What does smart wine, personal taste, and the true value of a wine mean to you? These are the questions that, in my view, every genuinely advanced wine drinker should be asking. The way you answer them depends entirely on what is already in your head. The answers come only with years of building your own experience, hundreds of bottles opened, and an endless amount of information studied and absorbed.
In Burgundy, you cannot learn everything, taste everything, or grasp everything. One lifetime and any budget are not enough. But there is one thing I have personally understood 100%. The greatness of a wine lies not in fashion, but in people and in the history of their estates. Once you truly grasp this, value, taste, and “smart” all come to you naturally. You can chase trends as much as you like, but the Bolshoi Theatre is called “Great” precisely because it never needs to prove its greatness to anyone; others look up to it and will always continue to do so.
Lyon is a great city, in some ways as eternal as Rome, and many times more deeply French and soulful than Paris. And here, finding smart wine is even easier than anywhere else.
On this particular evening, there were these two fantastic wines. Lavaux St Jacques 2023 from Éric Rousseau hardly yields anything to its illustrious neighbor Clos St Jacques, showing the same monumental structure and depth – Burgundy at its finest. And no less outstanding, Clos de la Maréchale 2018 from Jacques-Frédéric Mugnier, the largest monopole vineyard in the Côte d’Or, which he crafts magnificently; the 2018 is in perfect form right now and offers far more profound emotion than most of the latest fashionable Germans, Chinese, and Japanese.
Text and Photo: Greg Somm
