A high level tasting yesterday at Dutournier restaurant in Paris : le Carré des Feuillants.
Just one name to mention. It wqs a discovery for me, maybe not for you.
Simply great wines on the fruit, with a long finesse and purity like very, very few in Burgundy.
To be simple : the small brothers of the wines of Jacques Frédéric Mugnier.
The name of this Producer :
Virgile Lignier - Michelot
11, rue Haute
21220 - Morey St Denis
France
03 80 34 31 13 virgile.lignier@wanadoo.fr
Make my day : try to find some of his 2007 Morey St Denis or Clos de la Roche, and post your comment. Pure emotion.
Lignier-Michelot make good Burgundy in a generally ‘tits-out’ style. Worth trying if you don’t mind a bit of obvious oak in your Morey-Saint-Denis. The wine of his with the best quality/price ratio is his Morey 1er Cru Faconnieres, most attractive it is too.
However, M. Lignier also has a negotiant business, with the wines labelled as Virgile Lignier. I had a Morey 1er Cru Faconnieres with this label a few days ago and I found it to be perilously dull and one dimensional. I’d stick to wines from the main operation.
As more and more small producers with some reputation, Virgile has (I didn’t knew before) a “négoce” business. Obviously, I was refering to the property they take care personnaly (as I know, they take care about 8 hectares but do not own them).
Again, I did like the wines because of the style so close to the one of JF Mugnier : fruit above all with finesse.
Oh I’d forgotten I’d tried one of his 07 Morey villages. It was 2007 Lignier-Michelot Morey-Saint-Denis en la Rue de Vergy (a village-level Morey but from a named vineyard) and I had it last summer. It was fleshy, fruity and attractive, with good Morey character, but ultimately lacking a bit of complexity. Certainly a good drink providing some fruity fun, but even though I got this at a cellar door price it seemed a bit too expensive for a wine which was not completely satisfying.
I do like his labels:
I’m afraid I disagree with your comparison of these wines with Freddy Mugnier’s. I’ve been lucky enough to drink an embarrassingly large amount of Mugnier wine. They are elegant, refined, sculpted beauties which are models sophistication and restraint. I admit I’ve only had three of the Lignier-Michelot wines, but they are far more voluptuous, round, buxom wines that are more about up-front fleshy fruit. My chum in Morey, who makes quite oak-influenced wines himself, finds the Lignier-Michelot wines to be too marked by new oak to be properly balanced. If there is one thing that Mugnier wines are not it is oaky.
Shame Freddy Mugnier’s wines are even more expensive!
Agree with your comment. My idea was to point out that the wines from Virgile I did taste at Dutournier were more in the style of those of Mugnier than, for example, in the style of Rousseau or Mortet. The master and the pupil. Not brothers, of course.