Raymond Blake's Directory of Côte d'Or Producers

By Raymond Blake

This short ebook comprises a select directory of Côte d’Or wine producers. Raymond Blake provides profiles of 49 of his favourite wine producers across the côte’s two sub-regions, the Côte de Nuits and the Côte de Beaune. The experience of drinking a great Côte d’Or wine is one Blake believes is difficult to match – as are the prices paid for some parcels of land in this small but celebrated region. The detailed profiles explain each producer’s vineyard holdings, vine growing and winemaking approach and give an assessment of their wine style. Each entry ends with detailed tasting notes on a recommended wine for readers to try. This handy book makes an excellent reference for anybody buying Côte d’Or wines or visiting the region to sample them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Académie du Vin Library
• Release date: Aug 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781917084116

Raymond Blake

Raymond Blake is one of Ireland’s leading wine writers. His enthusiasm for wine is boundless; as an independent voice his judgement is widely respected. As wine editor of Food & Wine Magazine, a position he has held since its launch in 1997, his travels take him to the far-flung corners of the wine world, though his spiritual home is Burgundy. He writes for numerous other publications and is a member of the Circle of Wine Writers. In 2006 he was inducted as a Chevalier du Tastevin in Burgundy.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The Côte d’Or, the Golden Slope, enjoys a reputation and exerts an influence in the wine world out of all proportion to its size. It possesses none of the grandeur of the Douro Valley, for instance, nor the picture-postcard beauty of South Africa’s winelands. It is not majestic; its beauty is serene, and what strikes the observer time and again is the tiny scale. From north to south it is about 50 kilometres long, is sometimes less than a kilometre wide, and can be driven in little more than an hour. At a push it could be walked in a day. Yet for a thousand or more years this favoured slope has yielded wines that have entranced and delighted wine lovers, with a fair measure of frustration and disappointment thrown in too.

Greater Burgundy is a bigger, more geographically diverse, region than might first be supposed, stretching from Chablis, south-east of Paris, to Beaujolais, north of Lyon. The subject matter of this book, however, is Burgundy’s heart, the Côte d’Or. There is no more celebrated stretch of agricultural land on earth. It has been pored over and analysed, feted and cosseted, obsessed about and sought after for centuries and today, if anything, it exerts a greater pull on wine lovers than ever before. ‘Astronomical’ does not begin to describe the prices now being paid for prized patches of grand and premier cru vineyard, and for the wines produced from them by the top domaines. Such prices hog the headlines and paint a dazzling, though severely one-dimensional, picture of the Côte d’Or today. In the early years of the twenty-first century they are part of the story but they are not the only part.

This period may come to be considered by future historians as a golden age for Burgundy but it has brought its own challenges in the shape of those ludicrous prices, the scandal of premature oxidation in the white wines, and the increasing challenge of dealing with extreme weather events such as hail and spring frost.

Every year sees new names added to the producers’ roster and old ones slipping away, and thanks to this ongoing evolution the infant domaine of today can be the superstar of tomorrow. The directory that follows features a selection of my favourite producers from the Côte de Nuits and the Côte de Beaune. It is taken from my book Côte d’Or: The wines and winemakers of the heart of Burgundy, a comprehensive study of the region and its winemakers. That book includes far more information on the history and geology of the region, descriptions of typical wine styles for each village, a detailed explanation of the complex patchwork of vineyards, profiles of the principal grape varieties and explorations of the work of vigneron and winemaker. It also provides vintage assessments, a chapter on some of the challenges currently facing the côte and analysis of the future potential for the region. For details on where you can get your copy please turn to the end of this book.

No gustatory experience can match the thrill of a great Côte d’Or red drunk at its peak. The colour, crimsoned by age; the heavenly scent, perfumed with notes of sweet decay; a sauvage edge, the palate lively and tingling, managing to be so many things at once, oscillating between fruit and spice and meat and game, a merry-go-round of flavour, spiralling on the palate, refusing to be pinned down by anything so prosaic as a tasting note. All the primary components melded by age and yielding up new ones, unsignalled when the wine was young. Everything cohesive and in harmony, like a great orchestra playing at its best. Above all, vital and living, endlessly enchanting and intriguing, engaging the palate and the spirit like no other wine.

SOME NOTES

The terms ‘village’ and ‘commune’ are sometimes used interchangeably. In general I use ‘commune’ to indicate the vineyard area surrounding a village, and ‘village’ for the urban heart of the commune, but they tend to overlap and there isn’t a rigid distinction between them. In common parlance, village is more widely heard than commune. When written in italics, village is used to indicate the rank of a vineyard and its wine, so that in the hierarchy of vineyard classification village comes below premier cru and grand cru. A wine labelled simply Gevrey-Chambertin or Chambolle-Musigny is a village wine.

The Côte d’Or runs in a south-south-west direction from Dijon but for simplicity’s sake when, for example, describing the relative positions of different villages to one another I use the cardinal compass points. Thus Pommard is ‘north’ of Volnay and Vosne-Romanée is ‘south’ of Vougeot. The same applies to east and west. Greater accuracy is employed when mentioning the orientation of a specific vineyard or slope.

Each producer profile includes a ‘try this’ note about one of their wines. It could be their greatest wine, their simplest one, or something in between; the criteria for selection were loose and purely personal. Each stands as an individual, and should be seen as such: the wines do not form a homogeneous group, nor is it a parade of flagship wines. The wines represent the house style and ethos of each producer and in many cases they punch above their weight in terms of price or appellation. ‘Try this’ is not a formal tasting note, it is meant to highlight distinctive and characterful wines that I believe are worth seeking out.

1

THE PRODUCERS OF THE CÔTE DE NUITS

Travelling south out of Dijon, the grandeur of the historic centre gives way to a humdrum suburban sprawl of car showrooms, supermarkets, hotels, fast food restaurants and the like, before vineyards begin to assert themselves around Marsannay-la-Côte, where the Côte de Nuits begins. It forms the northern section of the Côte d’Or and is home to the greatest red wines of Burgundy, though such a prosaic statement fails to convey the renown in which this strip of vineyard and its wines are held in every corner of the wine-drinking world. No collection of superlatives adequately captures the impact a great Côte de Nuits red makes on the palate and etches on the memory. Mere words are pedestrian; words set to music in a great operatic aria come close to matching the all-enveloping, sensual impact of these wines.

Walking the vineyards, passing Chambertin, or standing at the miniature T-junction where Musigny abuts Clos de Vougeot, or looking back towards Vosne-Romanée from the gaunt cross that marks the Romanée-Conti vineyard, it is not possible to imagine the stir these names cause in certain circles. Demand for the wines has never been higher: witness the frenzied excitement that greets the release of a new vintage from an exalted producer or the arrival in the auction room of a prized parcel of old wines. Witness too the growth in the passing off of fraudulent wines, an odious practice, but perhaps the best barometer of how highly prized are the vinous jewels of the Côte de Nuits today.

There is a patrician feel to the Côte de Nuits that is largely absent in the Côte de Beaune. The top grands crus engender a reverence that, with the exception of Montrachet, the Côte de Beaune does not match. That these fabled vineyards sometimes – and sometimes too often – do not live up to the hype does not seem to dent people’s enthusiasm and their willingness to pay knee-weakening sums for a scant few bottles. Their reputations seem largely impregnable, set in stone, but it is not enough to know that the label says grand cru because it is not the wine but the vineyard that is ranked as such. Interposed between vineyard and bottle is the hand of the winemaker, clumsy or dextrous, greedy or not, dynamic or coasting, as the case may be.

Such is the dazzle of the famed names that others, particularly to the north near Dijon, are cast into shade. In the style of an old-time cartographer a contemporary successor might write ‘here