2012 Benjamin Leroux Corton - really quite interesting, ready, more elegant than I expected. Good mix of floral, fruit and savoury notes.
2009 Liger Belair Echezeaux - still very young but approachable, big rich fruit, impressive nose, nicely structured. I’d leave for longer, but it was already a great drink now.
Hey have you tried this Corton in any other vintages?
Nope, sorry. But you should add it to your list of things to try :)!
I am a Corton man to the core of my bones, as is @Peter_Chiu . I have never really known of this producer. Is this domaine wine or negoc wine? Do you know what section of Corton it comes from?
Ben Leroux? Solid producer in the Wasserman portfolio… Benjamin Leroux : Becky Wasserman & Co..
Again, does this guy own rows of grapes in Corton? If so, which vineyards?
Funny how you settle into patterns. My wife and I never drink red burgundy with food, save for occasionally having it with a perfect warmed up crunchy baguette + stinky washed rind cheese. Don’t ask me why, but this is the only food we ever pair with red burg. Well, tonight is the first night of a six week road trip and we decided to go crazy and have a red burg with dinner. First time ever! So we started with a fantastic BBQ place in Bismarck, ND (yep! 
), Laughing Sun Brewery, truly amazing BBQ. Got the brisket and burnt ends and paired it with a 2017 Denis Bachelet GC VV, and…it was glorious! Holy moly, the smokiness of the BBQ amped up the (albeit slight) smokiness that you get sometimes from a Gevrey Chambertin. The acidity in the wine totally jived with the acidity in the tangy BBQ sauce. It was delightful!
This is for the 2020 vintage.
92-94 points Jasper Morris, MW : “From Clos des Meix only this year. Lovely mid purple, this is one of the more stylish types of Corton. Just a few tannins behind but they are ripe and there is a graceful quality to the fruit which sweeps through to an excellent finish. (Nov 2021)”
Here is another datapoint. Unsure if this is pre or post 2020. Looks like he does not own vineyards there
This Corton Grand Cru comes from 3 south-facing parcels covering 0.2 hectares of vines in the Lieux-dits of En Charlemagne, Les Bressandes and Le Corton. The vines here were planted from 1945 to 2000.
Funny, the longer this 2017 Bachelet GC VV has sat in the glass, the less interesting it’s become. For the first 30 mins it had all of the haunting, stunning elements of a perfect burg, a WOW village wine. Now, 2 hours later, it seems like a totally forgettable $30 bottle of pinot noir produced in some forgettable place in California. How did this happen?
Many young burgs, other young wines as well, don’t open up with air, they shut down. It’s quite common, and commented on frequently. It’s a very wide misconception on this board especially that it’s always beneficial to give young wines more air, that they will all improve. It simply isn’t true. That’s why I never decant young burgundy unless I know the specific wine and have observed how it reacts to air. And why I have warned against too much aeration in the past. So it shouldn’t be a shock.
9 g-crus in Gevrey are still my preferred ACS and moved to Corton Hill due to QPR factor
Peter
bbq also may not have been great for palate as the meal went on - tough with the build up of sugar/smoke/salt/fat
Cross post! A positive experience.
Ben makes a lot of cuvées, mostly very small negoce batches. He’s known for bottling mags only when he has one barrel, so many of his GCs are mag only. His own vines are mostly in Meursault.
I opened a 1995 I purchased in release about 3? Years ago. It was really very good but not up with my favorite bonnes mares experiences
I have learned - the hard way - that young(ish) Mugnier CM and Fuees shut down with air.
Not sure whether Leroux owns this plot. Probably not. My understanding is the 2012 was primarily fruit from En Charlemagne - i.e. the part that would more usually make (white) Corton Charlemagne. But I do not know if they make it that way regularly.
This may have returned to form with some time in the decanter.
In my experience, no. If a wine, especially young burgundy and barolo, started expressive, then shut down, even more air does not return it to expressive. So often, whatever we think is wrong with the wine, we want more air to be the remedy, and it’s often just not.
Because of this I have started slowoxing only for Burgundy pinots. (while yes pouring a bit to taste and invoke oxygen into the bottle) If it doesn’t help we can always add more air via decanting. Not the other way around 