WTN: 2006 David Clark Bourgogne Passetoutgrains

Oak. Dear god, lots of oak. I think this is what I always imagined the infamous Laurent "200% new oak" would taste like. Oak oak oak oak.
EDIT: A good shot of brett, too. Caramel shit nose.

Underneath the oak is some fantastically ripe and intense gamay. Old-viney. Deep purple-red.

Man, a great wine could have been made with this juice. But this isn't it. Enjoyable in spite of itself, but flawed.

EDIT2: Thus was so sulfurous that I dropped an old penny in to see what would happen. It helped a fair bit..still sort of fecal, still VERY oaky, but at least there's some florality to it now....so this was (1) over-oaked (2) brett-infected (3) highly reductive. Yet still decent to drink b/c of the quality of the juice.

EDIT3: And I just poured out the last bit from my glass and the penny which I dropped in about 20 min ago has transformed from normal tarnished 30-year old penny color to BRIGHT copper red, like it was brand new. Something in that wine reacted like hell with the oxides on the penny's surface!

Ah, burgundy. (Sigh).

Sounds like some weird stuff. Why oak Passetoutgrains? Unless it was somehow priced very ambitiously?

Sounds like some weird stuff. Why oak Passetoutgrains? Unless it was somehow priced very ambitiously?

$21. About on par with the Lafarge (regular) passetoutgrains and less than the L'Exeception. A little less than the Groffier, too.

the penny which I dropped in about 20 min ago has transformed from normal tarnished 30-year old penny color to BRIGHT copper red, like it was brand new. Something in that wine reacted like hell with the oxides on the penny's surface!

The same thing happened when I left a penny in a bretty red a few weeks ago, the only time I ever tried this. Wonder if this happens to all pennies left in wine for some time. Maybe it's the acidity that does it. Perhaps someone penny-experienced can chime in.

[David M. Bueker]

So you want my thoughts for a penny?

I could give you my two cents.

Sounds like some weird stuff. Why oak Passetoutgrains? Unless it was somehow priced very ambitiously?

$21. About on par with the Lafarge (regular) passetoutgrains and less than the L'Exeception. A little less than the Groffier, too.

So it is all very bizarre. It's bad enough to make an 'ambitiously' tarted-up Bourgogone rouge but Passetoutgrains!

On the winery website they have a lot of good buzzwords about organic, natural, etc, etc. But perhaps the stylistic vision is just different from mine. Have you tasted any of their other wines?

Day 2: I open the bottle and immediately catch a whiff of rotten eggs. Yes, this is highly reductive, and I think I underestimated the H2S flaw last night. I do the penny trick again and it once again begins to dial down the rubber tire aromas. It's still too tarted up for my taste- plenty of new oak, very dark and extracted and "serious". I think I might have been wrong about the brett- I think I was confusing the H2S for brett.

David Clark being one of the personalities recently featured in a short but classy wine series - that episode IIRC being called 'the firm', focusing on Berry Bros. & Rudd and the difference in how the buyers/producers of Bordeaux and Burgundy differed. David Clark and the Burgundy buyer (Jasper Morris) IMO came across very well, albeit with Clark being painfully shy it seemed. IIRC his background prior to winemaking was the Williams Formula 1 motor-racing team.

Well worth a watch if it makes it onto a telly screen near you.

regards

Ian