Open any wine book or search all corners of the internet and you’ll find consensus: A two-mile stretch of vines in Burgundy’s Côte de Beaune is the source of the most astronomically expensive and famous Chardonnay vines on earth. We’re talking cult names like Leflaive, d’Auvenay, and Coche-Dury, whose top bottlings fetch hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands. On the surface, it would seem these hallowed grounds are strictly reserved for the top 1% but dig deeper and you’ll find a select few producers—like Jean-Marc Pillot—offering vivid insight into the high life without the high prices. Of course the name may sound familiar, and that’s because Pillot is a mainstay for white Burgundy at SommSelect, and his single vineyard Bourgogne Blanc from a parcel at the edge of Chassagne-Montrachet is one of the best hidden values out there. It’s also very limited, don’t miss it!
Pillot’s white Burgundies balance impressive soil character and electric minerality with vivid, pure fruit. They epitomize the Chassagne-Montrachet terroir while offering remarkable approachability in their youth and impressive complexity and evolution after even modest cellar aging. We love these wines, our customers love these wines, and the only challenge with Pillot is summoning the willpower to sell our meager allocation each vintage instead of shuttling it into our personal cellars. Honestly, if I had to list one (affordable) producer that epitomized the unending charm of Chassagne, it’d probably be Jean-Marc Pillot.
Jean-Marc Pillot is the fourth consecutive generation of his family to be involved in winemaking. He began apprenticing directly beneath his father, Jean, in 1985. By 1991, he had assumed leadership of the family property, though he was assisted in numerous regards by his wife, Nadine, and sister, Beatrice, and more recently his son Antonin. Pillot owns and farms a broad range of vineyards in the villages of Santenay, Puligny, Meursault, Montigny, and Remigny. Still, there is little-to-no debate that the family’s finest wines originate from their Chassagne-Montrachet holdings. This is their specialty.
Today’s wine hails from a small lieux-dit that lies just below the slopes of Chassagne and Puligny. Take a car, and you could be in the world’s most punishingly expensive and famous Chardonnay vineyards in a matter of minutes. Pillot vines here are younger, around 25 years of age, yet he still employs a strict manual sorting during harvest that returns small yields. Back at the winery, Pillot spontaneously ferments this special Chardonnay in stainless steel and it then rests in the steel tanks on its fine lees for 10-12 months. This wine used to spend some time in oak as well, but now the Pillot family has decided they want to emphasize pure freshness. It is always bottled unfiltered.
Pillot’s traditional approach and light hand in the cellar always yields a Bourgogne that retains a special vividness and dimension that’s missing from many of his neighbors’ higher-priced wines. Each layer of this wine is soft, creamy, and filling yet a tensile backbone spring loaded with freshness and acidity keeps it lively throughout. This rare ability to dance atop piano-wire tension with incredible depth and density is always the appeal of top Chassagne bottlings, and today, Pillot’s much more affordable Bourgogne Blanc! As long as it’s properly served in Burgundy stems around 50-55 degrees, you can expect refreshing, luscious fruit notes of yellow apple, yellow peach, Meyer lemon, lime zest, acacia, crushed stone, lees, and light baking spices. Enjoy now and over the next five plus years.
