Esmonin Elucidation

Yixin, slut charm not the problem. Plenty of sexy, opulent burgundy with tons of make-up, and it can be much fun, and still burgundy. May not age well (there are exception, e.g. I totally misread 89 dujacs early on), but the amount of fun is proportional to terroir, so you could still argue there is terroir even if you can't sense it in the way that fb is describing.

The stuff we are complaining about is very different and there is nothing sexy about it. It's blocky, and will most likely be ready to drink when the complexity tends towards the generic.
 
I regret to write that my palate isn't acute enough to differentiate between fixin and gevrey on a consistent basis, and hence terroir expressiveness on a smaller scale is not the first thing I (can) look for in a wine. I agree that Lafarge is more Lafarge than anything else, but I struggle to think of a single house I love for which that is not the case. DRC? Check. Pousse d'Or? Check. De Montille? Double check and then some. La Mission? Hell yes. Egon Mller? Uh huh. Daniel Vollenweider? Yep. Joly? Krug? Kanonkop? Hidalgo?

When I think of the most fervent advocates of terroir (qua terroir) I think of Penuel or the Ayat, and the refractive effect of even the most transparent (in motive and ability) of human messengers. Or to put it another way, I am sceptical of Biblical literalists and extreme terroirists for the same reason.

But maybe I've misread and we are supposed to be discussing something else altogether, such as how the parlour trick of Donnhoff blind-tasting is simpler if you have the Dellchen, Kirschheck and Felsenberg from the same classic vintage (e.g. '02) rather than something fatter (e.g. '09).
 
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.
...fb.
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Hell yeah.

Best, John
 
originally posted by fatboy:
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.
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Truchot.

Barthod.

Mugneret.

And the hit-rate for F. Esmonin is not statistically different from 0.
 
This is really most enjoyable. While I don't agree with most of the detail in Fatboy's(I am also fat, but regrettably no longer a boy) Burgundian ruminations they are indeed profoundly Burgundian in temperament. The trouble of course with Roumier is that unless you catch them when completely new you generally have to wait thirty years even in a weak vintage to see what all the fuss is about, which is why the wines are so delightfully unsuitable for their current financial canonisation.
Terroir is not really about one's ability to divine it without sight of a label though I'm always surprised that when indulging in this generally egotistic and foolish though fun pastime(blind tasting) people always start by guessing origins when a few moment's thought would with so much less effort identify producers. Terroir is an important idea in itself and doesn't admit the notions of truth, falsity and indeed definitions-rather it should just be allowed to be-so transparency is a profound and valuable notion as well as being generally just a notion, which doesn't make it less interesting but more a matter of opinion or general feel. If you see what I mean. Our notions of terroir are mostly I think derived from the styles of the leading producers in the particular appellations in question, so if your main source for Ruchottes, for example, is Esmonin then you will think his Ruchottes the most transparent-it is literally transparent, for good or ill, because the word very well describes the texture of his wines which for many tastes are overly slender but have the great advantage of not requiring the thirty years which nowadays so often seems as though it's going to be necessary for true expressivity. And I hadn't until recently realised that Jacques Seysses' dictum that with time terroir transcends winemaking is literally true. Which is a rather dumbfounding truth, in truth.
The Esmonin Estournelles in 2000 and 2001 are really very well worth seeking out, something a little bit unique. Paradox is the key to Burgundy.
 
it's cool to disagree with details. but it's best to be detailed as you do it, otherwise it risks sounding wooly. not least because, fwiw, i largely agree with what you say (up to the point where you cite seysses on terroir, anyway).

in that vein -- the bonnefond/roumier ruchottes barely resembles gevrey in most vintages. young or old. compare it to rousseau, or mugneret, and all becomes clear. in my experience, old mugnerets have tended to be the best wines i've had from the vineyard. but georges had a very definite style, as does rousseau. taste enough of them, and you begin to get an idea of what is in the vineyard versus the cellar. (this echoes a point .sahsa makes above -- you have to learn the discriminations. it takes time, and a certain amount of dedication to the repetition of themes. which isn't for everyone, yixin; i am a notoriously monomaniacal drinker.)

what i liked about esmonin was that his ruchottes, though usually "not as a good a wine" as, say, mugneret, expressed the common elements you see in a range of wines from some gc gevrey vineyards extremely well. which is also to say, i guess, that to really understand what i like about f esmonin, you have to really know a lot of other wines well too. and it's here that the problem with everyone fixing on a single model of what makes for "the best" wines kicks in: it can all start to get very russ meyer very fast. sometimes one might want the nuance of the vineyard in a slimmed down package, and f esmonin offered that package. i liked exactly what other people missed. and i knew i could get what they were missing elsewhere. the converse is no longer true. i hope this conveys some sense of just why i regret the "improvements" chez f esmonin.

or, to put it another way, and take a polarizing example, consider roty. the house style there is so distinct that unless you know the terroir, you will probably miss it. but if you know the terroirs, then through the style, roty's wines are very expressive of them. jayer was similar (although i care less for the terroir in vosne than i do in gevrey). this is the reason why i buy and drink shit-loads of roty (and jayer), and i'd argue it is what it is about both roty and jayer that explains why they often made wines that are great -- but if you base your ideas of terroir on either, you are totally and utterly missing the point (albeit that you will end up on the same page as seysses).

fb.

ps. i agree about the 00 and 01 esmonin estournelles, btw. it was a reliably interesting wine under the old regime. these are the last expressions of that old style, and i like them a lot (a lot of very terroirful 00s were made in gevrey, which is not what the bluffers will tell you).
 
Actually I don't disagree about many details except your characterisation of the 99 vintage which seems to me much more precise than 85 most particularly in the Cote De Beaune. I haven't tasted recent vintages at Esmonin but I was under the impression that Nawrocki's tenure was very short indeed and that things had largely returned to being as they were. There's no doubt that very often'improvements' at Burgundy domaines amount really to a kind of deindividualisation which is to be regretted, and that the best improvements tend to involve going back to the old ways of less oak and a lighter hand-it strikes me that not all of Jayer's influence has been positive here.
Incidentally I remember a Bourgogne Rouge 99 of Esmonin that was probably the worst and most over-produced example of that appellation I have ever tried to consume. Agreed, 00 in Gevrey has been a monstrous and continuing surprise.
 
I don't mind the notion that one has to wait 30 years for a bottle of roumier to show something; howere, there is an underlying assumption (since we were discussion 99s) that there has been a sufficient continuity of style in the past three decades when compared to the wines made in 1980 and earlier, which is debatable.
 
drinking bourgogne from f esmonin reveals an obsessiveness i can only admire. i'd have been curious to taste it -- in my experience, the really shitty f esmonins were the product of too little effort rather than too much: lots of overcropping (that i think helped the terroir expression), and haphazard elevage stripping freshness from the wines (the old random colheita approach is in contrast again to the other esmonins, where there is clearly a vision and a plan behind the carpentry) -- i wonder if it was bought in.

as for 99 vs 85 (and roumier), i'm with the dotster -- the difference is more tannin in 99, and there was much less of the amazing fruit purity in the young 99s vs the young 85s. it adds up to a certain blockiness (which is maybe why people think it is more precise in the cote-de-beaune -- to really love the wines made south of pernand, you have to have a thing for blocky imprecision anyway).

fb

ps. to go back to 00 gevreys -- as an antidote to all this talk of mullets -- if you happen across the villages vv from heresztyn, guzzle it up.
 
originally posted by fatboy:

in that vein -- the bonnefond/roumier ruchottes barely resembles gevrey in most vintages. young or old. compare it to rousseau, or mugneret, and all becomes clear. in my experience, old mugnerets have tended to be the best wines i've had from the vineyard. but georges had a very definite style, as does rousseau. taste enough of them, and you begin to get an idea of what is in the vineyard versus the cellar.
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I went to the coolest tasting three years ago (no pictures) to which the three said producers brought their ruchottes. [ For n00bs' enjoyment, the three source from the same parcel, divided up in the 70s ]. As a side note, the tasting was kind of amusing since two of the producers tried to show up with the same vintages, while the third did anything but. I loved most of the wines, but his fatness does have a very good point here, or at least one worth pondering. And I did gain an enormous amount of respect for rousseau's version, particularly since I was still very guilty of concentrating my efforts on his Big Three at the time. It does mature notably quicker than the other two, but may still drink for a very long time, from what I could tell. And it's gevrey alright, to the original point.
 
The Thomas-Bassot Clos des Ruchottes 1970 was an improbably great wine a couple of years ago.Rousseau, Mugneret and F. Esmonin all make wines on the lighter side of the pretty heavy Roumier-and it seems to me that Roumier at least from the 90s is if anything going to need longer than the old bottles though I gather there have been some changes recently.
Talking of Herestyn 00 the Gevrey Perrieres from there has to rank as one of the woodiest travesties of Burgundy I've ever drunk. It may come around, though, I've got some left and I've long ago abandoned being surprised when something truly disgusting ends up delicious with time.
I didn't drink 85s young; a decade ago I thought that they were all tiring and should be drunk up. Wrong, as usual.
 
I have to think about grouping Mugneret in the lighter category of ruchottes. Perhaps. I think the wines require quite a bit of cellar time amd have structure to spare, but that does not necessarily make them heavier. I'll pull a couple of corks and get back to you :-)

I did not expect 85s to go cyclical on me, but they did. They taste better now than they did five years ago, or at least firmer. But are they better than they were at the age of 10 ?
 
despite my hatred of tastings, i'd loved to have been at that one.

rousseau clearly thinks that ruchottes is inferior to c-s-j. and given the quality of his c-s-j, it's hard to dispute this. but i'd rather have mugneret's or rousseau's ruchottes to anyone else's c-s-j. go figure.

as for the heresztyn perrieres -- i've lost count of the number of times i've tasted through the wares of some burgundian and come away liking only the generics, or the generics and the villages... i put it down to the lesser wines not being worth putting the investment / effort into whatever fucked up the 1ers and gcs.

fb.

ps. wrong and burgundy are two sides of the same coin. it's why the current pricing is all out of whack. my suspicion / hope is that there will be a correction once the n00bs discover that they have been laying down a huge crop of zlotys for wines where understanding involves an awful lot of pouring down the sink...
 
the 85s have never tasted better than they did in the first couple of years... i suspect the 99s will have that much in common with them.

fb.
 
You are an exceedingly sensible man, fatboy. Though my 99s didn't taste very nice at all in their first couple of years. As with all these things it's a question of just what one opened when.
 
at a tasting a few years ago of the entire 1995 lineup from Roumier (save for the Musigny), the Ruchottes was noticeably different (and to my palate, the most enjoyable). According to my notes, the color was of a distinctively redder hue; the nose more high-toned and austere - yet expressive, if you get my point; on the palate, rockier and longer than even the Bonnes Mares.

After this tasting, I went on the prowl for this wine and splurged.

Of course, I have no idea whether Roumier's Ruchottes is expressive of its terroir - but I can tell you it was very different from his wines from Chambolle and Morey. It seemed very gevrey to me - and I'm not afraid to admit that I love gevreys.

btw, I agree with the characterization of CdB wines as demonstrating "blocky imprecision" - a dinner party at my home last year featuring 98 Mugnier Fuees, Roumier Cras, and Lafon Santenots evinced just that.
 
Y'all just showin' off your knowledge. I do think 'overcropping' with the right terroir works marvels, because the imprint of viticultural practice (as signalled by low yields) is correspondingly weaker. Hard to argue with Prum.
 
Maureen, is it not harsh that Lafon's Santenots should be regarded as exemplifying the 'blocky imprecision' referred to? I'm not totally sure that this characterisation has not been arrived at simply by drinking the wrong wines, and Lafon's Santenots at less than 20 years old is one of them.
 
originally posted by Tom Blach:
Maureen, is it not harsh that Lafon's Santenots should be regarded as exemplifying the 'blocky imprecision' referred to? I'm not totally sure that this characterisation has not been arrived at simply by drinking the wrong wines, and Lafon's Santenots at less than 20 years old is one of them.
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I had a bottle of the '88 Lafon Santenots at 20 years of age and, while it was a pleasant enough wine, it didn't speak much of its place to me. It may very well have still been too young, though, and I wouldn't go so far as to call it blocky.

Mark Lipton
 
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