Winemaker Notes
#96 Vinous Top 100 of 2025
Ruby red color, the Gevrey-Chambertin Clos Saint-Jacques has balanced red fruit aromas. A very complex and layered wine, with good length.
Professional Ratings
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Jasper Morris
A powerful glowing deep ruby purple, with a bouquet of sublime intensity and considerable freshness. Very classical, waves of nuanced flavour spread across the palate, so much intricate detail, but all based around a pure red fruit. This is the more luxurious of my favourites in the Clos St-Jacques line up.
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Vinous
The 2020 Gevrey-Chambertin Clos Saint-Jacques 1er Cru has an intense but delineated bouquet. It combines red and blue fruit, violet and subtle flinty aromas. There's fine mineralité here. The palate is quite robust with firm tannins. It's one of the grippier Clos Saint-Jacques, overtly spiced with compact black fruit towards the finish.
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Decanter
There is a combination of black plum and black cherry aromas, with a pleasant smoky edge from the cask that still does not obscure the mineral notes in this wine. On the palate the wine is slightly closed, tannic, firm, and not very approachable, but one can easily see that there is massive potential here and the substance to age for decades. The domaine owns one hectare of the Clos St-Jacques. After a fermentation with 30% whole clusters, the wine is aged in 40% new casks, and the domaine chooses a slightly more robust toast for this bottling.
Barrel Sample: 95
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.”
This small village is home to the Grands Crus in the farthest northerly stretches of Côte de Nuits and is famous for some of the deepest and firmest Burgundian Pinot Noir.
Gevrey boasts nine Grands Crus, the best of which are arguably Le Chambertin and Chambertin-Clos de Bèze. As with all of the fragmented vineyards of Burgundy, it isn’t easy to differentiate between the two, which are situated adjacent with Clos de Bèze slightly further up the hill than Le Chambertin. Clos de Bèze has a shallower soil and if you’re really counting, may produce wines less intense but more likely to charm. Some compare Le Chambertin in both power and plentitude only to the prized Romanée-Conti Grand Cru farther south in Vosne-Romanée.
Two other Grands Crus vineyards, Mazis-Chambertin (also written Mazy-) and Latricières-Chambertin command almost as much regard as Le Chambertin and Chambertin-Clos de Bèze. The upper part of Mazy, called Les Mazis Haut is the best and Latricières-Chambertin offers an abundance of juicy fruit and a silky texture in the warmer vintages.
Other Grands Crus are Ruchottes-Chambertin, Charmes-Chambertin, Mazoyères-Chambertin, Griotte-Chambertin and Chapelle-Chambertin.
The most respected Pinot Noir wines from Gevrey-Chambertin are robust and powerful but at the same time, velvety and expressive: black fruit, black liquorice and chocolate come into play. After some time in the bottle, the wines are harmonious with bright and sometimes candied fruit, and aromas of musk, truffle and forest floor. These have staying power.