Suddenly...aligote

B

BJ

BJ
I haven't had aligote in years. Never really been my thing.

Early in our courtship the Mme and I were travelling to the Maconnais and stayed in a fancy chambre d'hote in the Sawday guide. The host at dinner served his domaine wine - raising a glass with "Bourgogne, Aligote" with great gravitas. To this day, "Bourgogne, Aligote" gets a quote at appropriate, random times.

This Bourgogne, Aligote is great. It's a '22 Guy Amiot Bourgogne Aligote Les Grands Champs. 80 year old vines are pretty great no matter what the grape or region and that's the case here. Zero oak, and really more Chassagne than aligote (this is from the flatter lands below the AOC vineyards). I could drink a lot of this - medium bodied, interesting mineral elements, a bit of rubber tire (just the slightest aligote-ish bit), a bit of spice, touches of hairspray, flexibly enjoyable with food and without. Some decently powerful mineral thrust in the finish, showing the VVs well.

A definite buy again.
 
cool.

as you may recall from our days at faber college, i am from that other fraternity across the road that primarily served aligote at wild toga parties

i've always been partial - it can show wonderful floral & herbaceous notes, occasionally combining surprising purity with a touch of bitterness; that it often comes from reasonably noble dirt does not hurt the cause

then you have marvelous outliers like fleur d'aligote, the tripoz fizz that should be in the disorder hall of fame

things that started bugging me sometime in the 00s were aligote made to taste like mainstream white burgundy made from that other grape, whether intentionally or not - can't say. good wines but i often missed its varietal character. there were pleasant exceptions like marc colin's and rollin's.
last year, very generous friends poured '20 tino kuban les jardins vivants les reipes reserve and '14 d'auvenay sous chatelet that i approached with scepticism for reasons stated above. i ended up liking both quite a bit: despite notable concentration and a certain polish, i recognized the grape's traits i've always appreciated

is aligote beginning to play a greater role in burgundy due to climate shift, and is it worth replanting at least parts of some of the great chardonnay vineyards with this variety? that's above my pay grade, but i did have a superb wine last month that at least tangentially provides food for thought on the matter.

this very talented dude (by all accounts) jean-marc vincent in santenay bottled his first version of "Soler Al" , an aligote solera - as the name suggests - based on 2018, 2019, and 2020. i believe the second iteration in the works will contain five vintages. the wine is complex, cool, and beautifully balanced. if you like alitote but think it ultimately lacks complexity, this is a great wine to try in that one can argue that while multi-vintage blending elevates its complexity, it maintains a degree of coolness and phenolic spine, enhanced from lees of most recent vintage, that may in fact become increasingly difficult to obtain with chardonnay in this climate. i appreciated a familiar touch of varietal bitterness in the finish, but the midpalate was plenty generous and layered.

p.s. in what way did it show "chassagne"? with zero oak, no less!
 
Well, you may not like this as much if you like Aligote typicite. It was striking that the Mme commented she liked it but it seemed like a generic solid minerally white. I think I liked it better than her though.

I think of Chassagne having structured linearity within its heft (compared to its northern neighbors). This made me think of that.
 
originally posted by Pavel Tchichikov:
is aligote beginning to play a greater role in burgundy due to climate shift...?
Click to expand...
I think it's playing a greater role because the wines are less expensive than That Other White Grape.

While both look geeky/classy on a menu, by the glass aligote is affordable, $50/glass Chassagne not so much.
 
Yeah, you know, I paid $25 retail for that bottle of Amiot. Pretty damn cheap entry into a great Burg producer.
 
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