I felt like opening a bottle of Chardonnay to go with arctic char tonight and was pondering between a few bottles in my cellar from quite known quantities. Then I remembered this bottle. I had bought it a few years ago when we dined at Auberge du Pot d’Etain - a restaurant known for one of the finest cellars in all of Burgundy. They sell a selection of wines to go but these bottles are mostly from lesser known names. Based on the few bottles I have opened from the mixed case I bought the QPR of these wines is very high. I am not familiar with this producer at all but this is the most convincing bottle of wine I have had in a long while.
2014 Henri et Gilles Buisson St. Romain La Perrière- France, Burgundy, Côte de Beaune, St. Romain (27.2.2019)
Popped and poured into large Burgundy bowls, enjoyed at somewhere between cellar and room temp. Firing on all cylinders right from the get-go, the nose on this one offers tangy lemon, grapefruit, iodine, nuts and oak. Intensely savory, reminiscent of a serious Chablis. On the palate moderately concentrated with really - and I mean really - high acidity and through the roof intensity. Bone dry and markedly savory with a haunting, brilliantly salty attack. The oak is there both on the texture and the flavor profile but it is totally secondary to the tangy fruit and the salty minerality. The drive and the super chiselled form are truly something to behold. Saint Romain as an appellation is very much off my radar but this wine serves as a great wake up call. I am just flabbergasted what a complete effort it is - I would buy a case or two in a heartbeat given the chance. Wow.
Nice wines! And one of the few (the only?) producer(s) to farm organically in Saint-Romain. My sense is that the world isn’t ready for quite so many different lieux-dits bottlings of Saint-Romain, and that a single blend (a la Alain Gras) might be better than the sum of the parts, but the results are excellent. I have a 1988 Sous le Château from an earlier incarnation of the domaine lined up to drink soon in my cellar. Saint-Romain ‘le Haut’ is one of the loveliest places in Burgundy to visit.
I personally have just not been aware of any “leading lights” of the appellation. I’ve seen that Alain Gras’s bottling here and there but thus far have not ended up reaching for it. After enjoying this one perhaps I should? That said I have not experienced this level of tension in a Côte de Beaune white in a looooong time despite lots of people talking about the high acidity of 2014 so while enjoying the heck out of this one I feel like I should once again prepare myself for the disappointments ahead Regarding your 1988 this bottle left me feeling like it would have aged gracefully for many, many years.
The Alain Gras example is lovely and keenly priced. Ponsot’s is very good lately (William Ponsot came from Saint-Romain before moving to Morey) though likely a bit more expensive. Maison de Montille make a nice example that I suspect derives from Buisson grapes. In these warm vintages, the reds are beginning to get interesting, too.
Yeah, I have a source for several vintages of Ponsot’s Cuvée de la Mésange (are there any others even?) but seems to be about double the price of the Buisson. I will keep my eyes open for Alain Gras and de Montille’s version though. Thanks for the insight as always!
In the US, the most easily sourced st Romain is probably the version by Jacques Bavard which KL direct imports; I’ve always found it good but moot great.
Rosenthal brings these wines into the US and they are available.
William, do you have a sense of how the vintages in the more remote outposts of Côte de Beaune and Côte Chalonnaise map onto their more glamorous cousins? I sometimes have to buy without tasting and don’t have enough experience to have a personal mental map.
I don’t think there are clear rules, unfortunately - e.g. Saint-Romain is definitely cooler, but the soils are often thin and vines planted in them thus susceptible to hydric stress. Côte Chalonnaise has often a bit drier than the Côte d’Or lately, and that translated to some arrested phenolic development and hence structural coarseness in some (but emphatically not all) 2015s - but again, that isn’t even reliable enough a trend to be called a rule. When you introduce variables such as frost and hail it becomes impossible to generalize. As ever, the most reliable approach if buying blind is likely to follow the best producers.
Okay, but they are not based in Saint-Romain, they are on the main road in Ladoix, no? Looking back, my original post was ambiguous, but I was referring to domaines based in the village that farm organically.
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Regarding your 1988 this bottle left me feeling like it would have aged gracefully for many, many years.