Gevrey-Chambertin, Lavaux St-Jacques, Armand Rousseau 2001. For Burgundy lovers, just reading the name immediately brings to mind a Pinot Noir of complexity and finesse from a great producer, and from a solid vintage. Most of us with a case of this wine in the cellar assume that each perfectly stored bottle will illicit the same response and provide the same pleasure. Think again.
Last week I pulled a bottle of that Gevrey-Chambertin from a just-purchased case from a reliable importer, put it in a brown paper bag, and added it to a milk crate along with nine other bagged bottles set aside to taste with the other wine department staff at Balthazar and Pastis. Each week we randomly taste blind both wines on our wine list, to better dissect them, and sample bottles given to us for consideration to add to the list. I also encourage Balthazar’s Assistant Wine Director to choose a bottle or two from the wine cellar every week and to add it to the blind mix so that I can also be forced to decode what I’m tasting.
Back to last week’s milk crate of blind wines. We started by tasting a couple of nondescript, mass-produced Languedoc Grenache and Syrah blends in the $10/bottle range. Then we all agreed that we’d rather not give them wine list real estate, and admittedly patted ourselves on our backs for recognizing without seeing the label that we were tasting a blah, sort of yucky wine from a hot growing region where the grapes were probably not hand harvested, over cropped and manhandled from the vineyard to the vat. Dump those in the sink.
Then we reach a glorious wine in a brown bag, pour it, swirl, look at the color, sniff, sniff, sniff and then taste. It’s perfumed with cherry, violet, minerals and earth. Definitely first class Pinot Noir, we all agree. Great Burgundy. We swoon a bit and beg to have the brown bag removed so that we can know and bring into our wine lives this new found demigod in a bottle. It’s the Gevrey-Chambertin, Lavaux St-Jacques, Armand Rousseau 2001. It’s one we already purchased, with a case in our cellar and we’re happy for that.
Next up in our blind tasting: a solid, easy to enjoy Sancerre produced by Lauverjat, from the classic and recent 2004 Loire vintage. We decide to buy a bunch of half bottles for the wine list.
Then we become stumped. From the brown paper bag, I pour glasses for all of us in the wine department. The color is similar to the Gevrey-Chambertin we just tasted, but lighter. We all say it’s Pinot Noir from Burgundy. It’s enjoyable, and we agree it’s maybe from a pretty good producer, with nice cherry fruit and a bit disjointed acidity. Pleasant Burgundy from a larger appellation, but not a gem.
The bag comes off. It’s Gevrey-Chambertin, Lavaux St-Jacques, Armand Rousseau 2001. As it turns out, for the first time ever in our blind tasting, the Assistant Wine Director chose the same wine that I chose and put it in the milk crate for our blind tasting. The bottle he chose is from the same perfectly cellared case as the one that I chose. Odd coincidence.
At first we each look at each other and experience a collective wave of self doubt. How could we have swooned over one bottle and then simply appreciated the next? What’s wrong with our palates?
We then grab two clean, wine rinsed wine glasses per person and pour a hefty taste from each of the Gevrey-Chambertin bottles. The colors are noticeably different and we’re genuinely shocked to discover that one is shades lighter than the other. The darker shaded one is the better wine.
Then we sniff, sniff as before. One’s great; one’s good. Then we taste. One’s great; one’s good.
Suddenly we’re perplexed and enlightened all at once. The lesson learned is that the term “bottle variation†is not a myth. Sort of helplessly, we acknowledge that we don’t have the answers. Why can a wine within the same case have characteristics so incredibly different from a bottle resting next to it? Is this a Burgundy issue? Is this something I can answer in another blog? I hope so.
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