Domaine des Billards Saint-Amour Clos des Billards 2015
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Robert
Parker
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Le Clos des Billards is a one hectare monopole within the “les Billards” vineyard in Saint-Amour. This special reserve wine was created using only the best fruit from the lowest-yielding vines which range from 50-100 years old. It is vinified over 20 days using a weighted grill to keep the must cap submerged in the fermenting juice, thereby increasing the extraction of tannins and complexity; it is then aged in large foudres for 9 months before bottling, with additional aging in bottle prior to release. The result is an exceptional and age-worthy expression of the terroir of Saint-Amour, structured and elegant.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Saint-Amour Clos des Billards is very successful, revealing a brooding bouquet of black cherries, mulberries and rich soil tones. On the palate, the wine is full-bodied, layered and super concentrated, with an ample core of rich, ripe fruit underpinned by good balancing acids. It will need bottle age to resolve all its serious structure, but it's an immensely promising young Saint-Amour.
Delightfully playful, but also capable of impressive gravitas, Gamay is responsible for juicy, berry-packed wines. From Beaujolais, Gamay generally has three classes: Beaujolais Nouveau, a decidedly young, fruit-driven wine, Beaujolais Villages and Cru Beaujolais. The Villages and Crus are highly ranked grape growing communes whose wines are capable of improving with age whereas Nouveau, released two months after harvest, is intended for immediate consumption. Somm Secret—The ten different Crus have their own distinct personalities—Fleurie is delicate and floral, Côte de Brouilly is concentrated and elegant and Morgon is structured and age-worthy.
The bucolic region often identified as the southern part of Burgundy, Beaujolais actually doesn’t have a whole lot in common with the rest of the region in terms of climate, soil types and grape varieties. Beaujolais achieves its own identity with variations on style of one grape, Gamay.
Gamay was actually grown throughout all of Burgundy until 1395 when the Duke of Burgundy banished it south, making room for Pinot Noir to inhabit all of the “superior” hillsides of Burgundy proper. This was good news for Gamay as it produces a much better wine in the granitic soils of Beaujolais, compared with the limestone escarpments of the Côte d’Or.
Four styles of Beaujolais wines exist. The simplest, and one that has regrettably given the region a subpar reputation, is Beaujolais Nouveau. This is the Beaujolais wine that is made using carbonic maceration (a quick fermentation that results in sweet aromas) and is released on the third Thursday of November in the same year as harvest. It's meant to drink young and is flirty, fruity and fun. The rest of Beaujolais is where the serious wines are found. Aside from the wines simply labelled, Beaujolais, there are the Beaujolais-Villages wines, which must come from the hilly northern part of the region, and offer reasonable values with some gems among them. The superior sections are the cru vineyards coming from ten distinct communes: St-Amour, Juliénas, Chénas, Moulin-à-Vent, Fleurie, Chiroubles, Morgon, Regnié, Brouilly, and Côte de Brouilly. Any cru Beajolais will have its commune name prominent on the label.