Winemaker Notes
#45 James Suckling Top 100 Wines of the World 2025
?Cyril's favorite site for precise, age-worthy Pinot Noir, Favières is a one-hectare vineyard that sits above the Château de Marsannay and has only a shallow amount of topsoil over its limestone soils. Average vine age is 60 years old. 50% of the vines were replanted in 2009. Grapes are 100% destemmed and cold macerated. Fermentation for 15 days, after which the wine is cellared in 20% new oak barrels for 12 months and for six months in tanks. The wine is bottled unfined and unfiltered.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Incredibly concentrated and refined, this has a mind-blowing aroma of sour cherries, but on the palate it is still slowly opening up, with great chalky minerality that builds and builds to an extraordinary climax at the almost endless finish. From organically grown grapes. Bottled unfiltered and unfined. Drink or hold.
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.