Gilman used to call me Mr. White burgundy, i’m out for buying any of those forward or back filling.
i love white wine. i own lots of the right sancerre and dry rieslings, and god knows enough GC white burg for my life if i didn’t have to open 3 to get one good one, when the sun moon stars and tides are right.
So, where is the great chardonnay/ white wines.?
i spent the summer drinking really good cold muscadet, and bubblies BUT…, they are not 12 year old Niellon Vergers.,
SO for the many that know me and my palate, let me know what you think is worth trying and buying.
** i have said to many that champagne is the new white burgundy and i have drunk cellared and own lots of chablis with the same 3 for one result,…ughhhhhhhhhh
You can probably find some 2008 Hermann J. Wiemer Riesling from the Finger Lakes. The Wiemer Dry, Semi-Dry, and Late Harvest are world-class, can be laid down, and represent some of the sternest value out there.
Beyond that, I’ve been stuck in Galician wines, but with summer waning, that trend will soon wane with it.
If you want 12year old Neillon, there’s only one place to get it. IF you want really good whites, there are many. Alzinger Riesling is amazing good, minerally stuff. Some things from Cali might be close (Hanzell, Stony Hill), but I think the problem with going to Cali or any other place for Chardonnay is this - it’s not Burgundy and you’ll always compare. I do. Had a 10 year old Kongsgaard a few weeks ago - nice wine. But it was Cali, not Burg. Nothing wrong with that, but you’re not looking for Cali Chardonnay, you want white Burg. More to the point, you want white burg from a top producer with some age. And nothing else in the world is that.
Chet, I don’t know your palate for sure, but I get a sense as to what you may like.
Robert-Denogent makes some riveting Pouilly-Fuisse (several different vineyards) priced such that one can justify drinking them young and frequently. Check Burghound’s notes as he nails them, as one might expect. Kermit Lynch imports these.
The Corsican Patrimonio blancs from Arena and Leccia have some nice flesh on them like good, aged white Burgundy, but they are rocky and mineral, with really nice supporting acids. Both made from the Vermentino grape. Kermit Lynch imports these two, as well.
Hi Chet, I drank the whites os Schiopetto early this summer. I tasted his Sauvignon, Pinot Grigio, and Friulano. All three were very nice. I was particularly impressed with the Pinot Grigio and the Sauvignon. These un-oaked wines were bright and fresh, and compelling enough that I bought some bottles and have been promised some more.
I agree with Roberto that NE Italy is the place to poke around, and I’d bet you’ll find Ribolla Gialla especially thrilling. I had a couple of '07s this past week that were riveting.
I’m not sure whether Chénin Blanc floats your boat, but if yes you can have your pick in Montlouis and Vouvray. Savenniéres and Jasnières can also be excellent, if a little more of an acquired taste. Best of all, those wines can age like the best white Bourgogne, don’t suffer from the p’ox and are dirt cheap compared to Côte de Beaune or even top class Chablis. If you are interested I’ll give you some tips on what to get.
On the white Burgundy front, I think you are now probably perfectly safe to buy and cellar Joseph Drouhin and Comtes Lafon whites from the 2004 vintage forward, and William Fevre and Arnaud Ente whites from the 2007 vintage, forward, as these estates have stopped using corks coated with silicone and rinsed in peroxide. Of course these practices have not been “proven” to play any role in premox, but I at least have much more confidence that these wines will behave in the cellar like all white Burgundies used to back in the good old days. Another white Burgundy option are the lovely Chablis bottlings from Bernard Defaix, who ages his wines in the cellar for extended periods of time in stainless steel tanks prior to bottling, so that his most recent releases that I tasted at the Les Grands Jours tastings in March were from the 2000 and 2001 vintages! His wines are very, very good, and if one assumes that corks play a role in premox, one has six to eight years out from the bottling (at age nine or ten) to drink the wines before they might have premox issues.
Outside of Burgundy, certainly the Sancerres from Francois Cotat and Edmund Vatan are good substitutes for long-term cellaring and hail from terroir that is based on the same outcropping of Kimmeridgian Limestone as is found in Chablis and Champagne. To date, I have had no issues with premox with either producer. They each need a good ten to fifteen years in the cellar to really blossom and get serious. Pascal Boulay in Chavignol is also making very good wines that seem every bit as likely to age well from these same soils, but I do not have the same depth of experience with his older wines as I do with Cotat and Vatan. One is still switching varietal here from chardonnay to sauvignon blanc, but at least the terroir is quite familiar to Chablis drinkers. With all of these producers I think the level of complexity here certainly matches top premier cru white Burgs at full maturity, though there probably really is no substitute for Chevalier-Montrachet and the like.
Still staying in the Loire, I like especially the recommendation for the wines of Vouvray and Montlouis mentioned by Mike- in particular, the wines from Francois Chidaine and Domaine Huet. Given your long-time passion for white Burgs, I would suggest that the Domaine Huet wines might fill the bill very well, which are more akin to white Burgs in terms of weight and palate authority. You’ll need wines from the vintages of the first half of the 1990s or from the 1980s (or earlier) to really start seeing them blossom, as they take a long time to reach their apogees, but fortunately the market often has good representation of older Domaine Huet wines still for sale. A wine like 1985 Huet “Le Mont” Demi-Sec would be a great addition to the cellar and is listed as currently available on Wine-Searcher. These wines tend to dry out in terms of perceptible sweetness with age (like German rieslings) and there tends to be very little perceptible residual sugar in the Demi-Secs by the time they reach age forty or so- which is usually less than half way through their life spans.
I know that you are already a fan of the Trimbach twin towers of Clos Ste. Hune and Cuvee Frederic Emile. Along the same lines, the dry wines of Klaus-Peter Keller in the Rheinhessen in particular should be right up your alley. Figure that they generally need at least a decade out from the vintage to blossom and can be as closed down and monolithic as any Clos Ste. Hune during their adolescence, but I think you will be very happy with the Keller style. Anyway, these are just a few options out there that you may find worthy of laying down for a while and seeing how they evolve (and with the Huets, you can buy in some older vintages right away and see if they can hit some of the same sweet spots as the wines from the good old days in white Burgundy lore).
A couple of Italians with a track record for aging: Pepe Trebbiano and Jermann Vintage Tunina. I suspect that the SVDs from NZ’s Kumeu River will age well, but I haven’t been able to hold on to any.
A thread on eBob some 5 or 6 years ago concerning the unexpected ability of Swiss Chasselas to age prompted me to bury a few bottles. I should check in on one sometime soon.
Good points have been made. If you want white Burgundy, buy white Burgundy (hell, if you want Chardonnay, buy white Burgundy). But if you want something equally complex, structured, terroir-driven and ageworthy, buy grower Champagne from the likes of Cédric Bouchard and David Léclapart, Loire Chenin Blanc from the likes of Huet and Chidaine or German Riesling from the likes of Keller and Emrich-Schönleber. To me, these are the three types of dry white that can rival white Burgundy in terms of greatness.
Austrian whites: Nigl Piri Privat, Hirtzberger Singerriedel, to name a couple . . . another white that has rocked me repeatedly is the 2001 Trimbach FE Cuvée 375. Oh, do try to score a b or two of Rhys Chardonnay! Good to hear from you, chet.
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mail his friends directly, rather than posting to the masses.
