Your favorite Boudot

Your two favorite Boudot (ex-Leroy, etc.)

  • Camille Giroud
  • Georges Noellat
  • Gerard Mugneret
  • Grivot
  • Hospices de Nuits
  • Jean Tardy
  • Jerome Chezeaux
  • JJ Confuron
  • Louis Jadot (Domaine Gagey)
  • Méo-Camuzet
  • Michel Noellat
  • Mongeard-Mugneret

0 voters

I would like to put together a mini vertical/horizontal of Les Boudots to sample and get smarter on. Accordingly, am keen for folk’s recommendations for Boudots < ~$250 per bottle, and would appreciate a brief note for why you prefer that producer over others. I set a poll as well, that lets folks “pick 2” for the poll instead of “pick 1”, thinking this might produce a better data set. Look forward to folks’s thoughts!

Hands down, Georges Noëllat, followed by Michel Noëllat…
Disclaimer, I import both.

Why Grivot or Meo? Producer style or something else?

I could tell better next year as I´m planning a Boudots against Malconsorts-tasting next spring …

Two producers who print the strongest personal signature on their wines …
hmm … [scratch.gif]
(… not my favorites !)

How would you characterize the difference in styles with them versus the others? Eg jadot

I voted for Grivot and Jadot because they are the only 2 I have tried

I hosted a dinner a number of years ago with three or four producers Boudots from 1999 vintage. The surprising winner on the night was the Tardy. IIRC two other producers were Confuron and Meo.

The last time we did a horizontal of Boudots (all from the 93 vintage in 2011), the Georges Noellat and the Leroy won. The Tardy and the Jadot were also very good. Several other wines were marked by too much oak or too much producer rather than vineyard character, as Robert has noted.

Grivot usually shows a deep dark-red colour with an aromatic component of sweet-sour overripe cherries and plums and a certain type of oak-toast aside (and has a catastrophic TCA-rate in the mid-late 90ies, at least here). The texture is a bit „narrow“, not expansive and lush (hint of rum pot).

Meo-Camuzet: usually very dark-red with black reflexes, hints of soot (reminding me a bit on La MissionHB), a bit lead pencil and quite heavy dark oak toast. The tannins are often a bit dry and astringent, lacking sweetness. Nevertheless very concentrated and long.

That doesn´t mean that both producers won´t mature into fine wines, but I´ve often recognized especially Grivot in blind tastings …

Jadot (Nuits) has also a very dark colour, but more lead pencil, no soot and seems to be a bit purer with good minerality, more traditional in texture, often also with hints of stems.

Just my 0.02

I am slowly consuming a 6x of ‘93 Tardy Boudots, certainly better than expected.

Georges Noellat. I’m not a big fan of Nuits St. Georges and strongly prefer the NSG vineyards adjacent to Vosne Romanee. The Georges Noellat Boudots comes from 80 year old vines. The 2015 Georges Noellat NSG Boudot was just stunning – a very dense wine with a lot Vosne Romanee character (the asian spice and plum aromas made me think Vosne Romanee, not Nuits.) The 2015 Grande Echezeaux was really spectacular too. Unfortunately my allocation was cut from 6 bottles to 2 bottles in 2015.

I ended up busting my plan for an organized tasting and picked up a 2012 Grivot locally. Below is my tasting note… and take it with a grain of salt newhere I liked the wine, but I didn’t come away here thinking I should be loading up on Grivot… was too sweet (which I guess is the oak) to rave about / pick up a case without trying other producers. Same store had a Jadot… will try to go back tomorrow and find time to investigate…

TN: 2012 Grivot Boudot
aroma of darkly sweet rose, mixed with vegetables/earth – nice!
medium to full body (more full), won’t say its creamy but texture is silky
palette of brooding, ripe strawberry (black strawberries!), subtle rose, and some herbaceous vegetable, a little earth – nice!
I perceived more vanilla/sweetness over time… even a tinge of putrid sweetness – Not nice!
Moderate and dusty tannin
good acidity provides some nice balance
quite the long finish - nice!
A bit sweet on the start, a bit vegetable/earth (not in a bad way), and finished on a sweet note with those dusty tannins - Not nice!
quite smooth – no heat here at all
no regrets drinking this one earlier, and I’m not sure I’m missing something material by having drunk it 3-4 years ahead of plan

92-93 (which is my personal scale of enjoyment/not a rigorous quantitative undertaking). Despite lacking heat, the putrid sweet sensation ultimately was too dominant on this one for me to really embrace the wine.

P.S. I posted about Economou before… this wine reminded me of Economou 2004 Sitia from Crete (weird I know…). The Grivot had more oak/less heat/longer finish and the Sitia more minerality/more freshness. But the Economou is half the price… I’m not sure which wine I prefer (I am sensitive to heat/prefer a longer finish… but the Economou style better resonates)… unequivocally I think the Economou is the better value. If the Economou had less heat/equivalent finish, I would prefer that by far…

I’m actually surprised that the Grivot has gotten the number of votes that it has – except for the fact that it is more widely available. I used to cellar a number of Grivot wines (Richebourg, Echezeaux, Clos Vougeot and sometimes VR Beaumonts, but never Boudots. I was never particularly impressed, but perhaps they’ve gotten better lately. 2012 is also a vintage that a lot of people think is excessively ripe. You may want to try a Georges Noellat (very expensive) or Meo-Camuzet or Gerard Mugneret from a more balanced year like 2010.

Also, Benjamin Leroux started producing a NSG Boudots in 2015, and Lucien LeMoine also produces an NSG Boudots. Both would be worth a try, especially from the 2015 vintage. The problem with the Georges Noellat wines is that they have gone from being reasonable to insanely expensive way too fast.

Locally, I have availability of Georges Noellat 2013, Jadot 2011/12, G-M 2011, Meo 2014 (and can ship a 2006 Meo). Which would you suggest out of these? I’m tempted to scrap the Georges Noellat outright given that aforementioned price inflation… 2015 runs locally $300 (I see on CT folks paid $150)… I suspect $300 is indeed insane for that bottle.

The Meo 2014 will be a bit more open than the 2013 Georges Noellat, but those are the two I would try to see the real potential of what the vineyard can deliver. Yes, either will be very young to try. I was not a fan of the 2006 vintage for the most part, otherwise I would suggest that one.

During the 2000s, I bought and tasted Grivot across the board and my cellaring pattern was similar to yours except that Beaumonts was always on the must-have list. I did cellar Boudots occasionally, but I generally found the wine a bit too hard and angular- even given that we are talking about a NSG versus a Vosne wine.

In the late 2000s when I started sampling a lot of the 90s wines I had been cellaring- notably Roumier and Rousseau- my interest in Grivot declined because in retrospect, while the Grivot wines were nicely muscled, they just did not seem like they were going to develop those earthy forest floor, floral and mineral tones of other really top producers. Having had some 80s and 90s vintages, I suspect that some of the less attractive aspects of the heavy Accad influence has never fully departed from this Domaine. By that I mean that the imbalances of the 80s and early 90s are gone, but yet there still seems to be a certain sacrifice of subtlety in the interests of getting more extract.

Add in what happened to the pricing (Grivot was one of the first to go really nuts with price increases in the late 00s), and I just gave up on them entirely.

Meo and Jadot got my votes and they are my go-tos for Boudots. Leroy makes an incredible Boudots- but I am just not interested in any wine at the price that one currently commands. I would especially encourage people who have not indulged to give the Meo Nuits Boudots a try. Yes, it bears quite a signature- but so does DRC for that matter- and it has quite a lot of spice and earth to it, plus in recent vintages I think Meo has finally hit his stride with a fine consistency. Also note that this is a rare case where some prices have come down. Meo Richebourg, Parantoux and Brulees have gone through the roof, but the 2015 and 2016 Boudots were less expensive than the excellent 2009 at release. $175 before discounts is certainly not a cheap bottle of wine, but for a top premier cru from a small production top producer that is a very nice price these days.

I was going to vote Verdet, though I haven’t tried very many, the 2015 really impressed me.

By happenstance, i had the 2005 Tardy Boudots last night. It’s actually quite a nice wine, still a bit too young, but very well balanced and without any excessive oak influence that can sometimes show up in Tardy from that era. I haven’t looked at prices, but I imagine that this bottle is much more affordable than many of the others we’re discussing. I don’t believe that they still have access to these grapes.

Tardy farmed the Meo parcel until Nicolas took it back a few years ago. I found the Tardy wines to be very good and extremely well priced.

Curious to know where this price hike comes from in the US. Ex-domaine, the wines are still very reasonably priced. Retail pricing seems very steep in the US. We served the regular Nuits 15 as my brother’s wedding together with the main plate. Quite delicious young.