Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Benoît Riffault's 2017 Puligny-Montrachet Village is already open and expressive on the nose, wafting from the glass with aromas of ripe lemons, Anjou pear, nutmeg, dried white flowers and warm bread. On the palate, it's medium to full-bodied, broad and fleshy, with a satiny attack, excellent amplitude and concentration at the core, ripe acids and a long, expansive finish. This is quite a powerful example of the vintage, but don't let its youthful precocity deceive, as it has the structure and substance to evolve gracefully in the cellar.
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Wine Spectator
Focused, displaying well-defined flavors of lime, peach, hazelnut and pastry. Juicy and open, showing a hint of salinity on the finish. Drink now through 2023.
One of the most popular and versatile white wine grapes, Chardonnay offers a wide range of flavors and styles depending on where it is grown and how it is made. While it tends to flourish in most environments, Chardonnay from its Burgundian homeland produces some of the most remarkable and longest lived examples. California produces both oaky, buttery styles and leaner, European-inspired wines. Somm Secret—The Burgundian subregion of Chablis, while typically using older oak barrels, produces a bright style similar to the unoaked style. Anyone who doesn't like oaky Chardonnay would likely enjoy Chablis.
A source of some of the finest, juicy, silky and elegantly floral Chardonnay in the Côte de Beaune, Puligny-Montrachet lies just to the north of Chassagne-Montrachet, a village with which it shares two of its Grands Crus vineyards: Le Montrachet itself and Bâtard-Montrachet. Its other two, which it owns in their entirety, are Chevalier-Montrachet and Bienvenues-Bâtard-Montrachet. And still, some of the finest white Burgundy wines come from the prized Premiers Crus vineyards of Puligny-Montrachet. To name a few, Les Pucelles, Le Clavoillon, Les Perrières, Les Referts and Les Combettes, as well as the rest, lie northeast and up slope from the Grands Crus.
Farther to the southeast are village level whites and the hamlet of Blagny where Pinot Noir grows best and has achieved Premier Cru status.