a fine wine tasting archive
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Ornellaia is a red-wine name. Its first commercial white, the 2013 Bianco, was four thousand bottles of Sauvignon Blanc and Viognier made without malolactic and left on the lees for a year and a half. Thirteen years on, the acidity that decision protected was still cutting straight through the fruit.
Narvaux is a village lieu-dit on the thin ground above Genevrières, and 2013 was the late, cold, hail-struck year that gave Meursault its acidity back. Eight years on, in Colin-Morey's hands, the two had made something taut and mineral out of a commune usually described as rich.
On the twenty-third of July 2013 a hailstorm crossed Volnay in about twenty minutes and took most of the crop — the third year running. What was left was picked in October. A premier cru from that small, late, hard-won harvest.
From the 2013 vintage Hungary abolished the lower puttonyos grades, and the number on the label stopped being a legal requirement. This bottle still says five — by choice rather than obligation, and from one of the best aszú years of the decade.
Morey borrowed its surname from this vineyard in 1927. Georges Lignier owns more of it than anyone — and in 2013, a delicate year met the most delicate of Morey's grand crus.