After 3 days this week and about 230 wines tasted, I think it’s time to head back to Beaune today!

And for those who’d like to taste some black-coloured Fleurie, 6 months too early, here’s a link 😉

Hmm – a nice selection I thought – but there were a couple of disappointments.

2013 Olivier Leflaive, Puligny-Montrachet 1er Champ Canet
A hint of oak spice and a width of engaging aroma. Ooh! This is nice; layers of beautiful flavour and a fine line of enlivening acidity. Fine finishing too – really super wine – Yum! I’m always ready for a top-up…
Rebuy – Yes

2013 Nathalie & Gilles Fevre, Chablis Preuses
This is wide and deeply fruited, ripely fruited – lots of sweetness and apricot – interesting but not obviously Chablis. In the mouth this is big, layered and sweet – everybody but me seems happy – it’s a long way from classic Chablis with lots of botrytis-fruit. It’s quite long, but I have to revert to the Puligny which, by comparison, is outstanding. I also thought this was outstanding when I tasted it at the domaine in January 2015, but like many, many 2013s it has developed quickly, and in a direction that’s not to my taste…
Rebuy – No

2012 Comte Liger-Belair, Nuits St.Georges 1er Les Cras
The nose has an obvious fire-work style reduction – the bottle lasted about 1.5 hours but the reduction outlasted the wine – if I opened another, I would decant the wine. In the mouth this feels lovely, complex and finely textured – lots of fine flavour here but it remains framed with the same reduction from the nose. Decant!
Rebuy – Maybe

2014 Château des Bachelards, Saint-Amour
The nose starts all mineral and herbs – not what I expected – here is another wine that needs decanting, but bring out the aromas rather than chase away reduction. Time brings a simmering, deep and silkily-dark fruit and even occasional suggestions of flowers. Immediately more concentration, a little more plushness and silk of texture versus the Liger-Belair. An impression of layers of flavour – clearly we are drinking this WAY too early, yet it cushions and caresses the palate with, frankly, super fruit that has a faintly salted accent. Big, long-finishing, wine but brilliant! This will be ever-greater, the longer you wait…
Rebuy – Yes

Normally I’d give you a quick phone-shot of the bottles, but as you can see today, I had the windows phone ‘smiley’ of death. Nothing comes close to the prettiness of the windows 10 phone interface – but a bit flaky doesn’t quite cover the day to day usage experience. It may have been my fault, perhaps pressing something earlier than I should during today’s ‘upgrade’ – but afterwards the phone was bricked. There’s a tool to revert your phone back to an old version of windows, but in my ‘WiFi challenged’ Beaune apartment, the necessary 1.72 Gb download required the best part of 4 hours to achieve! And naturally, now it’s less pretty, plus all the recent photos were lost – so I offer you the aforementioned windows ‘smiley’ instead.

Fortunately, the wines were good!

2011 Au Pied de Mont Chauve, Puligny-Montrachet 1er Les Demoiselles
A rare bird, and a very pretty one too. Really nicely focused, fresh aromas of lemon, blossom and a suggestion of minerality – this was very inviting. In the mouth there’s really only a suggestion of oak padding and flavour, really this is about a lithe and complex wine with a subtle mineral, salt-encrusted, base of flavour. Really excellent – four of us finished the bottle in 20 minutes – such a shame that there was no more…
Rebuy – Yes

2008 Roty, Gevrey-Chambertin Clos de la Brunelle
Clearly a little ‘old-age’ is setting in; I’ve various bottles of this wine from 06, 07 and 08 – and remember the 08 being lovely when young, the others were harder. So I thought time to try another 06 – as it’s now 10 years old! I was in for a surprise – there was still a hint of oak, but this smelled and tasted delicious – bravo, what an improvement. Sinuous, dark flavour, lost of engaging complexity too – yum! Only when I came to taking the picture of the bottle (which you can’t see!) did I realize that it was the 2008, not the 2006 – oh-well, next time I’ll take my glasses off to inspect the label!
Rebuy – Yes

1995 Daniel Rion, Vosne-Romanée 1er Beaux Monts
A lighter colour than the Roty, also with a warmer, rounder fruit on the nose. Pretty and tasty wine – it has a nice balance and a modest but insinuating complexity on the tongue. Lovely wine, yet, not really better than the excellent, slightly more energetic Roty!
Rebuy – Yes