Burgundy Family Domaines Tasting Paris 2026
- adrianlatimer61
- 10 hours ago
- 11 min read
It is a rare privilege for Burgundy lovers to secure an invitation to the annual tasting of the Domaines Familiaux de Bourgogne at the very posh Pavillon Ledoyen, a Michelin starred restaurant in Paris, so I thought I might post a few thoughts. I’m not going to give a list of tedious tasting notes on mega label wines, nor a bunch of photos of me trying to hobnob with some of the greatest winemakers in the business. But just to give you a feel for the background, here is the list of family domaines involved:
Queuing up to enter, we met two luminaries from the Paris restaurant-wine trade, Mark Williamson from Willis Wine Bar/Maceo and Robert Vifian from Tan Dinh. We all collected our glass, tasting book, a pen and what looked like a large paper coffee cup which was your portable spittoon should the crowds buzzing around the honey pot of some of the more renowned domaines prevent you from spitting into the proper ones. Luckily, I was not to need it as the crowds were not too bad, or maybe we just got there first.
To get things into perspective and get the cult wine/winemaker lust out of the way quickly, I only swallowed three wines: Mugnier’s 2018 Musigny, Raveneau’s 2023 Chablis Les Clos and Rousseau’s Chambertin. They are wines that I will never taste again (unless I secure another trade invitation) and are priced (retail) in the stratosphere, so you can understand my reticence to spit and desire to swallow. The other 80 odd wines I dutifully but sadly returned to the black spittoons that were perched on every tasting table.
So, what can I say that might be of interest to someone who wasn’t there and is not looking for a bunch of scores and endless tasting notes that are largely the same? What conclusions about the 2023 vintage that was on show, and the 2013 (wineries were limited to 4 wines and maybe a mature example, usually from a decade before)? What impressions and conclusions?
First of all, 2023 seems a very enjoyable vintage. It was a sunny year but thankfully an abundant one too, so a bit of dilution has prevented the wines from becoming too rich and heavy. Perhaps a vintage for drinkers rather than those who love the big sunny years that score so highly but that will need 20 years to unfold and are often impressive but more about the sun than the place. The whites have lot of ripe fruit, but enough acidity and extract to make for I’d guess medium term consumption and the reds also have delicious red fruit. They are wines of pleasure and in the most part I suspect will not require ages in the cellar to come round. And they are not overly sunny. Hurrah.
Even more importantly, there is lots of 2023 to be had. And some growers seem to have (finally) realised that Burgundy market prices have risen to unsustainable levels and that they risk making the same mistake that Bordeaux did, believing that the balloon of global desirability would forever rise until it burst and, whoops, nobody wanted the wines anymore, and all those clients that had been thrown aside in the greed for higher prices oddly didn’t all rush back to return. They had moved elsewhere as there are other fine wine regions in the world. Fashion can be very fickle.
2024 is a pitiful vintage in terms of quantity and I’m always a bit suspicious when the epithet is ‘amazing it turned out so much better than expected’ which seems to be the general refrain, and somewhat faint praise. And 2025, though seemingly very good, is also a small crop. Which leaves 2023 looking attractive.
Jean-Nicolas Meo remarked that vintages ending in 3 tended to be extreme, and that 2013 (cold and nasty) had in fact turned out to be a bit of an ugly duckling: pretty much reviled at birth it has blossomed into quite a pleasing adolescent. I don’t think it’s a vintage for long keeping but have to say that the examples on display were all enjoyable and of course back then they cost an awful lot less than now. A good surprise.
Burgundy is always touted as the quintessence of ‘terroir’ and let me pick a couple of examples. At d’Angerville you had three 1e cru Volnays. The blended generic 1e cru was very much what you might expect from Volnay, the most ‘feminine’ village of the Cote de Beaune - floral red fruit, elegant, soft, approachable, lovely. The Fremiets was not at all the same profile, adjacent to Pommard with a good chunk of clay, it was tighter, denser and closed, a brooding wine that needs years. And finally, in mid slope and mid village, Champans combined the best of both, the lovely fruit of the former and some of the colder structure of the second. If you then jumped to Nuits Saint Georges, you had a clear display of terroir and quality at Domaine Gouges as you climbed the scale from the village wine to Les Vaucrains which sits above Les St Georges (NSG’s grand cru pretender) and is surely almost there in class too. The Clos des Porrets and Pruliers are in the heartland of NSG and a stone’s throw apart yet the first was more ungiving and tannic, the second definitely riper and with abundant fruit. Always fascinating to be able to compare side by side.
Of course, on the cost front, that imposing elephant in the room, the one thing I could not help thinking was just how many hundreds of euros of wine had I just sniffed, swilled, and then spat into a bucket. A depressing thought, allied to the one that to a certain extent the tasting was fascinating and delicious, but sadly pointless, as just how many of these elixirs could I actually ever afford to buy? Precious few, way, way too few. If value for money is in any sense your priority or necessity, this was the wrong place to be.
On a more positive front, I found the whites nearly all good, full of quite lush fruit, but not tropical, and backed by enough cut and chewiness to bring a smile for the future. Raveneau’s Chablis were, of course, top class, though more approachable than usual. Lafon was surely back on form and so was Leflaive, my pick of the crop. Some say that you don’t get the full flavour when you spit out a wine, but here I noticed that whilst the wine might have seemed a bit quiet in the mouth, after you had spat it out, the taste seemed to grow. Instead of rushing to scribble a pointless note, or rush to the next wine, you needed to stop and continue to savour the wine that was in fact no longer in your mouth. Impressive. I am sure they are going to be really exciting in a decade.
Even better from my personal point of view was that I didn’t sample a single white that was too reductive, the bane of modern trendy whites which too often are overpowered by that smell of struck match and gunflint of which a little goes a very long way, or should do. No, the balance here seemed spot on, neither too much reduction, oak nor ripe fruit. Nice! I hope it’s a trend as I keep drinking whites that disappoint, their fruit stifled in a straitjacket of reduction, even though reviewers on social media all seem to think this is the pinnacle of taste for Chardonnays. Oh, that glorious smell of ‘popcorn and struck match’!
Of the reds, what interested me most was the question of stems. Do you destem or keep the whole cluster? It has, like reductive white wine making, become a much bigger debate of late and a much more frequent practice. If reduction was a reaction to the problem of premature oxidation in whites, I am guessing that including stems is a way to add more freshness, drop alcohol a notch and counter the ever-warming climate. For years I have tried to spot it in tastings, but with limited success. Here it was, in a lot of cases, quite flagrant.
It’s interesting in that if you pick the most demanded wines in Burgundy over the last 30 years or so, DRC and Leroy lead the stems camp and Henri Jayer the non. And yet in the end both camps produced glorious wines. Now I guess you could add Dujac and Mugnier to the mega league for the with or without.
But never have I tasted so many wines that were overtly ‘stemmy’. At Chandon de Brialles the wines were very floral and aromatic (from the stems) but also ‘stemmy’, a sort of green, vegetal taste that has nothing to do with fruit, red or black. The nose was very impressive, but I left with a taste of stems. I’d be very interested to taste in a decade where they have gone. Looking at the very short notes that I did scribble, I not the words ‘stems’ all over the place. Of course these are not wines made to be drunk young, so the question is whether that green element that is so prevalent now will fade away and leave the lovely floral aromatics and, hopefully, fruit to carry the day. I don’t know enough to judge, so I guess it’s going to be a long wait to know. Etienne de Montille (lovely wines) explained how they adjust the percentage of stems per vineyard and per season, and I have often tasted with David Croix where one climat in Beaune can take (& need) the addition of some stems, but another with heavier soil and naturally more rugged tannins cannot and should not. One size does not fit all. What can lift and add complexity and freshness to one wine will totally overpower another.
Of vineyards there was not much to say that would surprise anyone, NSG Les Boudots abuts Vosne and tastes like it, and next door Vosne Malconsorts is always great (well, it’s next to La Tache). Both punch above their status. And in Meursault, Perrieres carries the most impact. But you already knew that and sadly the prices do too, but I guess it’s nice to be able to taste the ‘truth’ for once.
One other thing that struck me as I watched journalists feverishly taking notes and pictures, is just how pointless these scores really are. I don’t want to descend into a rant, but I was depressed but not surprised to hear that one of the finest of UK merchants agreed that one renowned wine critic’s scores were laughably high, but they still used them because high scores sell wines. It is difficult to escape the necessities of commerce I suppose. If this blog has any merit, it is precisely that I do not suffer from them. At Chateau de Latour (Clos Vougeot) they lamented that the desire to be first to get the scores out now means that supposed wine critics want to come to taste in November. The wine is just about fermented grape juice at that stage, truly a ridiculous time to taste. I’ve often been frustrated tasting at top domaines in the spring before the malolactic fermentations have finished, when some of the world’s most desired wines frankly tasted of bitter green apples (malic acid). How tasters can really get beyond that to comment upon the different and subtle nuances of each vineyard beats me. Or is it just the emperor’s clothes after all?
The 2023s taste well now, but let’s face it, most of these wines (of both colours) should not be drunk for another decade (plus). And the 2013s, which were so written off back then, now, when ready to drink, are showing quite nicely. They are not 2012 or 2014 and definitely not 2010 or 2015, but maybe that is the point – they should be drunk for what they are and what the vintage delivers. The late Clive Coates, who specialised and lived in Burgundy, had a very intelligent system of firstly scoring the vintage and then scoring the individual wines within that vintage context. Thus, in absolute terms a 95 score from 2005 would be a ‘better’ wine than a 97 from 2004, but the 97 was as good as a 2004 was going to get. And that, if you understand the parameters of 2004, is far more useful than the usual absolute mark out of 100, or 20. But of course it takes a bit more effort from the reader and is less easy to sell wines with…
To finish on a high note, the table next to the entrance/exit was in many ways the humblest but most interesting of all. Yes, yes, I admit that I rushed past it in my lust to get to Mugnier (fabulous) and then Raveneau, Roumier, Rousseau, Dujac, Meo-Camuzet, Leflaive, Lafon, d’Angerville, Lafarge… Not that I am a label drinker of course! But, come on, these wines are well beyond the budget of a retiree and a chance to taste them is like sampling gold dust, even if it’s just one mouthful that you have to spit out.
But let’s get back to that less crowded table.
Grand crus?
None.
Well then, Cote de Nuits?
No.
Errr, Cote de Beaune of course?
No.
What?
It was also the last in the tasting book, the name beginning with a V. Ah, but what a name – Domaine de Villaine, famed of course because of that other de Villaine, Mr. Aubert, perhaps the most respected gentleman in Burgundy (and of DRC of course).
Pierre de Benoist is one of the most articulate and passionate advocates of Burgundy, but here we had Bouzeron, Bourgogne Cote Chalonnaise and Rully. Wines further south and very much on the wrong side of the sheets! But Bouzeron is renowned for its real Aligote (Dore) and there is nothing green or grassy here. Indeed, some famous growers in the esteemed Cote de Beaune would very much like to add back a few Aligote vines into their Chardonnay vineyards to bring some freshness in the days of ever earlier and sunnier vintages. And de Villaine’s Aligotes taste fine and young at ten.
The Rully ‘St Jacques’ (white) was also a bit of a revelation – ripe apricot fruit but then a slash of refreshing acidity and chewy extract that would shame many a Meursault. At a fraction of the price.
But the grand finale was when Pierre produced a totally ridiculous bottle. A 1983 (yes, remember that vintages in 3 were extreme and 83 was a bad extreme), from Cote Chalonnaise. A Bourgogne.
Now come on, a 43 three-year-old basic generic Burgundy from a duff vintage. What was he thinking?
A bricky, orange old colour, slightly cloudy. An old school, aromatic, perfumed nose, still fruit, lovely balance, quite simply delicious.
What better way to finish could there be?
Postscript - ‘The Wine in My Glass’
After some encouragement and a fair few blog posts, I published (Sept 2025) a book about my travels in the wine world - the people, places and, of course, wines. I am not a professional, so everything I say is objective and unbiased (so I can criticise when other journalists do not dare to do so for instance) and any profits will go to the Vendanges Solidaires association which was set up in 2016 to help winemakers who are in trouble after suffering the extreme weather conditions (frost, hail, fire, flood etc) which sadly are becoming ever more frequent: www.vendangessolidaires.com.
The book ranges from California to Sicily, via Salta, Jujuy and Patagonia in Argentina, Valtellina, Piemonte and Tuscany in Italy, Madeira and of course all over France (Burgundy, Chablis, Sancerre, Beaujolais, Bordeaux, the Rhone).
If you have found any pleasure and/or interest in this blog, I think you might enjoy it, especially as it has been brilliantly illustrated by Arabella Langlands-Perry who managed to juggle bringing up two young kids, helping run Maceo/Willi’s Wine Bar in Paris and producing artwork with an abundance of both talent and wit. Brava.
‘The Wine in My Glass – Tales of Wines, Winemakers and Places’
Published by The Medlar Press Limited, Fishguard, Pembrokeshire, autumn 2025. www.medlarpress.com
Available from Medlar in UK, and/or from me in France or Willis Wine Bar in Paris.
Price UK Pounds 26 from Medlar or 35 Euros. All profits to charity.
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