Clos Vougeot Tasting

 


I belong to "the old man's Burgundy group", which I'm not sure is the official title of this tasting group but is fairly accurate.  I got in due to the sad recent passing of a key member that was old enough to have been a member of the Hitler Youth.  Seriously.  He was a good guy though, something one doesn't normally say about someone that was in the Hitler Youth.  He was young enough at the time that the experience was more like "Really Scary Cub Scouts", as opposed to "conversion to lifelong evil".  You're a little kid and your parents sign you up.  What are you going to do?  I had my questions about Indian Guides when I was 7, and thank God my parents didn't sign me up or there would probably be a faded color photo of me in some racially insensitive Indian getup.  Granted, not as bad as Hitler Youth, but a bullet dodged nonetheless.        

In 2024 there are only two serious Burgundy tasting groups regardless of where you live which are "Old Guys" or "Really Rich Guys".  I am not quite either so I scramble each month to find a wine that fits the topic of the month.  This month was Clos Vougeot, a Grand Cru Cotes de Nuits, which I don't know if you are aware, can get a bit pricey.  The current release 2021 Albert Bichot is $400 wholesale, so to find the highest regarded producers in the Clos means you have to sell a car to be able to get the buy-in for the group.

Clos Vougeot is an interesting Grand Cru.  The Clos was created by a gift of land to the monks in 1109 and over the next 200 years the Cistercians added (or shook down) more vineyards surrounding the existing plot to grow it to the 50 hA that got walled in by 1336.  There's no record of why the exact contour of the Clos was decided, but it's likely that it was based on what they owned as opposed to homogenous terroir as the Clos is extremely variable.  The Clos got seized in the French Revolution and was sold in 1791 and got passed along to some dude named Jules Ouvrard who used it as a money laundering operation, (essentially the Napa Valley of the time)?  It has been broken up by sales and inheritances to now include 80+ different producers.

So why is this a Grand Cru?  It had to be a very political decision.  The monks knew that there were 16 different climats within Clos Vougeot and by the early 1800s the wine was sold in three different tiers.  All the wine from the top of the slope was "The Good Stuff" that only The Illuminati, Powerful Politicians and whoever the Clive Coates of 1833 was got to drink.  The middle slope was almost as good, and fetched a great price.  That must have been Parisian restaurant cellars and whatever passed for a country club back then.  The stuff at the bottom of the slope, close to the road, was priced somewhat cheaper but known to those that looked into it during the 1300s as being nowhere in the same league.  That got sold to saps like me.  

So what do you buy from there now?  Some of the growers have plots in different sections of the Clos and make a blend that balances out the traits of the climats.  These are reportedly some of the highest quality wines.  Some of them just have vines down by the road, quietly put "Clos Vougeot" on the label and cash in on the reputation of the Grand Cru designation.  Sitting down to six of these wines across multiple producers and different vintages showed all that hyperbole about terroir might have some teeth, but also what the producers do when they get the grapes in house might be even more important.

For example, the highest rated wine of the group was one from Domaine Jean Grivot.  Grivot's vines are located right down by the D974.  Yet this 2015 wine was rich, concentrated and had assertive structure with complex emerging aromatics of allspice, mushroom and pure cherry fruit.  My preferred wine, the 2015 Domaine Jacques Prieur, had more aromatic intensity and longer finish, but also comes from possibly more refined terroir slightly upslope.  However, a wine I thought was of equally impressive quality was the 2005 Domaine Jean-Jacques Confuron, with grapes sourced close to the top, the spot the monks kept squirreled away for themselves.  There was a full decade more development, yet the wine was still very structured with balanced lifted acidity with an earthy mushroom/barnyard complexity sitting on top of the still vibrant primary fruit.  

The group was almost unanimous in the downgrade of the Louis Latour 2019.  Louis Latour, who has a rather mixed reputation thanks to their practice of flash pasteurization, doesn't own any vineyard in the Clos, and I'm not sure of the source of their grape contract.  Unless I call somebody over there in the know, it's not going to be possible to obsess over the exact location of each row of vines and wring our hands over the soil underneath.  The wine was very New World in style with ample color, structure and oak.  Now, this is not to suggest that this was a bad wine.  However, I would not have wanted to have paid $500 for it (current price).  Again, the axiom of "buy producer, not vineyard" would apply for those that don't care for the Latour approach.   

It would have been great to have tried outstanding producers with holdings near the historic "sweet spot" of Clos Vougeot like Domaine Leroy, but I didn't have the $12,117 needed to score a bottle of that.  Jasper Morris, an MW that knows more about Burgundy than almost anyone I suppose, noted a tasting he did once of 20 Clos Vougeot where the goal was to assess if the location of the plot was identifiable in quality and was there a distinct difference between "top of the hill" and "close to the road".  He said they were disappointed to find that it was producer that seemed to matter more than the vine location, striking yet another blow to the idea of terroir being superior to all other factors.

Ultimately it comes down to what makes Burgundy so interesting and maddening.  There are a zillion factors all swirling around with each vintage shaking up many of the variables yet again.  It is so complicated and always changing, there appears to be only two ways to approach it.  Find a few producers that you trust and stick with them (until you stop trusting them or can't afford them) is my move.  The other is to totally obsess over each detail, pour over maps, read reviews, balance out counter reviews, scan online boards, debunk various posts, argue with other obsessed dudes like you, and still get disappointed every other bottle.  What are you going to do?  It's expensive, they don't make very much, and more people want it than can get it.  The chase continues.  Clos Vougeot?  I'll roll those dice once in awhile.    

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