Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
A flagship of the Faiveley range, this is a structured wine with great acidity and beautiful perfumes. The wine is dense, already balanced with the red fruits shining through the tannins. It will develop slowly and will not be ready to drink before 2023.
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Wine Spectator
This is pure, featuring cherry, berry, floral and spice aromas and flavors married to a vivid structure. Firms up nicely as the fruit and supporting matrix build to a long finish. Best from 2020 through 2033. 120 cases imported.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The product of a dry spring and a rainy summer, the 2014 Corton Grand Cru Clos des Cortons Faiveley offers up an appealing bouquet of wild berries, dark chocolate, cedar, espresso roast and candied peel that's framed by a deft touch of creamy new oak. On the palate, the wine is full-bodied, with an ample, textural attack but a tight-knit, somewhat closed mid-palate that's structured around fine-grained but firm tannins. While the 2014 isn't as as broad-shouldered as the 2015, it's a powerful, structured wine that will demand some patience.
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Wine & Spirits
Georges Faiveley won the right to include his family name in the name of this grand cru in 1937; it’s a 7.44-acre parcel within Le Rognet. Some of the vines today date back to 1936 and ’56, providing a complex 2014 with lasting floral intensity. The dense, raspberry-scented fruit is completely savory, with powerful tannins that lend it broad richness. Cellar this until it’s ten years old before you consider drinking it.
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.