Gevrey-Chambertin

Don’t call it Burgundy: How to find great wines for less from France’s Bourgogne region

Way back in the 1990s, when I began visiting “Burgundy,” as it was then commonly called, in France, it was not so easy to navigate the region’s many wine producers, villages and restaurants. There was little readily available information on the internet. English was rarely spoken and arranging tastings at the many small, family-owned domaines […]

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A Secret to Quality and Value? Top Notch Bourgogne-Passetoutgrains!

Within the dazzling diversity of Bourgogne red wines, discovering quality and value doesn’t have to be an insurmountable challenge. Easy-drinking gems are readily available at terrific prices. You just have to do a little digging with an open mind and palate. Consider, for example, high quality Bourgogne-Passetoutgrain red wines. GENERIC BOURGOGNE-PASSETOUTGRAINS Bourgogne-Passetoutgrains (pronounced “Boor–gawn–Pass–too–gran”) typically

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Cellar Tasting: 2014 Domaine Sylvie Esmonin, Côte de Nuits-Villages

In Burgundy, truly accomplished winegrowers lavish meticulous care on all their wines from top to bottom. As Clive Coates, M.W. advised in “The Wines of Burgundy” (University of California Press, 2008), tasting a grower’s lesser wines in difficult vintages delivers more reliable information than tasting only their top wines from fine years. Consider, for instance,

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