Mark Ye was in town - brought this bottle for us to enjoy with Jimmy Sugi’s beautiful Bento Boxes (https://www.instagram.com/jimmysugi/). Wine was a delight - as was the food
1990 Marcel Lapierre Morgon- France, Burgundy, Beaujolais, Morgon (5/7/2021)
Stood up the bottle for a couple of months as I had kept intending to open it, just never got around to it. Decanted for sediment and poured back into the bottle before dinner.
The wine poured a beautiful clear ruby red. The nose was an intoxicating aroma of freshly picked earthy wild strawberries - covered in soil but at the peak of their ripeness. The wine needed about a hour of air to really open up on the palate, a balanced and elegant pure strawberry fruit glides effortlessly on the wine with cool aged acidity elongating the savory sous bois notes that developed with air. The wine has aged wonderfully.
Awesome note, I had a bottle of the 96 a year and a half ago and it was equally stunning. Just so hard to find these days, people either aren’t aging their Bojos, or aren’t selling them…
Wow. Great story. Mark— did you buy it recently or have you been holding it for a long time? Curious about provenance. I have some old wines but no old bojo. I think 2016 is my oldest.
Definitely. No point in it, unless you’ve got more than you can drink, or went too deep on a shorter lived vintage (like I kind of did on the 2002s, but they’re all drunk now).
But I don’t have anything as old as 90 – my oldest is a 1996.
I had one of my stash of 09s recently and it was really nice. Seems like it should be good for a long time, but I don’t have any firsthand experience of it.
Have a few Lapierre 2014, have popped two bottles with 6 month in between (most recent 2 month ago) and they were really weird. Good nose with red fruits and berries, oranges and stone fruits. However in the mouth no fruits at all, like really nothing. Still the fine grained Morgon tannins there (quite velvety already). Hoping it’s just a phase!(?) Previous bottles about 2 years ago were good. Hope they in the end turn out something like the 1990 here.
Thanks for the notes. Momofuku had a bunch of ‘90s bojo from foillard, lapierre and metras a few years ago and the prices were reasonable. I drank a bunch and found the wines to be underwhelming. They’d lost their youthful exuberance, but nothing particularly interesting had developed and they just seemed sort of flat across the board to me. On the other hand, I had great experiences with 1999/2000 Descombes at Aska.
I can only wish I’d started buying Desvignes that long ago. Pretty sure my oldest is 2005. Which probably won’t be ready until long after my 2007s are gone.
I feel it’s hard to know whether growers making wine in that semicarbonic method like foillard, lapierre and metras have the structure to age. But then Charlie has a great bottle of 1990. I also wonder how much relatively lax control of the temperature in the supply chain dramatically affected that ability to age for those of us buying in the US. Hard to know all the factors.
(It’s academic in my cellar because all of my older models are Coudert or Desvignes.)
+1. The best bojo’s I’ve ever had were a few '78 Domaine de la Presle Fleurie bottles I worked through around 7 years ago. I took one to an aged reds tasting with my tasting group and it slayed all comers. I pinged Jeremy Holmes looking to buy the rest of his stock and was able to get one more bottle out of him IIRC. Every one of them was hauntingly good and well worth the ~$70-$80 AUD price point.