WTN: Laurent Burg, not oaky for me

Betsy made pork chops with shiitakes, plus quinoa with kale, I opened the 2005 Dominique Laurent Cotes de Nuits Villages Vielles Vignes.

Despite Laurent's rep for oak (and I've had some DL village and PCs that I thought terribly overoaked), I've generally found good QPR and little oak with his lower end bottlings, especially the "Bourgogne #1." So decided to bite when this bottling (which I'd never seen before) was a $10 closeout at PC.

Nice sappy black cherry fruit, moderate acidity, some tannins. I'm not getting any apparent oak, just nice juicy Pinot Noir fruit. Weighty for CdNV, doesn't have the complexity or depth I found in the '06 Bachelet CdNV recently, but a very nice Burg that might even improve over the short term. B+ for the wine, A for value.

Grade disclaimer: I'm a very easy grader, basically A is an excellent wine, B a good wine, C mediocre. Anything below C means I wouldn't drink at a party where it was only choice. Furthermore, I offer no promises of objectivity, accuracy, and certainly not of consistency.

That's an insane deal Dale. Nice catch.

Thanks for the note. I think his "oak" reputation was more built on his GCs ... although people think he does the 200% new on the lower end bottlings. Often his entry level bottles are nice and pure as you described.

Jason

Eight or nine years ago I attended a tasting where both Dominique Laurent and Michel Tardieu were present; the former very voluble.

It was a big line-up of the wines from Bourgogne to Clos de Bèze and the Rhône equivalents but I only remember one Burgundy, a Volnay cru from 95, where the oak presence was drying and offensive to me; in all the others, some very impressive, the wood though detectable, seemed well integrated to me, a moderate quercophobe. I seem to recall Laurent expounding at length how he leant on his cooper to provide barrels to his exact specification so as to avoid extraction of too much flavour from them.

I have a few buried in a stack and it is about time that I disinterred the 97s, a patchy and early maturing vintage, while leaving the 96s a bit longer.