Yesterday was quite the wine day. I tasted my way through 43 or so South American wines, only to follow it up with an evening of a couple bottles of French wines with some guests. The first was the Pouilly Fuissé I’d been meaning to crack. I bought this wine to educate myself about what to expect from Pouilly Fuissé – the flagship village of the Macon region of Burgundy. I’d heard of it, but had no experience with it. It’s chardonnay [burgundy], offering lime, grapefruit, green apple, and a very grapy flavour profile over a luciously viscous, rich mouth feel. David normally hates chardonnay, but so far I think chardonnays from Burgundy have been slowly changing his mind. Normally over oaking and vapid flavour profiles turn him off. This was not that.
The suggestion had been made, when deciding which bottle to crack, that since we couldn’t decide which to taste, that perhaps we could follow up the white Burgundy with a red Burgundy. And after a bottle of wine, that sounded like a FANTASTIC idea.
This wine is special to me. The reason is simple – the proprietor who raised the vines and made the wine was my first teacher about terroir, tradition, and the ‘old world’ philosophy. I’ve talked about him before, and that’s us in the photo below, drinking this very same wine in his cellar in Burgundy. He was proud that his wines were not deeply coloured, near opaque – something he felt was simply a useless trend in wine right now, that did not exist 50 years ago. The photo on the left shows just how light in colour his wines are. You can easily read through them. Chorey-les-Beaune is known in Burgundy to be a light, simple expression of the pinot noir, as opposed to the heavier, bolder famous wines of Gevrey-Chambertin, for example. So I had learned to expect ‘light’. And light it was. I’ll post complete tasting notes, but in summary: a very light pinot noir with subtle strawberry and apple, but predominantly with a character of leaf decay and highbush cranberry – like a walk in the woods in the fall. All 4 tasters got that fall-woods vibe. You can see the edges are a bit browning, indicating some age. This was a 2000, and 7 years for a Chorey is lots – it’s meant to be enjoyed young as it lacks the strong structure to support improvement with ageing. A very memorable tasting. And thankfully, I have one more bottle of the exact same wine.
It’s been quite the stretch of days for me – from Beaujolais to Brunellos to South America to Macon and Cote de Beaune. I’m pretty spoiled!