From the Shadow of DRC

Blurred in the background of the photograph stands a Coche-Dury Corton-Charlemagne — both bottles were glorious that evening, but this note belongs to the one in focus.

Clos de Bèze is where the whole Chambertin story starts: monks of the Abbey of Bèze cleared this ground in the seventh century, and the neighbouring field of a farmer named Bertin — champ de Bertin — only later gave the hill its more famous name. The rules still bow to that history: Clos de Bèze may be sold as Chambertin, but never the reverse.

The man behind this label spent his career in the most distinguished shadow in Burgundy. Henry-Frédéric Roch — nephew of Lalou Bize-Leroy — became co-director of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti after his brother’s death and held the post for nearly thirty years, always the quieter figure beside Aubert de Villaine. What he built under his own name, from 1988 in Prémeaux-Prissey, was a different kind of statement: organic and biodynamic farming, whole-bunch fermentation in wooden vats, foot pigeage, and — save a single dose at racking — no sulphur at all. Prieuré-Roch became the quiet forefather of natural Burgundy, and Clos de Bèze its top wine: priced among the vineyard’s elite, known mostly to those who already know. Roch died in November 2018, at fifty-six. The 2005 is from his own hands.

In the Glass

Bright garnet with the first brick at the rim — twenty years, worn openly. The aromatics announce the house before the vineyard: red fruit lifted by spice, dried stems, earth and wild herbs, perfume standing ahead of polish. This is not manicured Burgundy; it is Burgundy with its collar open, and drinkers who prize tidiness will feel the difference immediately.

Underneath the wildness, though, runs 2005 — one of the great structured vintages of the Côte de Nuits, a year that locked its wines shut for a decade and a half. At twenty years, this bottle stood exactly at the unlocking: concentration and frame still present, the door just beginning to swing.

A grand cru from the oldest clos in Gevrey, made nearly without sulphur by a man who spent thirty years standing at the back of wine’s most famous photograph. In the glass, at last, he stands at the front.