From: Burgundy, France
Varietal: Pinot Noir
Substantially from 40-50+ yo vines planted just beneath 1er cru vineyards in the lieu dits of Les Échanges and Les Athets, with a small proportion of fruit from the adjoining Les Chardannes and Les Herbues vineyards.
Tasting Notes: Deep, rich, and intense. This enveloping bouquet has notes of fresh cherry, strawberry, violets, and rose alongside herbal notes on its silky palate. It is remarkably generous and punches well above its weight for both character and intensity. Elegant, finessed, and velvety, the kind of wine you want to savor, but somehow you can’t stop sipping.
Pairing: For a wine this luxurious, go with a meal fit for a celebration like Duck with Cherries and Red Wine Vinegar by David Tanis for the NYT.
The following is an excerpt from Burgundy Report in April 2017: “Isabelle Collotte is my host, she is taking on more and more of the responsibility from her father Philippe – indeed it really is a family affair – her cousin works here and her mother and grandmother were both helping with bottling when I visited, whilst Philippe was washing out the barrels. Philippe used to sell plenty of wine in bulk – either before or after malo – but Isabelle wanted to commercialise everything – indeed many of their Marsannay vineyards are included in the dossier for promotion to 1er cru, so it made sense. To achieve that they needed to build extra space to store the wine that they were now keeping – elevages for the ‘better’ crus is long here – 12 months in barrel plus another in tank to clarify without intervention – so they needed space to stock two vintages in barrel/bulk. The new facility is higher in the village, the old part here (next to Fougeray) holds the fermentation tanks, assembled wine for bottling and the barrels of the shorter elevage wines such as the regionals – here normally about 10 months.
Plowing is the norm here, no herbicides. The grapes are triaged at the winery before 100% destemming into concrete tanks – with one week of cool maceration – “we love the thermal stability of concrete” – there is a little pigeage [punching down] early in fermentation and later only remontage [pumping over]. The colour is ‘fixed’ with a short period at 35°C – the wine slowly cooling in the tank before a pneumatic press and then into barrels.”