Winemaker Notes
Tart red berries mingle with earthy notes of wet leaves, savory herbs and cedar in this bold Burgundian Pinot Noir. Grippy tannins and brisk acidity are well-integrated in the structured body, and the wine finishes with fabulous concentration and complexity.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Marsannay Les Favières is showing superbly in bottle, exhibiting aromas of raspberries and cassis mingled with raw cocoa, forest floor, peonies and blood orange. On the palate, the wine is medium to full-bodied, deep and concentrated, with chalky structuring tannins and lively acids. This is, as so often, the finest long-haul proposition in the Audoin portfolio.
Rating: 92+
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.”
Perched up in the northernmost position in the Côte de Nuits, Marsannay is the only appellation village of Burgundy to produce classified wines of all three colors: red, white— and rosé. The official Rosé de Marsannay earned its high reputation in the early 1900s.
Its reds, made of Pinot Noir, burst with red and black fruit and are consistently long on the palate. Chardonnays from Marsannay are charming, floral and full of citrus fruit and mineral. Top Marsannay vineyards include Clos du Roy and Les Longeroies.