Maiden Tasting! Four Burgundies

Four bottles of wine. Six curious tongues. Twenty four separate experiences . . .

The first ever Thursday Night Tasting launched last night on waves of Burgundy. It was great!

Let's begin. The Wines, in order of appearance:

Whites
2007 William Fevre Chablis "Champs Royaux" ($20)
2005 Jean-Marc Pillot Saint-Romain "La Périere" ($38)

Reds
2002 Patrice Rion Chambolle-Musigny Premiere Cru "Le Plan des Dames" ($54)
2007 Domaine de Villaine Mercurey "Les Montots" ($45)

The players, in order of residence (why not?), north to south:

Jon, Upper East Side, in the 80s
Robin, Upper West Side, in the 70s
Deb, Midtown, in the 50s
Steve, just over the Brooklyn Bridge
Tracy and Raphael, just south of Steve

The method:

Sequential tasting using an evaluation sheet that rates the wines by five criteria: visual appearance, aroma, texture (or body), taste, and finish. The scale used, which adds up to 30 points in total, is as follows:

25-30 Excellent, incredibly delicious, memorable
20-24 Outstanding, a really good wine
15-19 Good to Very Good
10-14 Average, drinkable
0-9 OK, who brought this?

(I should say, I cribbed the evaluation sheet and evaluation rubric from a few different online sources and tweaked them here and there.)

First, a little bit about Burgundy wine . . .

As Jon explained at the outset, the central Burgundy growing region in France is tiny: about 25 miles long and just over a mile wide. That's not all that much bigger than Manhattan Island. The grapes grown here are principally Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, meaning that white Burgundies are Chards and red Burgundies are Pinots.

OK wait, let me pause to explain something. The phrase "white Burgundy" gets me excited. I think it's because it sounds so impossibly exotic. How can something be white and red at the same time? I know "Burgundy" doesn't refer to color, but the association sticks in the back of my mind. White Burgundy. It's kind of like the Black Irish.

I guess I'm trying to articulate why I instinctively like Burgundy wine so much. To me, Burgundy is synonymous with delicate, complex, and mature flavors. Yet a full disclosure here: I've tasted fewer than a dozen Burgundies in my life so far, so I'm writing as an authentic ignoramus. Yet though I know so little about this wine, I've already detected in my habits of mind about Burgundies a touch of Francophilia I never knew I had. I'm drawn to these wines and to the images they evoke for me--images so redolent of cliché I won't name them here.

Of course, part of the general mystique of Burgundy may be related to its exclusively small size. In fact, there are only 100 AOC vineyards in Burgundy. "AOC" is short for "Appellation d’origine contrôlée," a designation granted by the French government to vineyards that meet fairly rigorous standards of production. It's also a way to protect and make a fetish of French terroir and viticultural history, not to mention standing in the global wine market. The Napa Valley, by contrast, has around 700 vineyards producing Napa Valley wine--and Napa wasn't designated as a unique wine growing region until 1981. Anyway, Burgundy's small size means that one can conceivably get around to tasting a representative selection of these wines--assuming, of course, certain liberties with one's time, money, and sobriety. To me, a genuine neophyte, this is magical wine.


So, let's take these color by color. First the whites.

Overall, we liked the Saint-Romain over the Chablis. (By the way, Chablis is a sub-region in Burgundy--or perhaps I should say super-region as it's to the north). The Saint-Romain scores were as follows: 23, 21.5, 20,19, 19, 18. (I was the 23. I got carried away.) This was really a solid wine. It had a golden, wheat-like, almost gingery clear color and a bouquet that many of us associated with hardwoods and oak. Interestingly, we weren't all saying just "oak," which can be an overpowering flavor in American Chardonnays; we were saying "wood" as well. Robin said "woodsy," which I liked. I think we were all enthusiastic about the body itself--buttery, round, silky, and velvety. Like a Chardonnay, but subtler. I really noticed that the flavors in this wine focused like a laser on the center of the tongue. In the front of the mouth it softened and mellowed, and grew a little "prickly," as Robin put it, near the back. We noted flavors like sweet peppers, white pepper, and grass, and the finish was long and slow to fade--the bright high notes dropped quickly away, but the more lengthy flavors lingered pleasantly in in the back of the throat.

The Chablis was quite different. It earned scores of 21, 20, 20, 19, 17, and 16.5--considerably lower than the Saint-Romain. Bright and clear, light yellow, "shiny" and with a slight aura of green, this lighter wine was dominated by the flavor of citrus. I really focused on its lemony tang, though Tracy nailed it nicely, I thought, by noticing kumquat (I don't think I'm just saying this because it's the more original observation). We also found that this wine explodes in the front of the mouth, where its bright and sunny flavors catch fire, though it dies quickly at the back. We also tasted grapefruit, pineapple and something Steve calls "small oranges" (Steve, do you care to elaborate?). Downsides here include what some saw as a high acidity and astringency and what Deb thought was a flat-out sourness. Something might be wrong with drinking a wine like this in the depths of January. This is summer wine.

I'd say that we all agreed that these were both solid wines. Nobody got hysterical here and gushed, but we liked them.

Onto the reds.

The Patrice Rion (26, 25, 23, 22, 20, 20.5) was the clear favorite of the night--though I must point to a little bit of context: I uncorked the Mercurey at least three hours prior to the tasting, giving it lots of time to unwind. The Patrice Rion had no such chance, and I think this made a big difference. In fact, by the end of the comparisons, I went back to the Patrice Rion and noticed that it really had opened up (at which point I revised my previous descriptions). Yet fully oxygenated or not, this is a really delicious wine. Ruby colored, with "a port-like fire" (thank you, Tracy) and a "Cherry Jello redness" (er, thanks Robin), we got lots of flavors just from the nose: wet leather (I think that's a good thing), oak, vanilla, pepper, berry, and what Deb associated with violin rosin. This wine is complex and virtually dialectic: the body is light on the tongue at first, yet really full and buttery, too, a contrast that creates a synthetic richness. It's smooth but gets prickly, too. The tannins are noticeable yet they are hints and grace notes that don't overpower. And the finish is polite and uniform, steadily fading down the back of the throat. Dissenting observations: Steve noticed a "new car smell" (though he didn't really say it like it was a bad thing) and Robin said that, while the finish was relatively brief, that wasn't a positive for her--she wished it were longer.

The Mercurey (26, 25, 23, 23, 22--only five totals here because Tracy didn't rate the finish) scored a shade higher, but I don't think there was agreement that it was inherently a better wine (in fact, the sense I got before I compared numbers was that people generally liked the Patrice Rion better). The color was a lighter red--dancing, brilliant, and clear. The nose was creamy and buttery, but also full of sharp berry and cedar aromas. It displayed fewer tannins, and was called "prickly," "perky," and light. I'm not sure exactly what "tight" means in terms of wine flavor, but it felt tight in the mouth--concentrated and focused, like all the nubbins of taste were corralled into a small pen. We picked up on bright fruit flavors, especially dark cherry. The finish was immediate. Someone said that the flavor just "evaporates," which was quite noticeably true.

I first tried the Mercurey a month ago, at a wine tasting in Brooklyn about a mile from our apartment. I bought this bottle there and, afterward, Tracy and I had dinner at a restaurant nearby. Then, we walked home in the first really bitterly cold winter night this year. Naomi was strapped tightly to Tracy's chest, warm and asleep in the howling wind.

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Postscript: Tracy and I just tasted the two red Burgundies from last night, and their differences are standing out very boldly to both of us. The Mercurey is simply younger, with more front-of-the-mouth flavors. There is fruit here, more noticeably than last night. It's rounder in the mouth than the Patrice Rion, with a graceful and receding finish. Tracy keeps saying that it's "graceful."

The Patrice Rion, however, strikes us now as a mature, quite dry, and with a sharp finish. There's a higher level of acidity here, and you might say it's less "gentle" than the Mercurey.

Let's leave it at that. Enjoy your Friday night!