2019 Rouge Bourgogne

It took two or three attempts to get hold of winemaker Thomas Collardot to arrange a visit to his winery in the pretty village of Gilly and then when I did, I double-booked and missed the appointment. Thankfully I was able to visit on the penultimate day in Burgundy before lockdown curtailed my trip. “I started the harvest on 20 September and picked over the next five days,” Collardot told me. “The growing season was been easy. The vines did not suffer any stress because of the occasional storms. The vinification was normal with a maximum of six pigeages during the 25-day cuvaison. There was no problem in finishing the sugars and the malolactic was completed between December and February. I find my 2019s fresher and more elegant than the 2018s, more expressive of their terroirs. They will be bottled in March 2021.”

This was a wonderful set of 2019s from the domaine that most people refer to as “CLF”. They have really come out of nowhere in the last three or four years, propelled by an enviable array of holdings in decent size, thereby gifting Collardot flexibility in terms of deselecting anything that does not come up to scratch and not forgetting the talent of Collardot himself. The Clos Saint-Denis knocks the ball out of the park, one of the highlights out of over 2,000 wines tasted and demonstrating just why this Grand Cru deserves to be seen as an equal to Clos de la Roche. Generally the wines are harmonious knitted together with fine-boned tannins, displays purity of fruit with impressive persistence on the finish. If you have not discovered “CLF” yet, then now is the time to do so.