrels of various ages. Each is designed to bring out the unique character of every plot of vines.

The most clay-rich of Collet’s terroirs is “Butteaux,” a south-east facing sector of the Montmains vineyard on Chablis’s left bank. For this cuvée, Romain ages the wine in a combination of old oak barrels (5 to 10 years). The resulting wine has a concentration and layered complexity somewhere between premier cru and grand cru.

We were blown away by the 2022 Butteaux. It’s less brisk and bracing than some of his cuvées, but it’s perfectly balanced and simply delicious in the glass. It begins with a rich attack of concentrated fruit that might make you think of modern Puligny-Montrachet, but a vibrant splash of Chablisienne minerals bursts through the palate and it finishes dry and precise. A dynamic blockbuster cuvée with outstanding depth and complexity.

Jasper Morris MW was similarly impressed, finding “lovely generous fruit yet with tension. Very good this year,” and awarding 91-94 points – just a point behind Romain’s Grand Cru Valmur. Collet’s terrific lineup of 2022s will be in next week’s May Futures release, but we’ve singled out this special cuvée for focus today. Quantities limited, first come first served.

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Collet Chablis 1er “Butteaux” 2022
retail case price: $540
May Futures: $395/case ($32.92/bot)
Available by the case and half-case

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The pursuit of freshness is a perennial struggle for white Burgundy vignerons these days. They’ve adapted to warmer, drier summers by delaying pruning, harvesting earlier, and tweaking their cellar work. But Chardonnay loves the sun, and inattentive growers can end up with overripe, high alcohol wines.

The moment has been kind, however, to Chardonnay’s distant understudy Aligoté, a centuries-old Burgundian varietal encompassing about a tenth of the region’s white vines. Its natural high acidity is an advantage in the new climate, and a wave of young vignerons – the self-named Aligoteurs – produce wines that make a real case for the grape’s potential.

Our favorite among these is Vincent Boyer, a masterful author of exquisite whites from Meursault and Puligny. He gives his Aligoté the same extended elevage (nearly two years in old barrels and concrete eggs) as his Chardonnays, and the resulting wine is simply exquisite. Burghound found the just-arrived 2021 “exceptionally fresh” and “very well-detailed” with notes of “lemon rind, green apple, and spice.” He awarded it his “outstanding” designation, and concluded simply, “good stuff.”

Serve this on your front stoop or back patio all spring/summer long.

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Boyer-Martenot Aligoté 2021
bottle price: $29

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With grilling season here on our doorstep, we’re thrilled to have a new punchy Bordeaux red in stock. The Chateau Bel Air Gloria comes from the owners of Chateau Gloria in St-Julien. The blend is 75% Cabernet Sauvignon, 23 Merlot, and 2 Cabernet Franc, grown on gravel ridges with clay subsoils on the outskirts of St-Julien.

Neal Martin of Vinous summed this wine up nicely, finding in the 2018 “a light but pleasant nose of blackberry, cedar, and wild hedgerow….the palate is clean and supple on the entry, offering blackberry and raspberry fruit laced with licorice.” He concludes “this is not amazingly complex, but it will slip down the throat easily.”

The last point we can confirm first hand. The wine shows just the right amount of tannin – enough to bolster the juicy fruit, but softened to make it deliciously gulpable. Serve this a bit cool with simple burgers and vegetables from the grill.

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Bel Air Gloria Haut-Médoc 2018
bottle price: $25

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Some wines in our portfolio hit a perfect balance between fruit, freshness, texture and price – Goubert’s Gigondas, Desvignes’s Givry, and Bohrmann’s Bourgogne blanc come to mind. But this category wouldn’t be complete without Poggerino’s Chianti Classico. It’s one of only a handful of non-French wines we import, and yet its among the most popular wines in the shop.

“The 2021 Chianti Classico is exceptional.” Thus begins Antonio Galloni’s review of Poggerino’s flagship wine, and having poured it over the weekend at our warehouse, we wholeheartedly agree. It shows the same gorgeous floral, dusty nose as always, with perhaps a deeper plum fruit profile than usual. The mouth carries an extra dose of richness and length.

Galloni awarded 93 points, finding “lavender, spice, menthol, licorice, and tobacco,” and calling it “racy and layered.” Jancis Robinson’s reviewer found it “fantastic,” calling it “long, intense and concentrated, with bags of polished tannins that never dominate the fruit.” It’s hard to find much wrong with this wine, and it’s somehow still only $25. Last year’s was sold out by the end of the summer; we think this year’s might even beat that.

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Poggerino Chianti Classico 2021
bottle price: $25

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Over more than two decades of working with Domaine les Goubert their consistency has remained unshakable. In recent years Florence, the thirty-something daughter at the domaine, has taken over the winemaking, and turned an always consistent production into one that truly shines. Josh Raynolds of Vinous called the wines “superb” and considers them “one of the appellation’s most venerable domaines.”

We’ve just restocked (for the 3rd time) on Florence’s 2020 Gigondas, which is among the most exciting cuvées we’ve had from them in recent memory. The nose explodes with a symphony of floral notes, combining vibrant wild cherries, garrigue, blackberry, lavender, and earth. The mouth is long and fresh with excellent persistence.

Raynolds gave 93 points, finding “palate-staining red/blue fruit,” with flavors that “deftly blend power and delicacy,” before an “impressively long, floral- and spice-driven finish.” We think it’s a tremendous value – priced in a range to pull out on weeknight, but impressive enough for a Sunday afternoon meal.

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Goubert Gigondas 2020
bottle price: $32

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Hello,

Today we have an exciting opportunity for those interested in large format red Burgundy. The Domaine Michel Gros bottles magnums only by request, so this will be the only opportunity to purchase them. (All 2022s will be available in 750ml in November Futures.)

We tasted these 2022s from barrel a few weeks ago, and it’s an outstanding vintage – it was hard to find a critical note for any cuvée. Despite the heat and drought of the growing season, Gros’s 2022 red Burgundies sport modest alcohol, excellent balance, terroir transparency, and inky dark fruit. In short, it’s everything you want from Burgundy.

These wines will be bottled this August, and will arrive with the rest of the Gros 2022s next January. Please let us know by this Friday 4/19 if you would like to order any. No minimum order, shipping not included. Quantities are limited.

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1. Hautes-Côtes de Nuits “Au Vallon” 2022 ($75/mag)

From a sunny plot in the Hautes-Côtes, this is pretty, understated, and crackling red Burgundy. Look for clean raspberry fruit and chalk. Drink 2025+

Vinous 89-91 | a lovely nose with rose petal-tinged red cherry and crushed strawberry fruit…fresh and sapid with fine tension…this comes highly recommended

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2. Nuits-St-Georges “Chaliots” 2022 ($135/mag)

This Nuits-St-Georges cuvée comes from the heart of the village, but it’s floral and elegant, and surprisingly polished this year. The finish is unusually long with notes of cassis and cool earth. Drink 2026+

Vinous 91-93 | fresh and tensile with fine tannins, a keen line of acidity, and a nuanced persistent finish that reminds me of Mugneret-Gilbourg…a lovely Nuits-St-Georges, elegant without shortchanging you on fruit

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3. Gevrey-Chambertin 2022 ($150/mag)

The nose shows deep strawberry jam and with gingerbread and plum. The mouth very long with classic Gevrey presence. A delightful mouthful. Drink 2026+

BH 87-90 | deeply pitched nose of poached plum, wild currant, and warm earth…rich, caressign, velvet-textured middleweight flavors

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4. Nuits-St-Georges 1er cru 2021 ($225/mag)

(from old vines in 1er cru plots Aux Murgers and Vignerondes) A massive, powerful nose that combines dark rich plum fruit with bright flowers. A clean, sleek mouthfeel with length and gorgeous texture. Drink 2027+

Vinous 90-92 | red fruit, violets and potpourri aromas that gradually build momentum…medium bodied, quite understated…balance and charm

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5. Vosne-Romanée 1er “Aux Brûlées” 2022 ($325/mag)

(from vines immediately next to Grand Cru Richebourg) An extraordinary nose, which could only come from Vosne. There’s sucrocité, floral density, and a silky mouthfeel – the tannins are dripping with perfumed, gorgeous fruit. A stunner. Drink 2027+

Vinous 91-93 | fine delineation…a “sexy” opening of confit red fruit…it has charm and feels more approachable than its peers…very fine

To reserve any of these magnums, email Tom

 

Order Deadline: Friday, April 19
Quantities very limited

Picamelot is among Burgundy’s finest crémant houses. The Wine Advocate’s resident Champagne expert William Kelley writes that “Picamelot produces some of the best sparkling wines in Burgundy,” and calls their wines “elegant,” “excellent,” and “superb.”

Their wines are priced to serve early and often – a perfect weeknight pairing for almost any food. Picamelot’s Brut “Les Terroirs” is their blend of Burgundy’s three grapes: Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Aligoté. It spends nine months on the lees, and was disgorged earlier this year.

This nose is clean and elegant, with notes of almond, pineapple, and cream. The mouth is very dry, quite lively, and crisply refreshing, with apple fruit and a long vinous finish. With this in your cellar, you’ll need no excuse at all to serve bubbles.

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Picamelot Crémant “Terroirs” Brut NV
bottle price: $25

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The Boursot family has grown grapes in Chambolle-Musigny since 1550. With a viticultural history older than most countries, the Boursots know their terroir inside and out. The current generation, brothers Romaric and Romault Boursot, are only the second to bottle their own wine instead of selling to a local negociant.

Jasper Morris MW writes that “the winemaking has been sharpened up by the current generation;” Neal Martin of Vinous finds the wines “superb” and writes of “a promising future.” Each visit we find wines that have gained class, polish, and real depth. And that starts with their simplest wine: a humble, delicious Bourgogne rouge.

The Boursots build this wine for immediate enjoyment. It’s 100% destemmed (no whole clusters) and raised entirely in tank (no oak), an unusual move for Burgundy, but one that results in crisp, gulpable wine. The nose on the 2021 Bourgogne shows cherry, plum, and white flowers; the mouth is fresh and chalky with raspberry notes and low tannin. A perfect match for the arrival of Spring.

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Boursot Bourgogne 2021
bottle price: $35

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Sauvignon Blanc is one of the most popular varietals in the world, grown everywhere from New Brunswick to New Zealand to New Mexico. But its origin is in France’s Loire Valley, where it’s the star of Sancerre and its neighbor Pouilly-Fumé. Nestled in limestone- and flint-rich soils on either side of the upper Loire River, these two towns produce Sauvignon Blanc with unmatched purity and refinement.

Our two sources here – Garenne in Sancerre and Michot in Pouilly-Fumé – produce some of the most popular wines we import. So today we’re delighted to introduce a third: Gilles and Séverin Chollet are father and son vignerons in Pouilly-Fumé. The Chollet style is subtler and less punchy than Michot’s, with more refinement and a lighter touch.

Our inaugural wine from Chollet is their Pouilly-Fumé “Les Caillottes,” drawn from limestone-heavy soils. This cuvé is lightweight, unoaked, and complex with notes of citrus and oyster shell. A pleasant dollop of sucrocité joins the notes of gardenia, roses, and lime. Clocking in at 12.5% alcohol, this will be a perfect addition to your patio this spring.

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Chollet Pouilly-Fumé “Caillottes” 2022
bottle price: $25

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