Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2018 Domaine Chanson Pernand-Vergelesses Premier Cru Les Vergelesses is dense, robust, and steady. TASTING NOTES: This wine offers jubilant aromas and flavors of blueberries and blackberries. Enjoy it with a rotisserie chicken in a mix of garden-fresh lettuces. (Tasted: February 4, 2020, San Francisco, CA)
-
Wine & Spirits
Chanson farms 13.3 acres in this premier cru at the base of the Corton hill, where clay in the soil helped sustain the vines and the freshness of their grapes through the summer of 2018. The initial impression is floral, generous, shimmering with purple-grape intensity. The lasting sensation is silken and soft, with highlights of rhubarb and strawberry. It’s a Pernand with stature.
-
Wine Enthusiast
The color is opaque, and the gently oaky and very ripe nose is composed of cassis and black cherry liqueur. I like the sense of underlying tension to the well-detailed and evidently mineral-driven medium weight flavors that possess an equally serious, dusty and austere finale where a hint of bitter cherry pit character slowly emerges.
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.”
Occupying the most northerly combe (the French term for a valley that cuts through a hillside) of the Côte de Beaune, Pernand-Vergelles sits to the west of and behind the hill of Corton. The most sought after whites of the village come from the slope of Pernand on the side of Corton where Pernand-Vergelles shares the Grand Cru Corton-Charlemagne with Aloxe-Corton. The best red producing Cru is Les Vergelles, which overlaps into Savigny-les-Beaune. Reds here are fleshy, seductive and structured while whites are both lively and age worthy.