2006 Domaine Albert Boillot
‘Les Petits Poisots’ Volnay
Regular Price $54.99
Sale Price $43.99
Its difficult to navigate Burgundy for even the experienced wine buyer. First of all, there are 100 appellations. Then, there are four levels – regional, communal (or village), premier cru and grand cru. For each progressive level, yields are getting lower and the plots of land smaller. The premier crus are labelled in a similar way to the village wines; the name of the village with the addition of the words premier cru or the name of the lieu-dit. There are a total of 562 premier crus in Burgundy. Technically the premier crus are part of the village appellations, not appellations in their own right. Inside every village appellation there are a large number of plots. Some of these have consistently produced wines of higher quality and have therefore been singled out as premier crus. Got all that?
Currently, all real estate in France is governed by French succession laws dating from 1804, which include compulsory inheritance provisions. Children are “protected heirs” and cannot be disinherited. They receive a certain proportion of the estate, depending on their number and on the existence of a surviving spouse. So you have any humber of vineyards that have been sliced and diced over the years and are now farmed by cousins, nieces, nephews and other distant relatives; many of them making wines under the same surname from the same location in differing levels of quality.
Then there is vintage…which simply refers to the weather and how it affects the grapes in a given year. Burgundy is not like California, which is warm and dry and sunny in most, if not all, years. The weather (temperature, cloud cover, rainfall, etc.) can (and does) change dramatically from year to year. Ergo, the wine can (and does) change dramatically from year to year.
And lastly, because Burgundy is a cool growing area, grapes are generally less ripe than those from warmer areas, meaning the wines often have higher acid levels and benefit from some bottle age.
What’s a marginally knowledgeable wine poseur to do? Well, most radio wine people and critics just ignore Burgundy (or read verbatim from the back label).
Okay, let’s talk about this wine. Boillot is a famous name in Volnay and Raymond Boillot makes wines from the estate that he inherited from his father, Albert, a cousin of the illustrious Henri Boillot. The holdings are tiny, and most of the wines are sold directly from the winery. Volnay is generally a wine of elegance, rather than power, and a wine that benefits from some aging. This wine has all that; its a 2006, which is considered (by the Burgundians) a good vintage. The wine has ‘gained some weight’, meaning that its fuller and richer now than it was when bottled. Still elegant, it shows understated fruit along with earthy and unami aromas and flavors. Very smooth and polished, it deserves to be opened for some time before serving (2 hours?) and will continue to evolve in the glass. It’s really lovely.