2017 Mazy-Chambertin Grand Cru

Cyrielle Rousseau, plus beloved hound, guided me through the domaine’s 2017s. As I have written before, she seems unfazed by taking the tiller of a prestigious name whose wines are now so astronomically priced on the secondary market that I can no longer afford to look at a bottle, let alone buy one. That is the reverence afforded to a domaine that has produced such a bevy of fermented wonder in recent years that offers so much drinking pleasure, as banal as that sounds. The wines never preen. They never expect adulation. They just seem to trigger the senses, and you fall in love. As I mentioned in my “Blind Vision” piece, there are some who suggest that the wines are not quite what they used to be, and recent experiences have implied a loss of focus around 2013 or 2014. That said, the post-2015 wines have been superb and the 2017s are no different.

Cyrielle Rousseau, who still looks as if she would be asked for ID if she ordered a bottle of her own wine in a bar, is refreshingly nonchalant and honest about the wines (always a good sign in my book). “We started picking on September 5 and harvested over the following week,” she told me, placing what appeared to be purple multi-sided Dungeons and Dragons dice on the barrel to mark which ones have been opened. “Everything went well during the growing season and as usual, everything has been de-stemmed. I find the 2017s quite spicy at the moment. They wake you up a bit.”

What needs to be said? If you love Rousseau – and frankly, you must be teetotal if you do not – then you will adore these 2017s. There are not the most powerful or the most profound ever produced by the domaine, yet they are imbued with a sense of honesty and bewitching balance, perfectly reflecting the growing season in which they were born. Repeating my assertion in my main introduction, these 2017s simply epitomize what Rousseau’s wine should be, quintessential in every respect.