Mugneret Gibourg

Mugneret Gibourg is probably the best known and most highly sought-after estate that we deal with - most of the others are upandcomers or leftofcentres, which is often the way it seems to work with our producers. Anyway, their cellar is less cellar, more nuclear shelter. You go into the house, through a big door, downstairs, through a barrel cellar, through another cellar that seems to be used for bottling, through a little tunnel that goes under the road (Guinness have one of those in St. James' Gate as well, I dimly remember from my few months there) and then into a big cellar where we taste.

We had been having a conversation over lunch about the veracity or not of different styles in different villages (Vosne silky v Gevrey meaty and so on) or whether the style a producer brings overrides the village style. If you are a terroir fan and look in detail at the geological composition of the soil, you will see that there are different types of soil in each village and you could easily get the same type of soil in part of Gevrey and part of, say, Morey St. Denis.

Anyway, Mugneret is a great example of a producer having a style. From beginning to end, I think there is a Migneret "style" and what a style it is.....

We tasted:

Bourgogne 07 - usually best Bourgogne around ; this one good as ever - silky, pure Pinot fruit, decent structure, delicious
Vosne Romanee - amazing nose, great purity of fruit, very sexy
Nuits St. Georges 1er Cru Les Chaignots - fine, concentrated, balanced, elegant, long
Chambolle Musigny 1er Cru Les Feusselots - mineral style
Echezeaux - meaty, structured, tannic, masculine
Gevrey Chambertin 1er Cru (young vines Ruchottes) - excellent fruit, nice concentration
Ruchottes chambertin - very polished, very mineral, very long
Clos de Vougeot - mineral, amazing concentration, excellent

I know my notes don't really do these wines justice, but they were and always are bloody amazing. From Bourgogne up, this producer never fails to impress.