Burgundy: White Tasting, Part IV

26 04 2012

OK, time to bring this long and winding road of a tasting review to a close.  I had set this up so that we’d end on a high note with the most prestigious bottles in the tasting, the illustrious Grand Crus, but for reasons outside their control, the drinking experience ended up being somewhat anticlimactic.  And no, it wasn’t because we were 10 bottles in by this point.  That’s what made the next morning anticlimactic.

FOURTH FLIGHT

A.k.a. over $300 worth of wine that really shouldn't be open yet.

Grand Cru vineyards are the rarest, best-positioned, most historic, highest-quality growing areas in all of Burgundy…or at least their classification is meant to reflect as much.  As you might expect, Grand Crus come in very limited numbers (only 32 in the Cote d’Or, according to my friend the Internet) and they produce minute quantities of wine each year with prices to match their prestige and scarcity.  I didn’t have the overflowing bank account to go too crazy and delve into the elite of white Burgundian GCs — the series of adjoining Grand Crus bearing the “Montrachet” name, including Le Montrachet, Batard-Montrachet, Bienvenues-Batard-Montrachet, etc. are almost certainly the creme de la creme of white Burgundy, but they’re also a hilarious pipe dream in my current circumstances — so instead I turned my focus to two wines from the well-regarded but much cheaper Grand Cru of Corton-Charlemagne.  Unfortunately, both bottles were from relatively recent vintages, and we quickly discovered that, with great white Burgundy, time is your ally. Read the rest of this entry »


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Burgundy: White Tasting, Part III

23 04 2012

When you spend hundreds of dollars over multiple months to build a tasting, you stretch out the write-up as much as possible.  To read the introductory entry in this Chardonnay-fuelled marathon, click here.  To read about the jump from basic Bourgogne Blanc to village-level bottlings, click here.  To read about the exciting ascent into the mystical and expensive world of Premier Cru white Burgundy, well, keep reading.

THIRD FLIGHT

Time to hit up the big leagues.

Now we officially move from the wines that you might pop open on a Friday or Saturday if you feel deserving after a hard week to the wines that you agonize over opening until just the right spot in their drinking window and just the right occasion because you know your budget won’t easily permit a replacement.  The combined retail cost of the flight of 3 village-level white Burgundies was about $180; the combined retail cost of the 3 Premier Crus below is almost double that, $340.  This is why I didn’t buy any other wine from January until April.  In the third flight of the evening we continued to highlight the top white Burgundy villages of Meursault, Chassagne-Montrachet and Puligny-Montrachet, and instead of village bottlings made from grapes that could be sourced from anywhere in the adjoining area, we narrowed our focus and opened a bottle from each sub-region made from grapes grown in a particular highly-regarded Premier Cru vineyard near the village in question.  Every inch of land in Burgundy’s famed Cote d’Or region has been analyzed and classified over centuries, and those areas with the best soils, slopes, exposure to sunlight, drainage and growing conditions were isolated as Premier Cru or Grand Cru.  That’s what we’re getting into:  hundreds of years of liquid history. Read the rest of this entry »


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Burgundy: White Tasting, Part II

19 04 2012

If you missed the inaugural entry about my dozen-bottle, Bourgogne-Blanc-to-Grand Cru, no-holds-barred white Burgundy tasting, check out my write up of four 2009 Bourgogne Blancs of varying levels of quality and corked-ness here.  Tonight we’re jumping right into Flight #2.

SECOND FLIGHT

Slightly out of order: from left to right, Wines 1, 3, 2.

From the basic Bourgognes, we move up one quality level and correspondingly narrow our regional focus with three village-level wines, so called because the village closest to the vineyards where each wine’s grapes were grown is the prominent identifying feature of the classification.  Even though Burgundy is a relatively small wine region (the Cote d’Or, the key quality area in the heart of the region, is only around 40 km long and in most spots less than 2 km wide), each of the main wine villages rests on slightly different soils and lies on slightly different aspects, which result in wines with clearly identifiable local identities.  I’ve read about the flavour differences among the various villages, but this was my first chance to experience them myself.  The plan was to open a bottle each from the three most well-known white wine villages in Burgundy:  Meursault, Chassagne-Montrachet and Puligny-Montrachet.  However, after checking in with at least half a dozen prominent Calgary wine stores and being unable to locate a village-level Chassagne anywhere, I had to sub it out for Plan B:  a village wine from the nearby town of Saint-Aubin, which certainly doesn’t have the reputation of its more illustrious neighbour but which has been known to produce solid whites at (relative) value prices.  Would it stand up with the best Chardonnay spots in Burgundy?  Um, not so much. Read the rest of this entry »


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Burgundy: White Tasting, Part I

12 04 2012

It begins: the first 4 of a dozen hopefully-representative white Burgundies.

I acknowledge that it’s definitely been awhile.  I spent my evenings last week cleaning out my basement, then took the Easter weekend off, then faced a total loss of home Internet for a few days, all of which added up to a blog-less streak of epic proportions…sorry about that.  To make it up to you, instead of posting a lonely wine review tonight, I’m diving back into action with the first instalment of a multi-part writeup showcasing the results of the long-planned white Burgundy tasting that I’ve had in the works since January and that fulfills a 2012 New Year’s Resolution of mine.  More on the planning behind the tasting and the rationale for the various wines selected here.

To summarize for those of you who don’t feel like clicking on the link above, the goal of the tasting was to open bottles from the four main Burgundy quality classifications (Bourgogne Blanc, village level, Premier Cru, Grand Cru), spanning  some of the key sub-regions for Burgundian whites (Puligny-Montrachet, Chassagne-Montrachet, Meursault, Corton-Charlemagne), to see how the wines from each of the sub-areas differed from those from others and how the wines from the same sub-areas varied from producer to producer and between quality levels.  I will vouch from experience that delving to the bottom of these analytical quandaries required a lot of drinking.  Such is life.

Cork Ratings for wines 1-3: 2.5/10, 6.5/10, 5/10. Meh.

There were 12 bottles open for the tasting and an esteemed panel of four judges with glasses at the ready; we tried the wines in four flights grouped by quality classification, going in ascending order from the base Bourgogne Blancs to the Grand Crus.  My actual tasting notes from the first flight are below, and the write-ups of the other three flights will be coming soon to an Internet near you.  At the end of the day, while the tasting didn’t instantly reveal the inner mysteries of Burgundy to me, it was a useful (and highly entertaining) crash course on a region that I haven’t spent nearly enough time getting to know. Read the rest of this entry »


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Burgundy: The Drinking Plan

14 03 2012

Burgundy, I haven't forgotten about you.

At the start of 2012 I waxed poetic about my newfound commitment to drink more Burgundy this year.  Two days later, I followed that up with a momentum-sustaining red Burgundy review of the 2009 Alex Gambal “Cuvee Les Deux Papis” Bourgogne Rouge.  I have since gone over two months without drinking or mentioning Burgundy at all.  What gives?  Am I like one of those New Year’s Resolution fitness disciples who goes to one workout on January 2nd and then gets back on the couch?  Not exactly.  Have I been turned off of the Burgundy quest since early January?  Nope.  Am I quietly getting the pieces put together on a massive mind-blowing Burgundian wine journey of epic proportions?  Oh yes.

My original idea about how to start drinking more Burgundy was to, well, start drinking more Burgundy:  head to the France section of various wine shops, buy a few bottles, crack them, write about them.  But when I asked Highlander Wine & Spirits’ Matt Browman for advice on how to approach his favourite wine region, he got me thinking in a more structured fashion.  His Burgundy drinking plan contemplated village-by-village comparisons of wines from high-quality producers across the entire hierarchy  of the area’s wine classification system…but more importantly, it called for all of the all of the test subject wines to be opened AT THE SAME TIME.  Faster than you could say “Burgundy tasting party”, I was on board.  It’s taken me until now to source (and pay for) the various bottles going into the tasting, but next weekend I’ll have a dozen bottles of top-notch Burgundy open and the wait will definitely be worth it.  Here are the official details of the Matt Browman Burgundy Drinking Plan in case you ever feel like trying this yourself: Read the rest of this entry »


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