En primeur tasting - Burgundy Briefing

Stockists
UK:
USA:
Berry Bros & Rudd Ltd.; O.W. Loeb; Lay and Wheeler: howard Ripley, Hayes
Hanson and Clarke and Goedhuis.
Weygandt-Metzler Importing Inc. PA
Domaine Ponsot, Morey-Saint-Denis
In the summer of 2004 Laurent Ponsot was on his Harley Davison in foreign parts
(did he say California), with the wind flowing through his new and trendy longer
haircut, so he missed the anxiety of the vigneron at home in Burgundy. When he
tasted the 2004s in May ’05 he thought like they bore some likeness to the 2002s,
and comments, “It seemed like a real terroir vintage.”
If you believed everything Laurent Ponsot told you I am sure one could be seriously
led astray. He has a wicked sense of humour. For a start you would think he just
came into the cellar after vintage and the wine had miraculously made itself while he
was playing with his latest sporty motor. Ask him a technical question and he looks at
you in horror and exclaims, “Wine is like a baby…I cannot explain it technically. We
are a tiny element of the process. There is no word in French for winemaker. We are
necessary part of the chain, but we do not MAKE the wine.” Of course he is
meticulous vigneron…you only have to look about the immaculate winery. As for the
technical side, I drew his attention to the excellent and detailed work he and his
father carried out on clonal selection (he was very helpful in the research for my MW
dissertation on Pinot Noir clones), at which point he smiled ruefully and answered a
few questions before launching off on a tangent with some bizarre anecdotes.
Ponsot hates new oak. “If you take Chardonnay and new oak, you end up with a
beverage like Cocoa Cola,” he tells me with a shudder of disgust.
I was under serious time pressure at this domaine, so sadly we didn’t get though all
the wine.
White
Morey-Saint-Denis, Les Monts Luisants Blanc
A 2.5 hectare monopole
This is a medium to full-bodied wine, firm, savoury, broad and quite sturdy (very
much a food wine). It is well balanced with fresh acidity and has surprisingly good
length. I like this a lot. Very good. From 2007/8
A Ponsot anecdote: Monks, he points out, first planted Aligoté in this vineyard. He
tells me that before phylloxera Aligoté was planted on the slopes with Chardonnay at
the foot. When the vineyards in Burgundy were replanted with vines grafted onto
rootstock, Chardonnay was used because it gave quicker results. Aligoté needed 10