Winemaking can be an unglamourous business. Behind the romance of the craft lies months of labor-intensive farming: flat tractor tires, vine maladies, hand pruning, bookkeeping, equipment cleaning, etc. Even for those in the trade, it can be easy to forget the work that goes into every bottle of wine.
Perhaps no wine more acutely displays the gap between backbreaking work and ethereal elegance than Chambolle Musigny. Put your nose in a glass of Chambolle and your mind slips away from the earth where it was made — Rajat Parr calls it “the ideal expression of Pinot Noir.”
Michel Gros’s plots of Chambolle are the village level, but the wine they produce is no ordinary village Burgundy. The majority comes from a clay-rich plot neighboring the famous “Musigny” Grand Cru vineyard, and the wine shows exceptional depth.
Gros’s 2015 Chambolle, like nearly everything else from 2015, is a delight. Today the vintage offers easy, approachable, hedonistic pleasure — the wines awfully hard to put down once tasted. And yet behind the youthful fruits lie firm tannins, sure to carry these wines for a decades and more.
Today look for notes of plum, licorice, cherry and stones; the mouth is dense and firm but with velvety texture and a clean, very precise finish. Burghound calls this wine “elegant” and “utterly delicious,” noting its “lovely minerality and energy,” and concluding “this is an excellent Chambolle villages.”
So complete and polished is Gros’s Chambolle that it’s easy to imagine it springing forth from the ground fully formed. But whether you recall the mud and sweat and stone in each bottle or allow the wine to carry you above its earthbound creation, we doubt you’ll be disappointed.
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Gros Chambolle Musigny 2015
Ansonia Retail: $102
2+ bottle price : $88/bot
FREE EAST COAST SHIPPING ON ANY 12 BOTTLES