I’m a big believer in blind tasting—not as a party trick or a gimmick, but as a way to judge what’s inside the bottle without being distracted by what’s on the label. Blind tasting levels the playing field: It’s only when we strip away our preconceived notions of a producer, a vintage, or an appellation that we allow ourselves to truly evaluate a wine for what it is, rather than what we expect it to be. That’s why we blind taste a lot of what comes into our orbit, and today’s wine makes an emphatic case for it.

When I tasted this 2017 after a half-hour decant, I was certain it was a village-level Gevrey-Chambertin (or higher) priced north of $60. All the hallmarks were there: sublime elegance juxtaposed with understated power, beautifully ripe red fruit tempered by a healthy dose of earthy rusticity, and an unmistakably potent, spiced nose of dark crushed rocks. When I pulled off the proverbial blindfold, I was stunned to learn it was a Bourgogne, priced well below what I had guessed. I could have sworn it was Gevrey, but it turns out there’s a good reason for it. The producers, Jane et Sylvain, are based there, and a hefty proportion of the fruit for this wine is declassified from their vines in—you guessed it—Gevrey-Chambertin. I’m not surprised that a Bourgogne Rouge could be this good, but I’m always fired up when a new one comes my way. This is a coveted price point for those (like me) who want to drink great Burgundy regularly, and in the case of Jane et Sylvain, that window is closing: after the 2018 vintage, the producers will cease their winemaking operations to focus solely on farming. I am personally planning to get my hands on as much of their wines as possible while I still can, and I strongly suggest you do the same.

Run by a husband-and-wife duo, Jane et Sylvain is a tiny domaine totaling just four hectares. Nestled in back of the village of Gevrey Chambertin, the house opens up to the vines behind and the cellar below. The bucolic property likely hasn’t changed much over the course of the four generations of Jane’s family that have lived and worked there. She inherited the vines at a young age after her parents’ passing, and formed the domaine with Sylvain in 1992. Since 2003, the pair has been committed to organic farming, leaning toward natural winemaking in the cellar. They make village-level and Premier Cru wines, relying on native yeast fermentations and old oak barriques to preserve the fruit character. Extraction and maceration vary between cuvées and vintages—the priority is to do just what is needed to bring out beauty and purity in each wine. 

They certainly hit the mark with today’s wine, which comes from 25-year-old vines planted near the border of Gevrey-Chambertin and Morey-St-Denis along the RN74, where limestone-based calcaires de comblanchien soils intersect with marnes de bresse marl. This parcel of vines has never been chemically treated, and, like all of Jane et Sylvain’s vines, it is tended to without the use of any chemical herbicides or pesticides, making use of strategies like tilling between vines and sexual confusion to minimize the risk of pests. 

While both husband and wife share responsibilities at the domaine, Jane is more at home among her family’s vines. Sylvain, on the other hand, takes the lead in the cellar. There, he natively fermented this wine with somewhere between 25% and 50% whole clusters before aging 12 months on the lees, without any new oak. In line with the domaine’s minimal interventionist beliefs, today’s wine, like the entire range, is produced without fining or filtering, and just the bare minimum of sulfur is added at bottling. 

Although this is technically a Bourgogne, feel free to think of this wine as a pitch-perfect Gevrey-Chambertin while you’re contemplating how best to enjoy it—after all, it exudes all the classic traits of the appellation. Slight pinkish-orange hues that surround the dark ruby core in glass show the signs that this maturing wine has entered its ideal drinking window. On the nose, ripe black cherry and brambly wild berry fruit give way to potent, earthy aromatics that evoke a stroll through a lush, damp fern forest on a brisk autumn day. Crushed dark rocks—a dead giveaway of Gevrey’s iron oxide-rich soils for me—join turned leaves, warm spice, mossy tree bark, and just-foraged mushrooms, still crusted with dark soil, in the sort of hauntingly beautiful musky cologne that could only be found in great Burgundy. On the palate, today’s wine is medium-plus in body, with tremendous concentration of fruit and earth notes and a firm but elegant tannic structure. It's just beginning to reach its peak and will stay there for another five to seven years, if not 15 or 20, as long as it’s kept perfectly cold and dark in your cellar. This wine definitely needs some oxygen—there is a bit of a prickle from undissolved CO2 when the cork is first popped, but it will completely dissipate with exposure to air. Give it a healthy 45-minute decant, or simply pull the cork two to three hours before you plan to drink it. Serve it at a cool 60 degrees in large Burgundy stems, perhaps with the most classic pairing of all: boeuf bourguigon. This recipe from the late, great Anthony Bourdain would be the perfect pairing as summer winds down and the evening air picks up a bit of an autumn chill. If you consider yourself a Burgundy lover to any degree, this is a spectacular, rare find that you should absolutely not miss.