Based on all the amazing white Burgundies we’ve tasted (and offered) from the 2014 vintage, I had very high hopes when a small parcel of this wine landed in our warehouse. You’ve got a venerable blue chip producer, great vintage, and perhaps the most exquisitely positioned Premier Cru vineyard in the Côte de Beaune…do I really need to continue? Well, actually, yes, because my experience with the wine got me thinking about how we (and pretty much everyone who does what we do, including critics) taste and evaluate wines.
So often we’re presented with a taste from a just-opened bottle, and I’ve been part of professional panels where some 40 just-opened wines are evaluated in one sitting. When I tasted this wine right after it was opened—fully aware of its pedigree and vintage—I found it rather tight, with very muted aromas based on how this wine usually performs. If it weren’t this producer and this vineyard, which I adore each year, maybe I would have passed it over. Instead I left the wine out for a while and re-visited it periodically. It improved. Then, I re-corked the bottle, put it in the fridge, and forgot about it until the next afternoon, when…boom! It had blossomed completely, delivering a near-perfect white Burgundy expression. There’s not enough time in life to give every wine this treatment, which is too bad: The greatest, most complex wines of the world are often at their best on day two! Such was the case with this Puligny-Montrachet Premier Cru “Le Cailleret” from Domaine de la Pousse d’Or. It is a case study in white wine structure, and is built for long-term aging. If you’re drinking it now, you’ll want to coax it awake like a surly teenager (pull the cork the day before), but my preference would be to lose it for a while in your cellar.
Take a look at a
map of Puligny-Montrachet, and you’ll see just how exquisitely the “Le Cailleret” vineyard is positioned. It abuts Grand Cru “Le Montrachet,” at the same point on the slope. How is it not classified Grand Cru? Well, while we think of the main
côtes (slopes) of Burgundy—the Côtes de Nuits/Beaune—as being uniform in their aspect, there are subtle variations along the way. Le Cailleret faces more directly east in relation to the more southeasterly Le Montrachet, taking in marginally less direct sunlight as a result—enough for a ‘demotion’ to Premier Cru. In the most minutely parceled vineyard land on earth, no subtlety is overlooked!
As our Burgundy-loving membership is aware, Domaine de la Pousse d’Or is one of Burgundy’s blue-chip properties, known for resolutely traditional wines with a long track record for aging. Sourced from organically farmed vines of 30-40 years of age, this wine was fermented with indigenous yeast in French oak barriques, of which 50% were new. It was later aged for a year in the same 50-50 mix of new and used oak.
In the glass, the 2014 La Pousse d’Or 1er Cru “Le Cailleret” is a deep yellow-gold with slight green reflections at the rim. As mentioned above, this is a complex wine, which—like a complex person—takes a little time to fully reveal itself. If consuming young, I would advise pulling the cork 12 hours before consuming. Or, give it a rough decanting about 2-3 hours before serving. Once this wine blossoms, you’ll encounter incredibly complex aromatics of white peach skin, yellow apple blossoms, quince, lime zest, crushed limestone, toasted hazelnuts, dried mushrooms and a hint of baking spice. After the wine opens up with air and comes up in temperature, it fleshes out into a near full-bodied white wine framed with bright acidity. While this wine is incredible now after enough air, what I really want to do is forget this bottle in the cellar for about 5-7 years. It is going to be an explosive wine, which is clear when you taste it now. Maybe savor one bottle now and save the other five for later, being careful not to serve the wine too cold—shoot for about cellar temperature here (55-60 degrees) or it will not reveal its true complexity. With morels in season at the moment, you might want to try it with the attached veal recipe. That combination of refinement and earthy savor is tough to beat.
