2007 red Burgundy blind tasting and a few other great wines

Our wine club Euryanthe decided to taste 12 wines blind in duo’s from the 07’ vintage . We were 10 tasters , all wines were opened well in advance .

1. a pure and stemmy wine , ca pinotte , but not very elegant . Somewhat simple . 87/100 Ann Gros , Chambolle Musigny Combe d’Orveau
2. elegant and smooth , a more seductive style , still not very complex 89/100 Ghislaine Barthod Chambolle Musigny les Cras
3. beautiful Vosne nose of red fruit and roses , spicy and floral , elegant and finesse , yummy . 93/100 Lucien Le Moine Vosne Romanee Les Gaudichots
4. more masculin , lot’s of tannins , more extract , very powerful but a bit austere 90/100 Forey Vosne Romanee Les Gaudichots
5. lovely ripe wine , spices and crushed fruit , fully mature , slight hardness in finish , 93/100 Rouget Echezeaux
6. Stemmy and spicy , lighter in color , fleshy , elegant wine with class , great lenght , 94/100 DRC Echezeaux
7. very sweet wine , fully ready , a bit of caramel , 90/100 Clos des Lambrays
8. corked Ponsot Clos de la Roche
9. earthy with brick suggests Gevrey , fully reeady wine , some wood , really sweet fruit , 92/100 Groffier Chambertin Clos de Beze
10. more classic , stemmy , complex ,violets , a fine wine 93/100 Pierre Damoy Chapelle Chambertin
11. starts out as a beautuful classic wine , but not 100 % pure , really unfortunate , gets worse NR Claude Dugat Charmes Chambertin
12. more black in color , sauvage , some wood , a power house of a wine , very long finish , lot’s of everything 94/100 Dugat Py Charmes Chambertin

Overall , a good vintage for current consumption and for the decade to come . Burghound really underrated the Echezeaux from DRC .

We ( 10 tasters ) scored our top 3 wines with as a result
first place : Echezeaux DRC : 19 points
second place : Charmes Chambertin Dugat Py
third place : Robert Groffier Chambertin Clos de Beze

After the tasting , we went for dinner and opened a few more wines

• Bienvenue Batard and Batard Montrachet 2007 from Ramonet : fully ready to drink which is alarming , Very rich wines , I thought it were 2005’s . Drink up ( with pleasure )
• 2007 Montrachet from Comte Lafon was corked !!! The 2007 Montrachet from Sauzet was delicious , a master piece .
• But the wine of the evening was the 2001 Mazis Chambertin from d’Auvenay : such an elegance and finesse wine , such an unbelievable classy complexity . Wow 98/100
• The 1959 Gilette creme de tete was very elegant and a delight to drink . The other sweet wine was the 1990 Vouvray Clos Naudin ( special cuvee ) that tasted like sugar water compared to the Gilette .

Nice Herwig, again you nailed it here.

Good review

thanks

François

Very helpful notes. Thanks.

Thanks for the notes Herwig.

Great lineup.

I’m curious as to how the 07 Dujac Echezeaux would do in that lineup. It’s gorgeous on the nose and drinks really well.

YMMV but the Ramonet Batard 2007 I opened in January was far from ready. Already nice, sure, but not there yet.
Just before having this bottle, I saw a short interview of J-C Ramonet where he was tasting this same wine and said “it will be ready in 10 years”. I should have listened to him!

Alain

+1, The 07s are drinking well.

Thank you Herwig. 2007 is a year we’ve been wondering about. Since drinking our last '00, we were hoping this would be a similar vintage that’s softer and close to ready to drink.

Great to know! We just bought a bottle to sample and now might move it up in the queue.

Nuts. Been wondering about the '07 Ponsot CdlR and C-C.

07 ponsot cdlr is drinking pretty nice right now, just had it very recently. A bit primary with sweetish fruit, but it is a very enjoyable drink

Herwig thanks for the summary, very interesting as always.

I’m curious about Le Moine – do you have much experience with their Grand Cru’s?

I can say that their basic Bougogne is pretty freakin’ good.

Regarding Le Moine , I have visited this negotiant business in Beaune since 2003 every year .
His red wine changed style with the 2007 vintage : from dark , extracted wines to more finesse , a bit like Perrot Minnot . I like his red wines now and they do well in our blind tastings .
His whites are an entirely different story . They are all over the place . They believe in very slow elevage , thus the wines are regularly bottled one year after most other producers . The result is a lack of freshness but more stuffing . A house style you like or you do not . But in addition , some of his wines clearly oxidize , like for example most of his 2005 whites . When I told them so , they denied it and told me I do not understand wine . This is not the only Domaine who flatly denies premox problems ( Leflaive is a BIG one ) but it is mindboggling . I opened a 2004 Batard blind for the belgian importer of Le Moine and asked him to guess the vintage . He said 1945 . So forget the whites and stick to his reds , premier cru’s .
Le Moine also produces an excellent Chateauneuf du Pape , bot red and white . Really good but outrageously expensive .

Would you say that gaudichots was ready or would it benefit from more cellar time?

ready now and for the next 10 years .

year after year at the Don Cornwell white burg retrospective, LeMoine wines have been horribly premoxed. I echo your opinion.

Thanks Herwig. On the whites – super worrisome but happily I have never bought any.

Interesting how the red style changed in 2007. Do you have any sense of the red 1ers vs. the GCs? While GC’s from 2007 onward are going to be extremely young and hard to gauge, I am curious. I managed to get a deal on a bunch of '11s and '12 Le Moine GCs but haven’t opened any yet and don’t plan to for many years. Sadly little about them in Cellar Tracker – nobody else is opening these either.

I have exactly one bottle of 2007 burgundy, bought on a lark: Clos du Tart. Anyone have a view on when this should be consumed?

Thanks for your report, Herwig; Clos des Lambrays is the only 2007 Grand Cru I own (two bottles), so I was a bit disappointed at its showing for you. I guess I’ll drink them up, as Dennis suggests.