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Edges of Burgundy: Our New Blog Series

 

Your guide to Burgundy's Unknown Gems: Great wines and rare values

Is Burgundy going the way of Bordeaux?  Prices certainly are going up every year.  The top producers’ wines are now out of reach for the vast majority of us.  In famous villages (Vosne Romanée, Chambolle Musigny), even relatively unknown producers don't come cheap.

And in some ways, the situation is already worse than Bordeaux.  If you're willing to pay the price, there's always another case of, say, Leoville Las Cases that you can buy and put in your cellar.  They just make so much wine in Bordeaux.

But not so in Burgundy, where bottles of top wines are now often allocated just two or three per customer... and that's if you're lucky enough to make the list.  The fact is, far less wine is produced in Burgundy than in Bordeaux and there just isn't enough to satisfy global demand.  Meanwhile, word on the street is that even top Bordeaux Chateaux still haven't sold out of their 2009s and 2010s, let alone the far less heralded vintages that followed.

It’s tempting to simply give up and start exploring other regions.  I've certainly done some of that.  Brunello di Montalcino may be out of fashion in some circles these days, but it's fast becoming a favorite in my home.  And yes, Bordeaux has been reappearing on my table more regularly: give it a chance if you haven't lately!

But it's far too early to give up on Burgundy.  As dire as things may seem, we're talking about a region that produces around 200 million bottles annually.  That's a lot of wine.  Of course, if you only focus on the top producers in the most famous terroirs, you ignore 199 million of those bottles.  But why make things so hard on yourself?

The solution, of course, is to start exploring within Burgundy itself.  And this series of blog posts is designed to help you do that.  Every Saturday for the next few weeks we're going to explore what I call the "Edges of Burgundy."  These are great villages producing Chardonnay and Pinot Noir that would be the envy of virtually any wine region on Earth outside of Burgundy, with wines that are capable of aging beautifully and that often outclass far more expensive wines.  And if villages like Gevrey Chambertin and Puligny Montrachet didn't exist, these are villages that would be very famous.  But in Burgundy they're are over-shadowed by more famous names.

Here is the list of villages that these we will cover, to start with:

By the way, I love Fixin, the Hautes Cotes, Givry, Maranges, Ladoix, Saint Romain and plenty of other places too.  But I've listed what are really the “super-seconds” of Burgundy villages.  And they're where we need to start in our quest for super-delicious and wrongly overlooked Burgundy.  Hopefully we'll get to the rest in good time.  In the mean time, check in next week for St. Aubin.