I had an urge to try a red Burgundy tonight, which is unusual for me. I’m traveling and had limited options, most of which were absurdly expensive. I opted for a 2009 Michel Gros Chambolle-Musigny, which was on sale for $55. I chose it for the price and because CT reviews suggested that, among the Burgundy options available to me, this would be the closest to ready to drink (albeit not ready yet). It turned out to be an effective reminder of why I generally avoid Burgundy: the price/quality ratio is wildly out of step with other regions, and I’m always left scratching my head trying to find complexity in lower-tier wines (I don’t dispute that Burgundy at its finest is exceptional). The attractiveness of this stuff relative to a $50+ price tag is incomprehensible to me.
Nothing about the bottle suggests it is flawed or likely to be atypical. I sampled the bottle over several hours, but the profile didn’t change much. The wine has a mild, pleasant smell of red fruits, but nothing close to “tremendous” or “striking” as claimed by reviewers on CT. When drinking, I found the wine to be thin, hot and lacking any serious complexity. Its basic red-fruit flavors are obscured behind alcohol. The purported herbal flavors are so mild as to have a negligible effect on the taste. It is still rather tannic, as expected, but the tannins—like the fruit—are secondary to the alcohol. There is almost no finish; the alcohol bite quickly fades, and nothing else remains.
In my view—and I realize my opinion is not shared by many people here with far more experience, so I’m open to the possibility that I just don’t “get it”—this wine is the quality equivalent of a thin, simple $15 US pinot noir. To me, it is utterly forgettable and extraordinarily overpriced. I realize it is still very young and closed, and it will undoubtedly improve, but I don’t see enough stuffing here to believe that the wine will ever evolve into anything remotely equal to its price.
Here’s my problem in a nutshell: What should motivate me to repurchase this? For current drinking, I would have strongly preferred a barbera that would have been a third of the price. For future drinking, my $55 could have purchased any number of other wines that will almost certainly shame this wine now or in 10-20 years’ time (for example, I considered purchasing some of my usual suspects from Lopez de Heredia, Ridge, Produttori del Barbaresco, G.D. Vajra, and Brovia, all of which were priced at or below this Gros). Indeed, with cellar space at a premium I can’t imagine bothering to cellar this and wait it out even if I were optimistic it would improve substantially.
Burgundy lovers, consider me unconverted. But I’ll keep trying, because you can’t all be wrong!