Exploring Montrachet’s Secrets in Burgundy Wines

For the Love of Montrachet overview

MAIN PHOTOGRAPHS MARTIN MORRELL | POLAROIDS GUY WOODWARD

Important details from the source

• Drawn back to Burgundy by the newly opened COMO Le Montrachet hotel and restaurant, leading wine writer Guy Woodward returns to an old French love affair: the exclusive vineyards and ancient cellars behind the world’s greatest whites.
• MAIN PHOTOGRAPHS MARTIN MORRELL | POLAROIDS GUY WOODWARD.
• There are four of us squeezing through the confines of Domaine Blain-Gagnard’s spartan cellar in the sleepy Burgundian village of Chassagne-Montrachet.
• Owner Jean-Marc Blain is extracting various 2022 wines from the oak barrels in which they are maturing before being bottled early next year.
• We taste a Chassagne-Montrachet, followed by a Puligny-Montrachet, taken from one of a dozen or so barrels of each of these white Burgundy staples.
• Then Blain leads us to a single barrel in the corner of a sepulchral side chamber, the name ‘Le Montrachet’ scrawled across it in chalk.
• It is the only vessel among the scores surrounding us to carry the venerated name, the wine harvested from Blain-Gagnard’s small patch of this vaunted vineyard, which extends to a mere 0.08 of a hectare.
• Not yet fully integrated with the oak, it nevertheless carries a rich, long seam of nutty, spicy creaminess that is hard to equate with the reputation of its source material, that supposedly most banal of grape varieties, chardonnay.
• Except this isn’t, of course, any old chardonnay.
• As the renowned wine critic William Kelley says, 'There is chardonnay, and then there is white Burgundy.' In much the same way, there is white Burgundy, and then there is Montrachet.

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