TN: '02 Lucien Boillot et Fils Volnay Les Angles

WINE TALK
1
  • 2002 Domaine Lucien Boillot et Fils Volnay 1er Cru Les Angles - France, Burgundy, Côte de Beaune, Volnay 1er Cru (3/24/2009)
    First sniff was nasty-- musky armpits and ivory soap. I held the glass up to the light and noticed that it was absolutely filthy, as though someone had removed it from the dishwasher mid-cycle and allowed a thick, soapy film to cover the entire bowl. Ugh. A fresh pour in a new glass revealed an entirely different wine. Dark and brooding, but not in a bad way, with dusty black cherry and wet earth on the nose. Silky but youthful on the palate, with enough tannic astringency to make me wish I’d left this bottle alone for a few years. We have two more, and I’m glad; I think this will be a quite enjoyable QPR wine with a bit of age.
2

Melissa…Now that you’ve had it how long would/will you wait to open the next bottle?

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I thought about that as I typed the note, and the biggest problem is that I just don’t have much of a frame of reference for Volnay. If this were Oregon Pinot (and in a blind tasting, I might have called this bottle Oregon Pinot) I’d hold it for ~3 years before I’d open the next one. It doesn’t strike me as one for the ages, but I’d like to give it just enough time for some of the tannin to turn to silk.

4

While I haven’t had any Boillot wines, Volnay can easily be a very long lived wine. If an 02 is still tight, it isn’t a stretch of the imagination at all to give it another 10+ years…

5

So you are indicating that the glass was the issue in the first pour???

6

Thanks for the note. So was the glass yours? From you house? Do you put soap in your glasses?

The wine sounds very nice. I don’t have much experience with Boillot either but I would think the Les Angles would have no problem going another 6-10 years and depending on how you like your wine (hard to judge how you’ll like your wine in 10 years) it could go much longer.

Jason

7

It wasn’t tight or unyielding-- it was rather effusive, actually. It was just a bit tannic, but at the same time, it already has the beginnings of a silky mouthfeel that makes me think (and this is intuition only and not experience) that we’ll find a “sweet spot” in a few years-- a point at which the tannins have resolved but the fruit is still fresh. I’m not saying it couldn’t go ten years (and perhaps our third bottle will indeed go that long), just that I’ll be very curious to see how it’s evolved before then.

8

A prominent coating was the probem.

The glass was indeed ours, but it was a lesser-used glass that I pulled from a high shelf. I was preoccupied, the room wasn’t well lit, and I just didn’t notice the glass. We do indeed use soap in our glasses, and the more resilient ones go in the dishwasher. Steve is our resident dish washer because I arrange the dishes in an illogical way, and he’s quite good at getting them spot-free. This particular glass, when I held it to the light, was bizarre. It looked like it must have come out of the dishwasher in the middle of the wash cycle, without ever being rinsed. I looked at our glasses, and it was the only one like that. It was absolutely coated in some sort of film.