Pinot Noir from Burgundy - Mugnier, 2004 revisited
3/28/2009 -
I’m never surprised when I learn that a Burgundy lover is a musician or scientist because the complexity of the subject is in sync with the infinitely variable nature of their professions. In Burgundy the fundamentals are simple: the same grape, grown on the same plots of land, mostly by the same families for generations. The results vary wildly. By way of comparison I like to imagine an omelet cook-off in which you, I, and Daniel Boulud have just the most basic ingredients; we would get three very different omelets (I might prefer yours to Boulud’s because I tend to like the slightly rustic as opposed to the perfectly symmetrical; mine would be a leathery mess because I’ve never learned to do omelets). Making wine, so far as I can tell, is quite a bit more difficult than omelets, with a great many more opportunities to mess things up. Perfect ingredients give a head start, but then the skill and sensitivity of the chef comes in to play; many great winemakers have been quoted as saying that they try to do as little as possible in the cellar because they want the wine to speak, not their manipulations.
When you have the privilege of tasting a range of wine from the same vintage, made by the same good winemaker, then you really get the idea. My first experience of this was with Robert Chevillon, who makes eight different Premier Cru wines in Nuits St Georges: eight bottles from the same vintage, all made from the same grape (Pinot Noir), grown and vinified in exactly the same manner by the same guy. While the wines were clearly siblings, they were also as different from one another as siblings are. This was – and remains – a revelation, and a source of endless fascination.
In Burgundy there are hundreds, maybe thousands of winemakers, and a huge range of styles. After years of playing the game, it’s become clear to me that serious Burgundy lovers have their favorites; if we could collate our lists the same handful of winemakers would appear at the top again and again, to such an extent that we could mostly eliminate marketing and fashion as factors in the results. What seems to unify these names is a quality of purity in the wine – purity, and transparency, which to me means that the underlying character of each vineyard is apparent, that the wine doesn’t seem over-extracted, or manipulated, or unbalanced.
All this is by way of telling you, in case you hadn’t known or guessed, that unquestionably JF Mugnier would be on all the top 10 lists, and probably on most of the top 5 lists. The wines are expensive and sought after, sometimes fought after. They will reward cellering.
To say that these wines are late arriving here is an understatement, but since they've been properly stored and shipped along the way we're still happy to see them. And the prices ought to make you sit up and take notice, even if you think you already have some bottles safe in the cellar. After all, there are some things that you can't have too much of.
