Chambertin, Second Attempt

Nicolas Potel’s career in Burgundy has been a sequence of beginnings. He grew up at Domaine de la Pousse d’Or in Volnay, where his father was in charge; after his father’s death in 1996 the domaine was sold, and the son set up as a négociant under his own name, buying grapes and wine from growers across the Côte and making a reputation for reliable, well-priced Burgundy at every level. In 2004 he sold that business, stayed on to run it, and in 2009 parted ways with the new owners — leaving the name Nicolas Potel on the door behind him.

So he began a third time. Domaine de Bellene, a small estate in Beaune farmed organically, and beside it Maison Roche de Bellene, a négociant house with a narrower brief than the old one: individual terroirs, old vines wherever possible, less oak, more transparency. 2009 was its first vintage.

The Year

He could have picked a worse one. 2009 in Burgundy was warm, dry and generous — an easy flowering, a sunny August, ripe fruit picked in good condition in September. The reds are plush and open, with soft tannins and forward fruit, and were approachable from the beginning in a way that made the vintage enormously popular and led some to wonder whether they would go the distance.

Chambertin itself, the hill’s namesake grand cru, tends to answer that question on its own terms: the vineyard makes the most structured, slowest wine in Gevrey, and even in a soft year it keeps a spine.

In the Glass

The fourth bottle of an evening at a friend’s home, after the Dom Pérignon Rosé 1993 and the Kongsgaard Judge, and before the Lynch-Bages 1986. Eleven years from the vintage.

Medium ruby with a little bricking at the edge. The nose was ripe and open in the way the year promised — black cherry and plum, a sweet spice, dried rose, and beneath it the earthy, iron-tinged, faintly gamey note that says Gevrey rather than anywhere else. Some sous-bois had begun to develop.

The palate had more grip than the nose suggested. The fruit was generous through the middle, but the tannins were still firm and fine-grained, the acidity was there, and the finish was long and mineral — the vineyard asserting itself over the vintage. It was drinking well, but it was not finished.

A négociant Chambertin from a business in its first year is not the safest bet in Burgundy. This one made the case for the man’s judgement — in the parcels he found, and in the restraint he showed with them. The domaine side of the same enterprise is in these pages too: the Vosne-Romanée Les Suchots 2012, from vines planted in 1937.

For other faces of the same hill in these pages, see Rousseau’s Chambertin 2002, Bouchard’s Chapelle-Chambertin 2004 and Faiveley’s Mazis-Chambertin 2010.