Brooklyn Blind Tasting Panel #5 - 2007 Bourgogne Aligoté

Honestly, who drinks Aligoté? It's so acidic and harsh and there isn't much of a reward. There's a reason that people add crème de cassis to Aligoté - it raises the beverage to a potable level. But I've had a few genuinely good bottles of Aligoté in the past year, one in particular that was truly memorable, and I began to wonder if Aligoté wines are improving.

I was at a dinner with Peter Wasserman a few weeks ago and he told me that Aligoté used to be 40-50% of Burgundy plantings, even in the 1er and Grand Cru plots. I don't remember what Peter said about when this changed, but I think he said it was the 1950's...? Anyway, Aligoté needs to be ripe, Peter said. It needs to be picked later than Chardonnay. Old vines don't hurt either. But most producers simply weren't devoting that kind of attention to Aligoté and it made more sense to pull out the vines and replant with either Chardonnay or Pinot. At that dinner we drank a great bottle of Lafarge old vines Aligoté and I was excited to find out whether it would be that wine or the fantastic Alice and Olivier de Moor Aligoté that would stun everyone at the tasting.

So, is there something happening here - are Burgundy producers making better Aligoté, or are these wines still best as Kir fodder? What better way to find out than to convene the Brooklyn Blind Tasting Panel and get into a few bottles. I decided to focus on 2007 because it's a great vintage for white wine in Burgundy, and also because some of the 2007 Aligoté that I drank last year I remember thinking would benefit from a few more months in bottle. For this tasting I was joined by three guys who know a lot about wine - Justin Chearno of Uva in Williamsburg, Scott Reiner of Discovery Wines on the Lower East Side, and Joe Salamone of Crush in Manhattan.

We tried our hardest. We were open minded and very serious about tasting these wines, but I must sadly tell you that if this sample of wines is representative of Aligoté, and I think that it is, Aligoté is still very much hit or miss (mostly miss), and it under-delivers at its price point. Here are the wines we drank, along with some notes:

2007 A. et P. de Villaine Bouzeron, $22, Imported by Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant. Aubert de Villaine makes wine for this other Burgundy producer called DRC. I've always been a bit biased against these wines under his own label. "What, 'cause you make DRC it means you automatically make great wines from the Côte Chalonnaise?" This is good wine though. Justin and Scott both picked it as their #2 wine in the tasting. It didn't "win" the tasting, but I'm listing it first anyway because by the time the tasting was finished and we sat down for dinner, this was clearly the best wine on the table. During the blind tasting it showed white flowers and a bit of honey, it was well balanced and well made, although everyone thought that it was a bit simple. It was better over dinner, but still not a wine to race to the stores for.

2007 Catherine & Dominique Derain Vin de Table Français Allez-Goutons, $23, Jenny & François Selections. This wine was kindly donated by Jenny & François for this tasting. No one voted for this wine, but everyone enjoyed it, and everyone gave the same reason for not voting for it. "It was really good, but so different from the others and it didn't speak so much of Aligoté so I didn't vote for it." I really liked this one - it was just ever so slightly effervescent and at 11% alcohol, it was light and lively with grapefruit pith on the nose. The palate was delicate and sheer, and very satisfying. Some thought it was too much about natural wine making, but I didn't. It was the only wine that held up well the next day. This is something that I would enjoy drinking again, but it is probably more divisive than any of the other wines we drank.

2007 Domaine Ramonet Bourgogne Aligoté, $22, Imported by Diageo Chateau and Estates Wines. Scott and I both picked this wine as our favorites of the tasting. I liked it because it smelled like Chardonnay, it was bigger and bolder than the other wines, and it had a lovely pungent minty nose. Scott thought it was the most complete wine. Justin thought the nose was great, with granite, rock, and soil. Joe felt that it was beefed up a bit. somehow made larger than it would naturally be. He felt a wood presence that intruded on the wine. For whatever it's worth, this wine did not maintain its goodness over dinner - by the time we ate it seemed disjointed and inflated like an air balloon.

2007 Paul Pillot Bourgogne Aligoté, $14, Imported by Margate Wine and Spirits. Joe and Justin both picked this wine as their favorites of the tasting, and Scott and I liked it too. Justin said that it was lactic at first, but that the fruit and acid balance was great, and he found himself thinking that he really wanted to drink it. Joe said that this wine rocked in the context of the tasting. It was nicely detailed with flowers and he appreciated the nature of the acidity - he said that most of the wines in the tasting showed acidity at the edges, but in this wine the acidity formed the core of the wine. I liked it too - my notes say apples, soft and pure, balanced, stones on the finish. The thing is, this wine was, to be honest and fair, basically undrinkable an half hour later over dinner. It completely fell off the table and became something that we were mystified about. How could it have been so good in a blind tasting and then been so bad while eating?

2007 Alice et Olivier De Moor Bourgogne Aligoté, $19, Louis/Dressner Selections. This was the truly memorable wine that I had a few months ago, and I was certain that it would "win" this tasting. The bottle we had was not representative of the wine, sadly. Joe said that although it was an outlier, he liked it anyway, and that it reminded him of northern Burgundy near Chablis - Kimmeridgian soils. I wanted to like it but I thought the nose had an oxidized quality that just turned me off, made the wine seem flat and lifeless. That said, I thought it was interestingly herbal - kind of minty, with lemon curd and herbal flavors, and a stony finish. Scott said that he initially didn't care for it but that it grew on him. We all agreed, drinking this wine with dinner, that it was an off bottle. Perhaps not flawed, but not representative of the great '07 De Moor Aligoté. In 2007 the De Moors combined their young vines Aligoté with their Plantation 1902, a beautiful Aligoté made from 100 year old vines. This bottle was not representative of the wine.

2007 Domaine Guy Roulot Bourgogne Aligoté, $20, Michael Skurnik Imports. I picked this wine as my second choice, but no one else particularly liked it. And they were right - it dropped off like a hot potato during our dinner. But during the tasting I liked its lean and stony profile and its pungent lemon scent. It was clean and acidic and very long, and I was certain that it was the next wine, the Lafarge. The others thought it was too creamy, too correct, with some artifice. Joe found the finish to be short - it grinds to a halt, he said.

2007 Michel Lafarge Bourgogne Aligoté Raisins D'Orés, $27, Becky Wasserman Selections/Martin Scott Imports. This wine was kindly donated by Peter Wasserman and Martin Scott imports for this tasting. This is an excellent wine made from 60-80 year old vines. It is delicate and intense and very stony and pure. But the bottle we drank was nothing like that, and we were shocked when we saw it unveiled - everyone knows how good this wine is, but this bottle was simply not right. The mid-palate was hollow, and it just wasn't very expressive. Joe thought it was the least together of all of the wines, with a darkness to the mineral finish. Justin thought the alcohol protruded a bit, and Scott thought it didn't carry its wood well. But trust me, this is a really good wine, and the bottle we had just showed terribly.

2007 Domaine Marcillet Bourgogne Aligote, $14, Savio Soares Selections. This wine was kindly donated by Savio Soares for this tasting. Scott thought this wine showed a lot of funk on the nose, that it was woodsy. Justin thought it was complex with woodsy and floral honey flavors, but also a bit murky on the finish. Joe and I both found it to be oxidized on the nose. He liked the expansive mid-palate, but he called it fundamentally flawed because the nose was so oxidized. I found the nose to be entirely oxidized and weird, and simply assumed that it was well past its prime.

Dinner with the Wines of Savigny-lès-Beaune

I had some of the fellas over the other night to have dinner and drink red wine from Savigny-lès-Beaune. Why Savigny-lès-Beaune? Well, a top bottle (not counting Leroy's Narbontons) costs about $50, a good villages wine should be in the mid $30's. That's real money, but it's pretty cheap as far as Burgundy goes. I wanted to drink several examples of the best bottles to see if they are undervalued within the pantheon of Burgundy terroir, or if they are simply more of that overpriced but merely decent wine from Burgundy.

Any list of the best producers in Savigny would include Domaine Simon Bize, Domaine Jean-Marc et Hugues Pavelot, and Chandon de Briailles. Others include Maurice Écard, Camus-Bruchon, and Catherine et Claude Maréchal, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some. There were 7 of us at dinner and although no one discussed what to bring in advance, we got a great mix of wines from great producers.

The shame of it is that nothing really showed all that well. I'm willing to bet it was a root day or a leaf day or something, because most of the wines didn't show much energy, their aromatics were subdued. Still, I learned a lot from this, particularly about the differences in terroir within Savigny-lès-Beaune.

If you take a look at this map from the Burgundy-Report site, you can see that a river runs east/west through Savigny-lès-Beaune. The vineyards to the north of the river typically have heavier soils that are rich with clay. They lie on hills with southern exposure. These can be rich, dense wines. The north-side vineyard with the best potential is probably Aux Vergelesses, a 1er Cru that borders the 1er Crus of Pernand Vergelesses. The other 1er Cru sites that reliably produce very good wines include Les Fournaux, Gravains, Lavières, Aux Guettes, and Serpentières.

South of the river the soils are sandier, more gravelly, and the exposure isn't as good. But it is from here that the appellation's most esteemed wines have traditionally come. The 1er Cru Dominode vineyard (always called "Les Jarrons" on vineyard maps) is said to make the finest wines of Savigny, although that might change as Patrick Bize's wines from Aux Vergelesses and Les Fournaux age and fully reveal themselves. Next to Dominode is Les Narbantons, a 1er Cru made famous by Lalou Bize at Domaine Leroy (but one can buy 3 or 4 bottles of Pavelot Dominode for the same price as one bottle of Leroy Narbantons).

We began with a couple of white wines and gougères, my first attempt at making the delicious cheese puffs that are so common in Burgundy. The 2007 Domaine Marcillet Savigny-lès-Beaune, $28, Savio Soares Selections, was a surprising wine. It's a humble villages wine that packs a lot of punch. I've had this wine on several occassions and liked it very much, but this time around I thought the oak was a bit too much. The others liked it a lot though, and 3 hours later the wine had indeed integrated beautifully, showing ripe fruit, minerals, and an earthy pungency that I associate with Savigny-lès-Beaune. Levi said that it might have been the wine of the night for him. I served this wine alongside the 2007 Chandon de Briailles Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru Aux Vergelesses, $48, Imported by David Bowler, which showed rather poorly. I liked the tropical aromas I was getting immediately after I opened the bottle, but no one really liked it a half hour later. My friend Clarke said that it had a vodka-type spirit essence to it, which was right on. It wasn't flawed, it was just weird.

Among the red wines, the first flight was my favorite of the night. We drank the 2007 Jean-Marc et Hugues Pavelot Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru La Dominode, $55, Becky Wasserman Selections, and the 2007 Simon Bize Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru Aux Vergelesses, $52, Becky Wasserman Selections, with a hearty mushroom barley soup. These are both delicious wines that are quite forward and approachable, perhaps a characteristic of the 2007 vintage. Drinking them next to each other was a great lesson in Savigny-lès-Beaune terroir. The Pavelot Dominode showed a definite layer of gravelly stone underneath the pure and spicy red fruits. It was much less dense than the richer Bize wine, although no less intense. I liked it very much - it was my favorite wine of the night. The only question for me was whether or not it will age well, as it just didn't seem to have any excess or unresolved structure. The Bize Aux Vergelesses showed a darker fruit character and a much earthier nose, like wet clay. It had a lovely perfume and although it was drinking very well, it never fully unraveled and I imagine that it will do very well with 7-10 years of cellaring.

We then drank two Simon Bize wines with braised beef and turnips. The 2006 Savigny-lès-Beaune Les Bourgeots, $35, and the 2006 Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru Les Fournaux, $48. Les Bourgeots was aromatically closed, but showed pretty dark fruits on the palate and good balance. Les Fournaux had lovely floral and dark fruit aromatics, but was angular and awkward on the palate. These wines are probably starting to shut down. The next day I got to taste them again and they were both excellent. Bourgeots was a seamless expression of Savigny-lès-Beaune dark fruit and earth, completely pure and delicious, and drinking perfectly. Les Fournaux showed more depth and intensity of fruit, and still needed more time, although it was no longer awkward. Simon Bize's wines...very impressive.

I'm not going to go into much detail on the rest because none of them showed very well. Just a few notes-

Still with braised beef and turnips:
2004 Pavelot 1er Cru Les Gravains, $45. Some nice things here, good fruit, but the wine was surprisingly evolved, and showed what I found to be unpleasant seaweedy notes.
2001 Chandon de Briailles 1er Cru Les Lavieres, $45. A library release that, if what we drank is an accurate representation of the wine, should have stayed in the library. Just weird, with cloying fruit and lots of alcohol, completely disjointed and kind of swampy. Flawed? Not good wine? Who knows...

With cheeses, including a most incredibly runny Époisses:
1996 Pavelot 1er Cru La Dominode (magnum), $135. The only wine that provoked anything close to controversy, as some liked it more than others. I thought it was perfectly fine, but kind of anonymous and dull. It never really opened up, and I would be curious to know how it fared on day 2.
1990 Robert Ampeau Savigny-lès-Beaune, $40. Lots of fun to see what's going on with this bottle, a 20 year old villages wine from Savigny. But alas, it was pretty much dead on arrival. Yes, I know that you need to do a lot of aerating with Ampeau, and we swirled and swirled and opened it over an hour before drinking it, but all that was left was seaweed and rotting leaves.