We just got home from two weeks in Paris and Burgundy (actually with a day in Champagne also). We had a wonderful time there, as always. Included in the trips were visits to wineries where we have loved the wines for a long time and a few exciting new wineries or wineries that were new to us. To start, I want to mention that, for the first time ever in Burgundy, we ordered wines at two restaurants where the wines we ordered elicited excited responses from our waiters. Given that we were not ordering DRC or Coche but wines from producers we had never tasted before made this very exciting. The first such experience wasa young new winery called Maison Thiriet. We asked our waiter whether they had any of her wines and he lit up. He said Camile Thiriet was a friend of his and we ordered a really nice 2016 CĂ´te du Nuits Villages. The other time this happened was completely innocent. We went to a restaurant called le Relais de Saulx. We saw on the list a Meursault En Barre from Heitz-Lochardet. Since we were visiting there the next day, we decided to order it. Our waitress, Nina, who apparently owns or manages to place with her husband who is the chef, just gushed about how great the wines there were. We found out from this wine and from the wines we tasted there that this is a very exciting newish domaine (more on the wines of Armand Heitz later). Just a beautiful bottle of wine. Do note also that both of these restaurants were great finds that I highly recommend. I still think about the poached eggs covered with slices of truffles that I ate at Maison du Colombier.
Our first appointment was at Bouchard, which has just beautiful cellars on the old castle walls in the city of Beaune. We mostly tasted 2013s at Bouchard and they were quite good. 2013 is a vintage with a good bit of guts and acidity but the wines are a bit rougher now and really are in need of time. As usual for me, I very much enjoyed the red wines, but I found their whites to be much better than their reds. My favorites of the whites we tasted were a very elegant 2013 Meursault Genevrieres and, of course, a truly magnificent 2010 Chevalier Montrachet le Cabottes. This was Tuesday.
That night, we had dinner with friends (who we were with the next three days) at Ma Cuisine where we had a cod dish that tasted a lot like homemade gefilte fish (very different from the bottled junk). Keeping in our theme of wines from producers we would be visiting, we had a 2012 Bernard Moreau CM Chenevottes. Beautiful golden color, at first I thought this was a bit old, but after just a few minutes the wine proved me wrong as it just needed a bit of time to open up. Fabulous wine. Then, we had a magnificent 2014 Hudelot-Noellat Chambolle Musigny les Charmes. Both Alex Moreau and Charles Van Canneyt are such fabulous wine producers (more on both later) and it was a treat to have their wines together that night.