2014 Joseph Faiveley
Bourgogne Aligoté
Burgundy, FR
Regular Price $24.99
Sale Price $19.99
Once upon a time, farmers grew the grapes that their grandparents and great-grandparents grew before them. Those grapes were made into wine that were largely the same as the wines that their grandparents and great-grandparents made and those wine were traded or sold to the grandkids and great-grandkids….well, you get the point.
This went on for, oh, probably, centuries.
Then, one day, someone stood up and said, hey, if we plant this other grape instead of the one that we’ve been planting, we can make a wine that tastes better that the stuff we’ve been making. And so, everyone stopped planting Aligote and started planting Chardonnay.
Or so the story goes.
(Actually, I just made that story up and have no facts whatsoever to support this telling; in other words, I’m now exactly like all the other wine writers.)
Anyway…Aligoté really is the ‘other’ white grape from Burgundy. It’s been around since at least the 1600’s (which, for the record, is not earlier than Chardonnay). When overgrown, the subsequent wine is thin and harshly acidic, so the Burgundians began adding a bit of creme de cassis to it, and thus, the Kir was borne.
However, when the grape is properly tended and managed, the resulting wine (like this one) is rich and robust with copious amounts of its typical broad acidity. It seldom sees new oak, as that would add a layer of expense to a wine that is already difficult to sell. It’s also not very ‘fruit forward’, with nutty and herbal aromas backed by reticent fruit flavors. Lastly, since this wine has a bit of bottle age (2014), it also sports a very attractive Chenin Blanc-like honeyed and textured mid-palate. It’s really delicious, the above lies notwithstanding.