Winemaker Notes
Intense notes of black fruit blended with oaky touches and delicately spiced.Full and fleshy on the palate, the structure of this wine is based on elegant tannins.
Pairs well with game, venison, and meat dishes in sauce.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This is attractive with floral character and notes of fresh cherries and blueberries. Some dried herbs, too. Medium-bodied. So polished, silky and seamless with chocolate-coated red fruit and a delicate finish.
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Jasper Morris
Ripe bright purple, with a very sprightly bouquet, enlivened by some stems. Supremely elegant, purely floral, ripe but balanced, with a long graceful finish. Really well done, fine-boned even, with a lighter touch than is typical of the central zone of Nuits-St-Georges.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Revisited from bottle, the 2018 Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru Les Cailles offers up aromas of cherries, plums, cassis and smoked meats that are still quite youthfully fruit-driven at this early stage. Medium to full-bodied, velvety and elegantly muscular, it's a rich but nicely balanced wine that's holding a lot in reserve. Rating: 92+
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Wine Spectator
This is lush and pure, offering black cherry, black currant and toasty oak notes. Excellent length too, but this is mostly about the expressive fruit.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2018 Bouchard Père & Fils Nuits-Saint-Georges Premier Cru Les Cailles is nicely built with a pleasing lushness on the palate. TASTING NOTES: This wine exhibits lovely, black fruit aromas and flavors. Enjoy it with grilled pork chops. (Tasted: March 3, 2020, San Francisco, CA)
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
Inhabiting the bottom end of the northern half of the Côte d’Or, Nuits-St-Georges is a busy, market-driven town and home to many of Burgundy’s negociants. It is also the largest town in the Côte d’Or after Beaune and contributes "nuits" to the name of Côte de Nuits (i.e., the northern half of the Côte d’Or).
The appellation itself is divided into two parts, where in the north it directly borders Vosne-Romanée, the southerly end is the commune of Prémeaux. There are no Grands Crus in this village, though it does have a large number of Premiers Crus.
The best Nuits-St-Georges Pinot Noir are layered with cherry, plum, underbrush and sandalwood. The fruit is sweet, the wine energetic, and the finish long and lush.