The village of Saint-Aubin, neighbor to Chassagne- and Puligny-Montrachet in Burgundy’s Côte de Beaune, has become a go-to source of serious white wine at reasonable prices. Thanks to some high-wattage star producers, along with (I hope) a willingness among Burgundy lovers to look beyond the traditional precincts for “collectible” bottles, Saint-Aubin is now a destination rather than a detour.
It doesn’t take long to get from Puligny to Saint-Aubin, and of course one of Saint-Aubin’s two strips of Premier Cru vineyards directly abuts the Grand Cru-studded ‘Mont Rachet’ hill. This wine, a powerful and focused 2014 from Vincent Prunier, hails from the strip of Premier Cru vineyards a little further west, above the actual Saint-Aubin village, and yet, stylistically, it couldn’t get any closer to Puligny. The “Les Frionnes” Premier Cru delivered a crystalline expression of Chardonnay in 2014, which, in our estimation, is a truly great white wine vintage. This is a genuinely cellar-worthy wine at a price well below what most of us think such wines should cost. If you’re a white Burgundy lover, be sure not to miss it!
In the glass, this wine is a pale straw-gold with hints of green at the rim, with aromas of yellow apple, nectarine, citrus pith, white button mushroom, and crushed stones. Similar sensations show through on the palate, which is medium-plus in body but still tightly wound—this is a very classically structured white Burgundy that needs a good hour in a decanter (and a slightly warmer temperature, like 55 degrees) to fully reveal its charms. I found that this wine got better and better as I revisited it over the course of an afternoon, but the real magic lay a little further down the road: If you decide to lay this down, I think you’ll be handsomely rewarded in 10, even 20, years. I see this entering its peak drinking window around its 10th birthday; if you’re enjoying a bottle or two now, give it a rough decant, serve it in big glasses, and pair it with an opulent piece of fish like turbot or the attached recipe for chicken fricassee. There’s a lot of wine here, and it’s only going to get better.