Esmonin Elucidation

I've often enjoyed F.Esmonin wines.In my experience the best expression of their style is in the Estournelles St. Jacques, more so than in the pleasing but probably underachieving grand crus.
 
Ian, this is a completely wild guess, but when I was tasting 08s in barrel, I was loving Gevreys like never before. This was particularly evident in cellars that spanned multiple villages, e.g. Chambolle, Vosne, Gevrey, etc. No idea if Meadows and Tanzer felt the same, but I suppose it could have affected their judgement of F Esmonin. Did David Schildknecht review them as well, does anyone know?
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
Yeah, but perversely, Meadows and Tanzer like his 08's. Naturally, your views trump theirs, but I still wonder. Maybe he's getting better.

Who the hell's Carson?
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n00b alert!
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
Oh good grief.
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Listen to Tom Blach as it sounds like he may actually try them regularly.

Allen will sometimes review them well, but I've never seen anything in them myself.

You fucking n00b.
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
You are the cutest thing, Nathan. Yeah, Tom sounds about right, and I will listen to him.
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IMO, they are a waste of money. At best, they are OK.

So I think you should buy some.
 
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99 ruchottes was nice last night. detailed, medium bodied, and very expressive. very pretty acidity. 99 roumier bonnes mares, in comparison, was so boring that i wondered about cutting myself. who knew?
i tried to rub received wisdom on the ennui, to make it better. it was too late. i have a nasty rash this am.

a few of you will recall my woe when f esmonin passed to the dark side. something was lost there.

some of you who crave some kind of pointy return on your vinous life-style instruments won't care.

i do not endorse this thread.

fb.
 
you've tried to shock with 99 b-m story, but it's only partially working

would I rather have the 93 or 95 instead ? certainly

but 99s are closed inky shit. Joe and I recently had 99 G-E drouhin. Nobody's home.

so take that, and add this unusual extraction that roumier got in 99 ( for better or for worse ), and what do you get ? Silly extracted stuff on the top with nothing to support it underneath, 'cause nobody's home either. Yawn indeed.
 
originally posted by fatboy:

99 ruchottes was nice last night. detailed, medium bodied, and very expressive. very pretty acidity. 99 roumier bonnes mares, in comparison, was so boring that i wondered about cutting myself. who knew?
i tried to rub received wisdom on the ennui, to make it better. it was too late. i have a nasty rash this am.

a few of you will recall my woe when f esmonin passed to the dark side. something was lost there.

some of you who crave some kind of pointy return on your vinous life-style instruments won't care.

i do not endorse this thread.

fb.
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Meds motherfucker.

Roumier Bonnes-Mares not being good doesn't make Esmonin good. It means it was the first thing you were drinking to get over the shakes.
 
older f esmonin isn't "good." many of the wines were blah.

hidden in amongst them were a lot of beautiful, elegant, cool expressions of great g.c. terroir that didn't shout at you. it was the last reliable source of some of these, and was woefully under-appreciated because we live in a world where everyone's model is the safe, boring shit churned out by the likes of roumier (albeit that i'll grant .sasha some good 93s and 95s -- some of the 83s were great too, but they were a different animal.)

when f esmonin hired the dude whose-name-escapes-me-right-now from hudelot-noellat, the shouters won. more points, more extraction, more identikit generic oaky boring cack for know-nothings to drink young in small doses, all the while blathering about 'potential'. (it's funny how people who decried the desecration of fine estates in bordeaux to satisfy the cock-monkeys who claimed they were "wasting their potential" will stand by and applaud exactly the same thing in burgundy. meh.)

anyway. so much for the past. most 99s are like most 85s -- they were best drunk in the first couple of years after the vintage when they had plenty of slutty charm. while they'll be back, of course, the makeup and the hollowness will show. the f esmonin was one of the very few i kept. it was really pretty. it was the kind of wine you want to drink the whole bottle of, and get to know. so i did.

fb.
 
ah, very interesting. Don't have time to reply properly now, but one thought prevails.

I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing about the parallel you've just drawn to bordeaux. However, in order to see this parallel, one has to see the big picture. Not just by tasting from these different regions, but by truly loving the wines of different regions. Seriously, if you make wine in burgundy, how often do you get out? And even if you taste bordeaux and can even tell the difference between 90 and 00 poyferre, are any of those wines on your radar when you make, taste, plan, discuss burgundy? This extends to tasters as well, and I mean great, experienced tasters. I often find that my good friends who will open a bottle of burg 9 out of 10 times are much more likely to call (I don't mean to pick on one particular producer, but that's what comes to mind now) a 99 from grivot an evidence of great variety of style and flexibility that pinot can offer in the region of great terroir and winemaking. I, on the other hand, will have little interest in the same wine, because if I wanted something with a little more force and extract without giving up on transparency that I so much appreciate in burgundy, I'll go and open a figeac, thank you very much.
 
I had that 99 Roumier B-M in August 2002 and it was shut down so hard already that I made a mental note not to open any of mine for at least 10 years. I'm now thinking 15 should have been the projection.

FB, I couldn't disagree with you more about the quality of 1999 Burgundies from good producers (and, no, I don't just mean DRC and Rousseau or other domaines that price similarly). I continue to try some of them and to buy more when I find well-stored bottles that interest me. I recently had Bachelet's Corbeaux and then his Charmes and both of them were very delicious. And it's not just Bachelet - in the past year, I've opened and loved (despite their obvious structure and the need for more age) Roumier's chambolle, d'angerville's
and voillot's champans, CdB Corton Bressandes, and Jadot's Estournelles St Jacques - not exactly a high priced list, at least when purchased.

Of course, I'm still enjoying some 85s although I agree many of them were tastier awhile ago.
 
This is when a well-placed bottle of Lafarge Les Mitans is very useful.

Look, even blah Burgundy is 'tastier' than blah Bordeaux - more makeup, lower necklines, higher hems, somebody you would fuck after a couple of gropes on the dancefloor. There's just too much pantsuit action going on in Bordeaux at that end of the spectrum. I suspect fb is less susceptible to slut charm (a typical malaise of one who over-indulged when younger), but the rest of us don't want to go running to the wash basin every morning after. So please stop with the education.

Did I mention a Les Mitans? Pantsuit action, yes (the La Mission of Volnay, I think), but with hotpants and a derriere-as-pivot strut.

And everytime I pop open a '95 von Schubert Abtsberg Auslese (the common people no fuder bottling) I wonder at why I didn't buy more when this was still priced in DM (and Pfennig). Sometimes the noob does know more.
 
there is nothing wrong with tasty wine. 85 and 99 made lots of tasty wine in burgundy. very little of it ever spoke of its place, or ever will. i like my burgundy to be confident about where it came from. when i read a tasting note that claims that a bourgogne tastes like some or other grand cru, i die a little inside. i want my bourgogne to taste of its own place, thanks much. i want my fixin to be fixin, not second rate wannabe gevrey. my boudots should be more vosne than nuits because of the soil, not because some dumb fucker aspires to faux grand cru.

the beauty of f esmonin when he got things right was that the wines screamed of their origins. the ruchottes was recognizably ruchottes, the griottes identifiably griottes, the mazy was a mazy. yes, the wines were lighter bodied, and one might argue that they could have been "better". but, actually, for whatever all that means, i'm hard pressed to think of another estate in burgundy that i've enjoyed as many really transparent wines from. lafarge is more lafarge than anything else. roumier also. ditto gouges. jayer was extremely so, but to my taste; the drc is very drc, and i might even criticize the style as being a parody but for leroy. -- as for bachalet, he only really makes terroirful wines in weak vintages. his 99s are kind of delicious, i guess, if that is what you seek, but they are indistinct too. more "tasty pinot" than gevrey.

another example: i had an 02 le haut-lieu sec from huet last night. it was screamingly haut-lieu, a vineyard that, after much pondering, i think would be better suited to making great fizz than still wine. especially when i think of another huet i shared with .sasha and joe in new york last week. there's something about still l-h-l i just don't care for, at heart. but that doesn't mean i wish it tasted like some bland but tasty generic vouvray sec instead. i enjoyed the experience, despite it reinforcing my somewhat negative opinion.

none of this means that i think that what i look for in burgundy is what you should look for. it just means that we are looking for different things: that we might value different qualities; in wines, in vintages... and it means, getting back to the topic, that while i've have far more blah wines from f esmonin than michel / silvie (though i've had some clumsy fucking crap from them too), i've never had a single bottle from the latter that can compare with the best of the former when it comes to expressivity.

others' mileage may vary. that's cool. let a hundred flowers bloom, i say.

fb.
 
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