This Spotlight shines a light on Burgundy, aiming to illuminate some of its more obscure aspects and describe the wine styles of villages and growers. It also explains a strategy for exploring a region that some find difficult to understand and proposes wines from a range of producers familiar and new, many from our stock of older vintages which we have long matured in our cellars, while offering a view on what is especially exciting at present.
Outside of our Burgundy in-bond offers, it's one of the biggest ranges of wines we have ever proposed to our members. The selection, which will be released over a series of weeks, includes nearly 100 wines. We have included Domaine Clos Salomon, sadly its last vintages following its sale, Domaine André Bonhomme, new producer Domaine Quivy in Gevrey-Chambertin, the rise of Pommard and a selection of top domaines with wines available in very limited quantities. Some mixed cases help make the selection for you if you want to try your way around a range of wines.
How to buy Burgundy as a member
The best way to buy Burgundy is to focus on the producer, not the appellation. The style and quality of the producer vary enormously and can often transcend that of the appellation. Burgundians make this difficult by, usually, printing the appellation in a large font and the name of the grower in small print at the bottom of the label. It’s a sort of anti-marketing, a code only understood by Burgundy geeks, and only possible where demand for the best growers vastly outnumbers supply! You have to work a little harder and decipher codes to find the good stuff in Burgundy!
It may appear counterintuitive, but wines from a good grower in a lesser appellation will be better than a poor one in a prestigious appellation. Although Burgundy made an excellent classification of the vineyards, divided into four categories (Bourgogne, village, premier cru and grand cru), you still need a good grower to make good wine from those vineyards. By contrast, Bordeaux classified the producer, not the land. Ideally you should classify both land and producer, but that has proven very difficult. Revisions of the producers in the Saint-Emilion classification every ten years or so has led to lawsuits and withdrawals from the appellation by those who were demoted.
Finding the right Burgundy is like a quest undertaken by medieval knights with tests, trials and tribulations to prove you are worthy of the prize of its wonderful wines! Our best advice is to taste widely and choose the style of the grower you like and/or follow a critic with a palate similar to yours. And, if you allow it, let’s ride into battle together, and you may choose to use some of whatever experience I have acquired over the last 30 years confronting the pitfalls and questions the region poses.
The wines in our Spotlight
One of the best growers I know is Domaine André Bonhomme from Viré in the Mâconnais. The quality-price ratio is exceptional: it’s almost unheard of in Burgundy to have such wonderful quality at such a fair price. They could easily raise their prices substantially but they, modestly, prefer not to. They make unusually firm-fleshed wine for the Mâconnais, with grip and excellent ageing potential. We are offering a large selection of their wines – tiny quantities, so we have held back a number of vintages to amass a certain volume which we are releasing in this offer. These are very special wines not to be missed.
At modest price levels, we are offering wines from the Côte Chalonnaise and from Savigny-lès-Beaune. We have the last vintages from Clos Salomon, which my predecessor Sebastian Payne MW first bought and which has sadly just been sold. Savigny is a large village in terms of hectares so has always offered good value for money. It lies in a cool valley which has performed well in recent warm vintages. Chanson have lovely vineyards here and vinify with a high proportion of whole bunches which emphasises freshness.
Chablis, especially from a large grower like Brocard, and the Mâconnais from small domaines including Jacques Saumaize, Château de Beauregard and Famille Cordier (as well as Bonhomme mentioned above), offer good value, even at premier cru level, hence the inclusion of two mixed cases of premiers crus. Global warming is affecting all wines. Chablis is less extreme than it was. Previously on the limit of ripening, not all vintages used to be successful! Despite that it still has a distinctive freshness and a style that sets it apart from the rest of Burgundy and the world.
I am very excited about Pommard, which has benefitted from warmer vintages, and has also done well in the cooler years. The growers we are working with are all careful about vinification and the level of extraction, which influences the quality and quantity of tannins. I have written an accompanying article, The Rise of Pommard, which goes into greater detail. Indeed, a number of appellations with cold clay soils, which naturally delay ripening and historically produced firm tannins (including Aloxe-Corton, Nuits-Saint-Georges, Clos Vougeot and Bonnes Mares) are now making balanced wines with ripe, sweet tannins. I have therefore been taking on more new growers, such as Launay-Horiot and Chantal-Lescure, featured in our Spotlight.
Pommard has a variety of soils and styles. The classic style is made from the hillside vineyards to the south of the appellation, made famous by Rugiens and here represented by Chaponnières and Les Bertins, which have clay soils and make big and powerful wines. To the north of the village, the soils are alluvial in nature and derived from what was once a substantial river in older geological eras. Comte Armand’s Clos des Epeneaux is a great vineyard. Its marl soils, an ideal mixture of clay for power and limestone for finesse, produces a powerful yet refined wine. Further north, towards the border with Beaune, de Montille’s Les Pézerolles has sand and limestone soils, and it is particularly fine boned and silky, leaning towards Volnay in style.
We started working with a new Pommard grower, Launay-Horiot, with the 2024 vintage, and have bought some back vintages of Les Perrières from 2016, 2018 and 2023 which can be enjoyed now. It is intelligently vinified to produce rich yet fine-flavoured wines. The vineyard was originally planted in 1902, with approximately 30% of vines remaining from the original date of plantation. A third has been recently replanted. It is high in clay soil, so the extraction is particularly gentle. There is also a saigné (some of the fermenting juice is drawn off to increase the ratio of solids to must), which increases colour and flavour concentration but without mechanical extraction, which could render harsh tannins. We offer for the first time the 2024 Pommard Premier Cru Les Bertins from Domaine Chantal Lescure, which was bought by Jean-Philippe Girard and his associate Éric Rousseau in 2023. The exceptionally talented winemaker Fabrice Groussin, whose fine, elegant style I was impressed by when tasting and buying the wines he made at Domaine Changarnier in Monthélie, joined in time to make the 2024 vintage.
The wines of Domine Jean Grivot have never been better. The vineyards are in good health. Mathilde took over winemaking responsibility from her father Etienne in 2017. The warmer vintages have been especially good to her Nuits-Saint-Georges Premier Cru Les Pruliers and Clos Vougeot Grand Cru. The 2023 Vosne-Romanées have a gorgeous, velvety texture and sweet tannins.
Gevrey-Chambertin is a favourite village of mine making generous wines supported by sweet tannins. It’s a large commune with 410ha, the second biggest in the Côte d’Or after Beaune with 450ha, and almost four times bigger than Vosne-Romanée. So it offers a certain supply of wine to meet demand and can be relatively well priced, in Burgundian terms! It has a variety of terroirs, including the cool Combe de Lavaux, and many good growers making wines in different styles.
A great new find are the beautiful midweight wines of Domaine Gérard Quivy, a small family-owned estate located in the heart of Gevrey-Chambertin. The domaine occupies an 18th-century manor house (built around 1704-1710) and owns approximately seven hectares of vineyards, primarily in Gevrey-Chambertin appellations. It’s an extraordinary discovery. Due to their small size, they have been selling nearly all their wine in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada, and so are virtually unknown in the UK. I had never heard of them until 18 months ago. This could only happen in Burgundy!
We are also offering wines from the following growers from Gevrey, which I list below from the least to most powerful. Taupenot-Merme make exquisite, fine-boned, ethereal wines of great perfume and delicacy. Marchand Tawse make medium-bodied wines with a lovely tension and grace, intense rather than powerful, yet with a wonderfully persistent length of flavour. Domaine Alain Burguet harvest late, sort severely and produce a rich, sumptuous, velvety and powerful style which is opulent but not clumsy. Louis Jadot make Estournelles St Jacques Premier Cru from a vineyard situated in the cool Combe de Lavaux, situated high on the slope with a lot of limestone soil. It shares some of the fine character of the famous, and adjacent, Clos St Jacques Premier Cru, a candidate for elevation to grand cru, but is considerably less expensive. Louis Jadot favour a long fermentation time, making powerful, structured wines for long keeping.
We also have a small quantity of wines from some sought-after domaines which we will release at the end of the Spotlight.
The challenges of buying Burgundy from the viewpoint of a trade buyer
Burgundy is a fascinating and engaging region to buy from. I have grappled with its many complications and contradictions and tried to build an attractive range of wines to suit all palates. One must serve a long apprenticeship. I have been helped by three towering figures in the trade with whom I have visited many producers, and learnt so much, Russell Hone and Becky Wasserman of Le Serbet and Roy Richards of Richards Walford. What they had in common were remarkable palates, great memories (Russell’s is photographic) and a love and understanding of its producers, from peasants to aristocrats.
Unlike Bordeaux, where most wines can be bought one year and not the next, in Burgundy producers reward faithfulness by operating an allocation system. You are required to buy a balanced number and volume of wines across their portfolio and do so every year or lose your allocation. The best producers with a fine reputation have a long waiting list of potential buyers ready to buy if you do not. In such cases, power rests in the hands of the seller, not the buyer. The logic is that the top producers consistently make the best wines, especially in challenging years as they have the intelligence to react to different weather conditions, so buying from them every year is a good option. It also helps if you pay on time, and The Wine Society does!
New opportunities arise when companies change hands and the new owners and winemakers raise the quality, for example at Domaine Chantal Lescure, or when there is a change in circumstances at family domaines (often a birth, death or marriage), which leads to a change in succession! Perhaps a beneficial change of generations in a family domaine occurs when the parents, who perhaps were great viticulturists but poor winemakers, retire and their children, who have been to wine school and worked abroad, take over the excellent vineyards and improve the winemaking so lifting the quality of the wines. The ending of a vineyard rental agreement, e.g. métayage, an agreement by the owner to rent out a vineyard for 25 years, may result in the owner taking back the vineyard and may lead to better or worse wines! Given the small production of Burgundy domaines, many sell only to a few markets, and if they can be persuaded to expand to another market, as happened with Domaine Quivy, we were able to benefit. A change in the reputation of a commune like Pommard, where prices may not have caught up with improved quality, offer the opportunity to start dealing with a new domaine like Launay-Horiot.
Conversely, sometimes new owners are less good, which is what I found when Clos Salomon in Givry sold up. So, we offer the last vintages of the old owners. In a very small number of cases, quality may decline, or owners get too greedy regarding prices, and it is time to say goodbye.
I have been visiting Burgundy for six or seven weeks a year since 1996, refining my selections all the time, aiming to offer you what I consider the best wines in their category in a wealth of different styles. As befits a co-operative, my job description is to increase the satisfaction of our members, not maximise profit.
