Get 10% off the purchase price with every order of 12 bottles or more of still wine not already on sale. The savings add up!
Candela Prol, highly experienced certified wine educator and friend of the shop, is available for tastings and training for private and corporate events. For rates and other inquiries, please contact her at candelaprol@gmail.com .
*Offsite events are contracted to and coordinated by a 3rd party, and are in no way affiliated with Chambers Street Wines.
We will make this short and sweet. No introduction is needed for the white wines of Gerard Boulay. They sit atop the Sancerre heap, with Francois and Pascal Cotat, Edmond Vatan, Domaine Thomas-Labaille and Vincent Gaudry. The Boulay whites are deeply serious Sancerres, the kind I love, in which the Sauvignon Blanc character takes a backseat to the Kimmeridgean limestone soils. The farming is organic, the vines range between thirty and fifty years old and wines are aged mostly in old wood. These are wines we have loved for years and we often lament that the ever-increasing demand has made them scarce in recent vintages. But this is not a white wine offer!
We are here today to talk about Boulay's Sancerre Rouge, 'Oriane,' which most of us were unfamiliar until last week when our sales rep and dear friend Hannah Norwick dropped by. She showed us several very tasty wines but everything shrank in the shadow of this bottle. 2017 was very successful for the classic Pinot Noir appellations of the Loire, combining excellent ripeness with a real feeling of balance and elegance. 'Oriane,' is made from forty-year-old vines on the steep slopes of Chavignol. The fruit is destemmed and the wine fermented in tank and aged in older Burgundy barrels, seeing no sulfur until bottling.
From the moment my colleagues and I tasted it we were in awe. The nose and palate suggest incredibly pure fruit, all ripe cherry and strawberry with a touch of crisp rhubarb at the margins. There are understated floral notes here leading to a stony finish that goes on for days. The wine manages all this while defying the laws of physics, feeling weightless in the way that only truly great Pinot Noir can. It's practically etched from crystal, fragile and delicate. It seems obvious to say but I thought about Burgundy from the moment I tasted the wine. It reminded me of some of those vineyards that sit high on the hill - Lavaux Saint Jacques in Gevrey and Bressandes in Beaune. These are sites that perhaps don't have the density of material of some of their mid-slope neighbors but compensate with soaring aromatics and mineral expression.
This is indisputably excellent wine and the value (especially in comparison to Burgundy of similar quality) is remarkable. While this is already five years old, it feels youthful and will doubtless continue to improve. You would do well to consider laying a few bottles away and to encourage this, we are offering the usual 10% case discount on a purchase of six of these today!
Sam Ehrlich
**THIS IS A PRE-ARRIVAL OFFER. WINE WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR DELIVERY/PICK-UP EARLY NEXT WEEK**
Boulay, Gérard 2017 Sancerre Oriane
The nose and palate suggest incredibly pure fruit, all ripe cherry and strawberry with a touch of crisp rhubarb at the margins. There are understated floral notes here leading to a stony finish that goes on for days. The wine manages all this while defying the laws of physics, feeling weightless in the way that only truly great Pinot Noir can. Its tone rings out like the clarinet at the beginning of 'Rhapsody in Blue.' Very little else I can say except I really love this wine. Sam Ehrlich