The White at the End of the List

Say the name Olivier Bernstein and the reply arrives before you finish the sentence: Chambertin, Clos de Bèze, Bonnes-Mares, Clos de la Roche. The house is a Côte de Nuits house, and everything about its reputation points north.

Which is why the white is easy to miss. There are only a few of them in the range, and Corton-Charlemagne is the one that carries the most weight. Plenty of people who have drunk Bernstein’s grands crus have never seen this bottle.

The house itself is worth pausing on. It opened in 2007 with no vineyards at all — by then Burgundy land had passed out of reach for anyone starting from nothing. The answer was to farm rather than to buy: long agreements with growers, with the work beginning in the vineyard rather than at the cellar door. That is the distinction between this kind of micro-négoce and the older trade, where fruit or juice simply arrived. Some parcels have since come into his own hands, in Gevrey’s Les Champeaux, in Charmes-Chambertin, in Mazis. But the model came first.

The wine does not open on request. For a long stretch there is only lemon peel and a thread of pineapple, drawn narrow. Wet stone arrives later, and hazelnut after that, and none of it hurries.

The palate begins with weight — noticeably so — and then the weight turns into something else. Fruit stacks in layers, minerality pushes from behind, and the finish leaves salt on the tongue. That is the moment the hill announces itself.

People sometimes call Corton-Charlemagne the Chablis of the Côte d’Or, and in a glass like this the phrase stops being a slogan. The flesh belongs to the Côte de Beaune. The cut belongs somewhere further north. Both are in the bottle at once.

Eighteen months in barrel, and a wine known for arriving late. Fifteen years on, it has still not arrived entirely. There is no hurry here either.