WEEKEND COLUMNISTS The principal function of a fine wine broker is presumably to broker fine wine, but it is much appreciated when they break out of the mould and do something a little more altruistic.
Bordeaux Index has begun holding annual retrospective open tastings in London’s Hatton Garden of the most significant bordeaux made 10 years earlier. In Battersea, south London, Farr Vintners has held particularly useful blind tastings of key Bordeaux vintages for selected members of the trade and press. But earlier this month, in the west London premises of Fine & Rare Wines, was a blind tasting that was even more educational, revealing and unusual than any of these.
Fine & Rare’s Simon Davies and Amanda Baxter managed to corral samples of the 2008 vintage from 56 producers of the famous Grand Cru, Clos de Vougeot in Burgundy. This ancient walled vineyard is so extensive – 50 hectares, or 125 acres – that even this generous selection was not exhaustive. There are at least another nine Clos de Vougeot producers whose wines for one reason or another were not included in the tasting: Olivier Bernstein, Champy, Eugénie, Haegelen-Jayer, Leroy, Sylvain Loichet, Perrot-Minot, Ponsot Vieilles Vignes, Tortochot and Varoilles. But I don’t think I have ever had the chance to taste so many Grand Cru burgundies at the same time, even if Clos de Vougeot – or Clos Vougeot as it is often written – is too big to be consistently one of the most thrilling Grands Crus.
The thrill of Clos Vougeot is historical. Vines were first planted there in the 12th century by the austere monastic order based in nearby Citeaux, which they found too marshy for successful viticulture. The Cistercians accumulated land around their original holdings on the slope just south of the village of Vougeot so successfully that by 1336 the vineyard was essentially as it is today, Burgundy’s largest walled vineyard, or clos, with a press house and cellar attached. For the next five centuries or so, it had only two other effective owners: the Cistercians until Napoleon confiscated the vineyard in 1790 and then the Ravel family of Parisian bankers. In 1818, it was taken over by the Ouvrard family, who also bought the hallowed Romanée-Conti vineyard, the wine from which was aged at Clos Vougeot. It remained with the family until the late 19th century when it was bought by six Burgundy wine merchants, leading to a subdivided vineyard for the first time.
Today, Clos Vougeot is most famous for the number of owners with a plot inside its historic walls – more than 80, many of whom sell their grapes to merchants or other growers – and for being the headquarters of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, France’s most famous vinous brotherhood. The Château du Clos de Vougeot is, therefore, the scene of much carefully orchestrated revelry and the world’s most efficient meal service in the narrowest space, between long tables crammed into the main hall.
My favourite Clos Vougeot 2008s
Dom Anne Gros
Dom Michel Gros
Dom François Lamarche
Dom Joseph Drouhin
Dom Henri Boillot
Dom Leymarie-Ceci
Dom du Clos Frantin
Dom DrouhinLaroze
Dom Régis Forey
Dom Hudelot-Noëllat
Dom Jean Grivot
Stockists at www.wine-searcher.com
There was another delightful consequence of this huge blind tasting: discovering some producers little known in the UK, of whom some had made some very good wine indeed. The first five names in my list of top wines are very well known and hardly surprising, but I was intrigued to discover that some of my favourite wines had been made by Leymarie-Ceci and Régis Forey. Leymarie-Ceci is a small Vougeot domaine based on half a hectare at the top of the Clos Vougeot bought on impulse in 1933 by a Belgian wine merchant who went on to acquire two properties in Pomerol, the Belgians’ favourite Bordeaux appellation. The style of its Clos Vougeot is a little bumptious and Pomerol-like admittedly, but there was no shortage of stuffing and pleasure in this wine.
The wines of the Domaine Régis Forey are a little easier to track down, especially in the US and ... Belgium. According to one New York retailer, Chambers Street Wines, Régis Forey owes his particularly convincing, somehow sincere wine style to his belief in unusually long macerations of skins and juice.
Other less famous producers whose wines impressed me in this fascinating tasting were Domaine Laurent Roumier of Chambolle-Musigny and Domaine Henri Rebourseau of Gevrey-Chambertin, a favourite of New York retailer Sherry-Lehmann and a burgundy domaine that, most unusually, has an online direct sales operation for mature vintages.
The 2008 vintage was chosen because the wines were not too dense and introvert and, because ripeness levels were not that high, it was hoped that the wines would be usefully transparent at two years old (as, say, 2005s would not have been).
There was certainly no shortage of 2008 burgundy’s relatively high acidity but, in the most successful cases, the fruit was really quite ripe enough to compensate for this. And, while there was no single style of wine (I could have taken one or two of these wines for non-European Pinots, so sweet and oaky were they), the overall quality was seriously impressive. So often when tasting a single producer’s range, its Clos Vougeot can seem a rather weak link in a chain leading to, say, the various Chambertins, or Vosne-Romanées, but many of these wines were obviously Grand Cru quality, even on such an unusually hot day.
Conventionally it is supposed that the best wines of Clos Vougeot come from the best-drained upper third of the vineyard near such other Grands Crus as Le Musigny and Échezeaux, and the least successful Clos Vougeots are assumed to come from the soggiest third right down by the main road. (Apart from a small slice of Mazoyères-Chambertin, this is the only Burgundy Grand Cru vineyard to descend so low down the Côte d’Or.)
An analysis of the location of the vines that were responsible for my favourite wines in this extensive line-up revealed that all came from the top third of the vineyard except for Joseph Drouhin’s vines, which are in two parcels in the middle and the bottom; Régis Forey’s and Grivot’s which are at the bottom; and Clos Frantin’s, which are in all three elevations in this vineyard that I will be taking much more seriously from now on.
For tasting notes and scores, see Purple pages of www.jancisrobinson.com
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