Today’s brilliant Grand Cru Chablis from top producer Patrick Piuze is a perfect example why both collectors and sommeliers purchase as many bottles that are allocated to them as soon as it becomes available. As I’ve noted in past offers, Chablis-whisperer Patrick Piuze makes a lot of wine—not a lot of quantity, mind you, but rather a lot of different terroir-specific bottlings from carefully chosen parcels.
So, to clarify, there are a lot of different Piuze wines but not a lot of any single one. That’s pretty typical of Burgundy, of course, and it’s important to distinguish a name that’s on everyone’s lips from one that’s on every store shelf. We’ve come to rely on the dynamic Piuze not just for impeccably crafted Grand Cru wines (like today’s 2016 “Bougros”) but for great purity and obvious craftsmanship at every rung of the Chablis quality ladder. Piuze is a true ‘micro-négociant’ with a laser-like focus on quality and an enviable roster of grower-partners throughout the appellation. In fact, I can’t remember ever passing up an opportunity to offer a Piuze wine, be it a ‘village’ bottling or something more rarefied like today’s. They consistently over-deliver, as your first sip of this 2016 “Bougros” makes clear. While this Grand Cru is always a little more generous in its youth than most of its upscale neighbors, the Piuze touch makes it even more so: This is showing great depth of fruit and serious texture already, and yet I foresee it blossoming into something really special in a few years’ time. This much breed at this price is a rarity, and sadly, so is the wine itself: We only have up to six bottles per person to share today.
And as I’ve also noted in past offers, Piuze has had a truly meteoric rise in the wine world: A Montreal native, he first came to Chablis prominence in the early 2000s while working for the legendary Jean-Marc Brocard domaine, among others; he ventured out on his own in 2008, with a Rolodex full of top growers and a passion for viticulture above all else. He’s known for his gregarious personality, which has served him well in cultivating relationships with the myriad growers he sources fruit from. All the fruit for Piuze’s range is sustainably farmed and hand-harvested, and his Premier and Grand Cru wines are fermented and aged in used oak barrels (whereas many Chablis houses prefer to ferment in stainless steel). His wines display uncommon depth and texture without losing their sense of place, and anyone who’s been subscriber for a while knows of our abiding love of his entire range.
“Bougros” is on the western end of the south/southwest-facing amphitheater where all the Chablis Grand Crus are situated. It sits downslope from “Les Preuses” and is said to have a richer proportion of clay mixed with the signature limestone of Chablis, a soil structure experts say makes Bougros wines a touch richer and rounder than their Grand Cru brethren. Whether this wine will age as well as some of the other Grand Crus Piuze makes—and, predictably he makes almost all of them—is an open question. But I can tell you unequivocally that this ’16 is absolutely delicious.
As we’ve learned in other regions of Burgundy, 2016 bears a fairly strong resemblance to 2015 as a vintage, which appears particularly true in Chablis. But, as in other parts of Burgundy, ’16 produced much less quantity due to frost and hail in April and May of that year. Critic Stephen Tanzer, writing for Vinous, summed up ’16 thusly: “If you’re the sort of Chablis purist who believes that this traditionally cool northerly expression of Chardonnay must be painful to be good, you may have trouble working up much enthusiasm for the 2016s and 2015s,” he said. He went on to say that “if you pass on these two vintages, you’ll miss a lot of very good wines,” including “2016s that are turning out to be more energetic than most producers would have predicted at harvest time.”
This seems to have been borne out in Piuze’s 2016 Bougros Grand Cru: this is about as voluptuous as Chablis get, but it finishes with freshness and mineral nerve. In the glass, it’s a classic yellow-gold with slight green highlights at the rim, with a ripe and forward nose of nectarine, yellow apple, pear, salted lemon, fresh-cut hay, and crushed oyster shells. After about 30 minutes in a decanter this richly textured Chablis offers a lot of pleasure right now, but there’s still growth and evolution to be realized here: I foresee it peaking around 2020 and continuing to drink nicely through 2026 and beyond if kept well. Pair it with a beautiful piece of white-fleshed fish, prepared simply, to showcase its incredible purity and length. It’s a crystalline beauty of a white wine you won’t soon forget!
