Winemaker Notes
Dark and intense fruits dominate the spicy notes that follow on the nose. It is full-bodied with rich tannins and surprises the palate with its minerality and energy.
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
This pinot noir grows in the same block as the chardonnay vines for Matrot’s Meursault-Blagny 1er Cru, high up the hill, at the border with Puligny. The thin soils leave the vines in close contact with limestone, providing a wine with buzzing energy and a delicate frame. This is a beautiful, old-fashioned Burgundy, its scent parallel to equally old-fashioned roses, its sleek raspberry and black-cherry flavors lasting with textural grace. The silken weave draws you into a wine that feels completely integrated, lovely to drink now and over the next five years.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Blagny 1er Cru La Pièce Sous Le Bois is promising, unfurling in the glass to reveal notes of cherries, berries, warm spices and forest floor. On the palate, it's medium to full-bodied, deep and elegantly layered, with refined tannins, a lively spine of acidity and a long, mineral finish.
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.”
A classic source of exceptional Chardonnay as well as Pinot Noir, the Côte de Beaune makes up the southern half of the Côte d’Or. Its principal wine-producing villages are Pernand-Vergelesses, Aloxe-Corton, Beaune, Pommard, Volnay, Meursault, Puligny-Montrachet and Chassagne-Montrachet.
The area is named for its own important town of Beaune, which is essentially the center of the Burgundy wine business and where many negociants center their work. Hospices de Beaune, the annual wine auction, is based here as well.