Category: Burgundy

Most wine in the US is opened too young. Blame it on retailers moving inventory or on our age of impatience, but it’s increasingly rare to enjoy a bottle that has been been properly cellared. Which is why we’re always excited to find older vintages still available at French domaines.

We stumbled upon the Domaine Nicolas Maillet last year during a visit to the Maconnais, and he has turned out to be one of our best finds. Maillet is a man full of passion -- for his vineyards, for his rootstocks, for biodynamics, and for the purity of his harvest. And he manages to translate all of this energy into…

We recently celebrated our sixth year as a père et fils business, a multigenerational approach that is common in Burgundy. The Belland family in Santenay is a particularly impressive example. Their domaine has operated since 1839, and today Roger and his daughter Julie comprise the 5th and 6th generations. With 176 years of experience, the Bellands know their terroir intimately.

Most of Burgundy completed the harvest last week, with all signs pointing toward an excellent 2015 vintage. As once tractor-filled streets return to their sleepy normalcy, the excitement and celebration in the air has given way to the sweet, yeasty smell of fermentation.

Many wine collectors seek out red Burgundies for their longevity. Aged well, the best can improve for decades. With time in the bottle, these wines develop extraordinary nuances, unlike any other food or drink. But not all red Burgundy requires such patience.

The wines of Beaujolais get an unfair rap. Their brand has been linked to the Beaujolais Nouveau, a cloying, fruity wine made just weeks after the harvest. But those drinkers who avoid the region entirely miss out on some exceptional wines.

Of the four vineyard levels in Burgundy, “Grand Cru” is the highest. Reserved for the top 1.3% of vineyards, the classification represents the finest Burgundy has to offer. The town of Gevrey-Chambertin is known for deep and powerful wines, owing their richness to the high level of clay in the soil. The Grand Crus of Chambertin are some of the…

Chablis is a singular place. Its combination of deep stony soils and cool climate exists nowhere else on earth. These factors produce a similarly singular wine -- mineral and crisp, pure and clean. Our goal as importers is to find wines that reflect the place from which they come, and there is no better place to find them than Chablis.

Burgundy is a small place. The town of Puligny-Montrachet, which Clive Coates calls “the greatest white wine commune on earth,” covers less than a single square mile. And yet the wines from this town have been prized for over a thousand years.

“Oaked” or “unoaked” sounds like a yes-no question, but it really is a range. Most of the wines we import spend some time in oak, but the strength of its influence depends on the age and size of the barrel, the chauffe (how heavily the inside is charred), and time in the barrel.

The town of Morey-St-Denis exemplifies the small scale of Burgundian winemaking. Wedged between two more famous neighbors, this village of 680 people has a vineyard surface of under 4 tenths of a square mile. It’s dark, delicious, classic red Burgundy -- there just isn’t much of it to go around.

“Minerality” is a hard word to define. It appears throughout the wine world, but nobody can quite say what it is. Last year wine writer Lettie Teague called it “a helpful word to describe wines that aren’t fruity, spicy, or herbal.” That’s still pretty vague, but it’s a good start.

Sometimes we wonder why Michel Gros makes any white wine at all. The Gros family has lived for generations in Vosne-Romanée, a town that produces some of the finest red wines in the world; and his red Burgundies have won him acclaim for decades.