IF ONLY WALLS COULD SPEAK - Blancpain

muted whatever individual expression might
have been found in a particular wine from a
particular producer by blending all of the producers’
wines from a single vineyard together
in the final bottling.
This began to change 30 years ago as
ambitious, creative, talented vintners
one-by-one began breaking away from the
negotiant cocoon in order to express themselves
with their own hand-crafted domain
wines. They did not want their handiwork to
be lost in a blend. They wanted their wines to
make a statement about their wine making
philosophy and represent the best that burgundy
had to offer. More than that, many of
these domain owners were willing to take
risks in the name of uncompromising quality.
What formerly had been a rather bland world
of commercially produced negotiant wines
became a world of wonderfully diverse
artistic expression. Burgundy lends itself to
creativity as the pinot noir grape, used exclusively
for the reds and the chardonnay
grape, exclusively for the whites, both may
be vinified in a multitude of ways—should
the wine stay long on the lees before fermentation
is begun? Should vinification
temperature be depressed? How much stem
should be allowed? Should grapes be sorted
bunch by bunch? How much new oak? How
much stirring in the barrel? You get the idea.
There is no set formula, no single recipe so
to speak, to be followed. This variability
allows talented wine makers to extract different
expressions and emphasize different
qualities from the grapes from a single vineyard.
Some domain wine makers seek to coax
out of their harvests an expression of the soil
of each particular vineyard. Others follow
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the opposite route, seeking to bring forward
their own wine making style, de-emphasizing
soil characteristics. The knowledgeable
consumer is the winner, able to choose
domains according to style. With some very
limited exceptions, over the past decade, all
burgundies of distinction have been domain
wines and the quantities of negotiants’ wines
have diminished and their appeal to wine
connoisseurs has largely disappeared.
The wines of Lucien Le Moine improbably
turn this now accepted truism on its head.
Doubly so. These are wines of great breed
making powerful personal style statements—
wines which critics have already called “worthy
of a special search in the market place”. Yet
contrary to the current catechism that wines
with strong personalities and great definition
can only be domain wines, these are technically
speaking negotiant wines, because the