This $60 Burgundy Competes With $1,000 Bottles

All right, kids, a lot of deliciousness here to unpack today. Are you with me? Are you focused? I'm focused. Dialed in. Where do we start? Let's start with the area. Okay, first we're in Burgundy. This is Burgundy today. We're doing Burgundy. You all know Burgundy's Pinot Noir, 100% for this bad boy. But the area within Burgundy is where we're going to talk first, and that's Marange. Marange. Not Orange. Marange. Have you heard of this area before? Many of you haven't. It's okay. It only became its own AOC in 1989. Actually, late 88. Now, this didn't make big news at the time because we didn't have the interwebs. Like, Al Gore wasn't born yet, I don't think. So we weren't in a situation where this information could be diffused to the public in a quick and rapid way. There might have been a one-paragraph article in the Wine Spectator back then, and you all weren't reading the Wine Spectator for the Marange articles. You were reading to see what Caymus got back in 1988. So, that being said, yes, it's one of the few scenarios where the French bureaucrats actually got their crap together and made an appellation out of a place that deserved to have its own appellation, which for years previously was just basically Bourgogne-Rouge and Bourgogne-Blanc. Now, this pissed off a lot of the negotiations because these guys, for years, were farming the hell out of Marange to kind of pump up the volume of their basic Bourgogne-Rouge and Bourgogne-Blanc bottlings. So they buy some shitty Pinot Noir from somewhere else, blend it with this kick-ass old vine stuff in Marange, and then have a great Bourgogne-Rouge. They did this forever. Well, that stopped, and Marange got to be its own thing. We actually started selling Marange in the early 90s here. Vincent Giraudin's bottlings from the Clos de Loire, that was our first introduction to Marange. So we've been on it for about 30 years, just three or four years after the appellation was established. But now Marange is like a thing, and it's because there's a lot of top growers in Marange, just like you see in, you know, Saint-Denis, just like you see in Saint-Aubin, and now Marange is a thing. And basically Marange is a thing because of these growers, all right? So today we're dealing with Domaine Bachelet Monod. This is Alexander and Marc Bachelet. They started their domain in 2005 with some family holdings, namely Bertrand Bachelet, I think it was, was the main chunk of the holdings. And they own really nice dirt, all the way from kick-ass Bourgogne Blanc, which they make just on the other side of the Pellini-Montrachet border, gorgeous, all the way up to Bathard-Montrachet. But they're located in Marange. Marange is the home base, and it's where a lot of their top wines come from. And they own an impressive seven-plus acres here in Marange La Foussiere, which is one of the top Premier Crews. It's a huge Premier Crew. It's a hundred acres, and they own seven acres of it. Nice chunk. Their parcels average 60-plus years old, so super old vines. And here's the deal with Marange. Here's what I love about it. Look at that color. This area, you're in the far south of Bourgogne now, right? We're on the right of the edge, before you get to the Côtes Chalonnais, right next door to Saint-Denis. And this area actually produced some pretty big wines. With climate change, the freshness here along the hillsides, we have decent elevations here, 300 meters, 400 meters, and it's giving these wines of intense color and richness and concentration. And I don't think the rest of the Bourgogne wine world was ready for these wines. I don't think they were ready for them in the context of climate change. People already knew that this was going to be a special place even before, because again, it got its own appellation in 88-89. But what's happened in the last 30 years, because the average temperatures have gone up so much, and they're harvesting two weeks earlier, is that it creates a scenario where, boom, this area went from nothing to something. Very special. The boys, the thing with the boys is they're pretty hands-off. So this is all native yeast fermented from those 60-plus-year-old vines, hand-picked, all aged in 228-liter barrels, very little of any new. And then what they do is they do the same thing with the red as they do with their whites. They'll put it in the cement tank for six months to harmonize and marry prior to gentle bottling. So they treat this wine with mad respect. I always love this wine. Blackfruits. More black cherry here. You can tell from the color. This is a little bigger, deeper, kind of denser, fleshier style of Burgundy. But aromatically, it's cool. There's a coolness to the nose. I love the restraint. This is big Pinot Noir, but also restrained. Super fine, really nice tannins. Silky, but bright. Just yum. I mean, yeah, there's a reason Neil Martin said, I strongly suspect these will represent some of the best values over the entire Cote d'Or, and if I were a millionaire, I would still buy them. Pretty hearty praise, right? And he's right. You know, in his most recent barrel tastings, or the 23 barrel tastings that he did, and these are tasted, by the way, just prior to bottling. He goes and tastes them like a year after the harvest. So these are like, there, they're in, right? He gave this an incredible barrel score of 92 to 94 points. And you go, you sit, I know you're looking at me going like, 92 to 90, well, that's not very much. Like, James Suckling gives $15 Malbecs 95. Well, consider the source. This is Neil Martin. He's a toughy. He's a chap-ass, right? He gave this wine 92 to 94 points from barrel, after a year in barrel, which, by the way, is the same score that was realized as, you ready? Complige Bel Air, Vaux-en-Romagne, Premier Carreau, Regnault, $3,000 a bottle. DRC Eschizo, $2,500 a bottle. Cecile Tremblay, Eschizo du Dessus, $1,700 a bottle. Rumié Charm, Chambartin, $1,200 a bottle. AFGRO Richebourg, Armand Rousseau, Mozzie Chambartin, Claude Dugas Charm, all those wines got the same score in 2023 from barrel as, boom. And this wine, $59.98. And it's Premier Carreau. I think this is a pretty, pretty attractive story. If you're not clicking, then I did a horrible disservice to this wine. This is great, great gear. Click and buy. Subscribe to our daily emails. Subscribe to our daily video offers on YouTube. This is amazing stuff. This is why you subscribe, because we're showing you wines like this. Now, could I be like a weenie and show you some Grand Cru Burgundy that's $900 and trying to shame you into buying it? No. This is our vibe. This is our mojo. This is who we are. Kudos to the Vachelet brothers, one of the most kick-ass bottles of red Burgundy under $100 we've tasted in the past year. Go and get yourself some.