Gevrey, After Faiveley Changed

Mention Faiveley and wine people split into two camps: those who remember the old reputation — hard, closed wines that demanded decades of patience — and those who have tasted recently and wonder when the house got this good. Both camps are right. The dividing line falls at roughly the 2007 vintage, when Erwan Faiveley, having taken over the family domaine at a young age, reworked the farming and the picking. The wines that followed kept their bones but found their skin: silkier textures, terroir showing through clear glass instead of frosted.

The scale of the operation makes the turnaround more consequential than most. Founded in 1825 and now in its seventh generation, Faiveley is one of Burgundy’s great landholders — around 120 hectares, twelve grands crus, twenty-five premiers crus, and one of the largest holdings in Gevrey-Chambertin itself. When a house this size starts making wines this well, the map shifts a little.

The Vineyard That Pushes

Mazis-Chambertin sits immediately north of Chambertin, and among Gevrey’s grands crus it belongs to the structural school — this is not a vineyard that seduces with perfume, it is one that pushes with frame and sinew. Pair it with 2010, a low-yield, acid-bright, classically built vintage, and you have a wine constructed for the long road.

In the Glass

Dark red fruit led — raspberry, mulberry, blackberry — with minerals, earth, spice and underbrush trailing behind. The wine was generous and elegant at once: fruit fully open, but drawn taut by the vintage’s live-wire acidity. The frame is big and muscular, the tannic lattice dense — yet polished fruit upholsters all of it, so nothing scrapes. This, in one glass, is what the new Faiveley means.

At fifteen years, thanks to 2010’s spine, it still counts as young — a door just beginning to swing open. Decant generously if you open one now. And bottles like this always carry the same quiet lesson: the people who bought Faiveley while the reputation lagged the reality are the ones smiling. Some of us are perpetually one beat late.