Vertical Tasting of Louis Jadot’s Corton Pougets
BY STEPHEN TANZER |
I have a lengthy history with Louis Jadot’s Corton Pougets, but the wine itself has a much longer one. Jadot’s Pougets originally came to my attention as a worthy collectible in the late 1980s, during my early years publishing the International Wine Cellar, when I participated in a vertical tasting of a dozen or so vintages from the preceding 20+ years. Some of those wines were made before the arrival of legendary enologist Jacques Lardière, who began his 43-year career with Jadot in 1970 and took over responsibility for winemaking the following year, at the precocious age of 23. Even those earlier vintages struck me as utterly distinctive, but Lardière took the Pougets—along with virtually everything else he touched at Jadot—to a higher level. Lardière’s protégé Frédéric Barnier, who joined Jadot in 2010 and began vinifying on his own here in 2013, already has some superb vintages to his credit.
In December, Barnier showed me a splendid series of Corton Pougets vintages at the Jadot winery outside Beaune. The wines were even more scented and complex as a group than I had anticipated, but they were firmly structured too—clearly built for slow evolution in bottle. If you’re a long-time fan of this bottling, that news will hardly come as a surprise. But if you’re not familiar with Jadot’s Pougets and have an instinctive aversion to Corton wines owing to their frequently dominant soil tones and gaminess-verging-on-rusticity, this wine may be for you. Making it more palatable still, through the years the Pougets has been a very reasonably priced Grand Cru in comparison to Corton Grand Crus from other producers; in fact, Jadot sells this wine at lower prices than some of its Premier Crus from the Côte de Nuits.
Double rainbow over Corton Pougets
A Unique Site for Pinot Noir
Corton Pougets was originally purchased by the Jadot family in 1913 (the bottle carries the Domaine des Héritiers Louis Jadot label), and can fairly be described as one of the company’s flagship Burgundy bottlings. But Jadot’s history goes back much farther than that. The house of Louis Jadot was established in 1859 but the family had already been wine-growers in the region, having acquired their famous Beaune Clos des Ursules vineyard, a walled portion of the Premier Cru Vignes Franches, in 1826.
Of the just over 3 hectares of Corton Pougets owned by Jadot (representing nearly one-third of this Grand Cru’s total surface), 1.2 are planted to Pinot Noir and the other 1.87 to Chardonnay. In fact, Jadot’s consistently superb Corton-Charlemagne bottling comes entirely from their vines in Pougets.
The single most important thing to know about Corton Pougets is that it’s a red wine from white wine soil. Located next to Le Charlemagne on the mid- and upper slope of the Corton hill in Aloxe-Corton, enjoying a southern exposure, it’s on brownish chalk and light marl, with a substantial limestone component in the lower portion of the vineyard on the Ladoix side. Along with just four other Aloxe-Corton vineyards close to the famous woods at the top of the Corton hill Le Charlemagne, Le Corton, Les Languettes and Les Renardes (all but the last of them extending up to the tree line), Pougets can produce either Pinot Noir or Chardonnay—the latter bottled as Corton-Charlemagne. Today, the only other estate bottling of Corton Pougets is Domaine Rapet.
