I haven’t had many, but what I’ve had suggests that in their hands, Rugiens is the quality equivalent of a grand cru.
Tasting there is quite an experience. Madame Gaunoux (Michel’s widow) doesn’t believe in barrel tasting, so you just sample whatever bottled wines they decide to show you.
Interesting, I just picked up a bottle of the '96. Looking forward to trying this!
It is always interesting to me to see glowing reports of burgundy from the period when people like Anthony Hanson wrote passionately about over-cropping, chemical fertilizing, and outright adulteration making the wines inferior. I don’t doubt for a minute the notes that experienced tasters post; I’m just confused.
David Kubiak
In general, I really like Gaunoux’s wines and have been buying too many from Envoyer over the last year or two. I have had one or two that did not send me, but I have loved a bunch of them including the 1996 Pommard Grands Epenots and the 1999 Corton Renardes. I have not had anything as old as Alan’s 78.
I find the style of wine to be fairly powerful, not that elegant (at least at the ages I have had them) but seemed to age well, are pretty complex and have nice long finishes. The 1999 Corton went through a stage where it was pretty animalistic - when I drank a bottle in London with Nicos in around 2005 or so, he described the wine as smelling like a combination of horsehair and English cheddar. The wine has settled down a lot and was getting good about a year ago when our Burg group did a Corton tasting. Kind of old fashioned wines in the best sense of the term.
There certainly were a lot of wines from that era that were inferior wines. Many were pretty bad, not only in Burgundy but in Bordeaux, in California, in Germany, etc. As always, the secret was to find the producers that did not over-crop and adulterize their wines (my guess is that in those days everyone probably used chemical fertilizer). I do not have Alan’s experience with 78 Gaunoux, but 78 was a great vintage and I have had wonderful wines from other producers, such as Faiveley.
Burgundy is intrinsically confusing-I speak as one whose first introduction was from Hanson’s superb second edition which contains what is still the only proper explanation of burgundy’s cycle of maturity. Nevertheless, prejudice about what’s likely to be in the bottle from this period is as often as not confounded, and I would be pretty astonished if there’s been much change in method over the last hundred years at Gaunoux, whose wines I always buy when the price is right. I have not been enamoured of their village Beaune but everything else is top notch, particularly in weak vintages when however plenty of time is needed.
Tom,
Have you had the 2005 village Beaune? I really liked it and it was pretty well priced.
My siblings and I recently met up in the house in which we were raised for one final weekend (our mother is no longer alive, our father moved south) and in anticipation I sent wine to my brother who planned to drive from Chicago. I packed Flannery steaks and salad greens and a terrific sheep’s milk cheese from a farmers’ market. We bought potatoes. After the steaks and with the cheese we drank the 1959 Michel Gaunoux Pommard Grand Epenots I acquired in late 1999 as part of an auction lot purchased to acquire a 1951 Dr Barolet chambolle to give to a friend for her 50th. It was fabulous (and my brother’s birth year so he was thrilled) and had basically no sediment and no browning. Cork was in outstanding shape although I packed the durand just in case (which I had to get my brother to use as my hand isn’t big enough).