To get right to the point, today’s wine is one of the best red Burgundy values we’ve seen in a long time. Bearing ‘only’ a village designation from Chorey-lès-Beaune, and priced accordingly, this bottle could easily be overlooked—and, having almost done so ourselves, I can tell you what a grave mistake that would be.
First off, while Chorey is a tiny, lesser-known village that is overshadowed, literally, by the hill of Corton, its vineyards are still right next door to those of Corton (!!). That simply can’t be ignored, nor can the sterling track record of Domaine Michel Gay & Fils, which calls Chorey-lès-Beaune home. Today’s 2014 provided a valuable (and delicious) reminder of the limitations inherent in tasting and evaluating a wine within seconds of opening it: Upon first sampling this wine, we found it a little reticent and tightly wound, but there was evident purity and aromatic complexity there, so we set it aside to revisit later. Boy, am I happy we did, because what this wine became after it had been open for a while—and especially what it became on day two—was really something special. It made me wonder if there were other wines like it out there that we may have passed on! Yes, patience is indeed a virtue, especially when it comes to classically structured Burgundian Pinot Noirs like this one. Give this humbly priced Chorey a chance, and it’ll blow your mind.
It’ll probably age beautifully too, which is not something you get to say very often about a red Burgundy at this price point. But this is where the Michel Gay & Fils pedigree comes into play: I’ve long admired the purity and precision of this estate’s wines, which have become more widely acclaimed with each new vintage. Michel Gay founded the domaine in 1992 after he and his brother divided up a family estate going back more than a century; in 2000, Michel’s son, Sébastien, took the reins after studying viticulture/enology in Beaune. Under Sébastien, who is described as “living in his vineyards,” the estate made the conversion to organic viticulture, which has infused the wines with ever-greater purity and energy. When I see the Domaine Michel Gay label these days, I know to expect very clean, very perfumed, very fine-tuned wines. When you taste them, it’s clear they’re the product of a very meticulous, exacting winemaker.
The estate has grown to include about 10 hectares of vines with an average age of about 40 years. The sites in Chorey-lès-Beaune range in age from 60-90 years, making this an impressive “house” flagship, but the Gay holdings extend into Beaune (including the Premier Crus “Toussaints,” “Coucherias,” and “Grèves”); Aloxe-Corton (including a parcel of Corton-Renardes Grand Cru); and Savigny-lès-Beaune. Sébastien ferments the wines in a mixture of concrete and stainless steel tanks, subjecting the hand-harvested fruit to two careful sortings first; from there, the wines are raised in a mixture of new and used oak (never more than 40% new) for 14-18 months. Sébastien is also known for holding wines in bottle for as long as a year for further aging before release (probably why we’re just seeing this ’14 now).
There really is a lot of serious wine coming out of this estate, so if you aren’t familiar with it, today’s Chorey-lès-Beaune is a perfect place to start. The vintage, as I’ve repeated ad nauseum here, is one of the great red Burgundy vintages in recent memory, and this bottle exemplifies the great balance that characterizes the best wines. And really, I can’t repeat this enough—there is a luxurious sheen to this wine, and a level of fruit purity, that is rarely if ever seen at this price point. In the glass, it’s a luminous ruby red with pink and crimson reflections, with highly perfumed aromas of black cherry, red currant, juicy wild strawberries, red apple skin, tea leaves, violets, underbrush, and a delicate note of warm spice. Medium-bodied and loaded with mouth-watering tension, it needs some air to reveal its true self. Decant it a good hour before serving at 60-65 degrees in Burgundy stems and do not worry if you don’t finish the bottle—it’ll be just fine on day two (three, even, but I really can’t imagine a scenario where a bottle would last that long). Serve it with chicken, pork, leaner beef, or, even though it is unimaginably far away, Thanksgiving turkey and its trimmings (having just thought of that, I’ll be stashing away a few bottles for the Fall). This is an impressive bottle and an important reminder of how much great wine is out there at great prices—sometimes it’s right there under your nose and you don’t realize it right away. Practice patience!
