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Clos de Vougeot 2013s compared blind

“I have a couple of reservations about London wine brokers Fine and Rare Wines. Firstly, although they tend to dominate wine-searcher.com’s listings, they hold no stock so are operating on a very different basis from their peers. You typically have to wait a month or two before taking delivery of wine (or whisky nowadays) you order from them. And secondly they saw fit to let Joss Fowler go recently. My view of this is coloured by the fact that I admire Joss as a writer so much that I was thrilled when he agreed to write for us (see Correlating the scores and the scorers for instance) but I must admit I have no idea what sort of salesman he is. And in the cut-throat world of fine-wine broking and trading it is presumably selling that counts.

“But in one respect I admire F+RW tremendously (please don’t quote just the last four words, F+RW) because, at the suggestion of Simon Davies, who used to work for them and now works for A&B Vintners,  they have organised a series of blind tastings of one vintage of Clos de Vougeots from as many producers as possible. This is a great idea because blind comparisons of burgundies are relatively rare, and because of course Clos de Vougeot is the vineyard with the greatest number of different producers in Burgundy.

“Not that F+RW manage to snag samples from all of the 40-plus growers who own vines in the appellation. Domaine d’Eugénie didn’t even reply to their request, for example. But at last week’s showing of 33 2013s from this famous walled vineyard, the great majority of the growers were represented, and were supplemented by some producers of Clos de Vougeot who must buy in fruit. One of my two favourite wines, for example, from Olivier Bernstein, must have been made from fruit that this relatively recent burgundy producer sources …

Olivier Bernstein, Grand Cru 2013 Clos de Vougeot
“Tasted blind … Deep crimson. Admirable freshness on the nose. Really racy style with massive energy apparent in the wine. Lightly sandpapery tannins. Really very fine. Edgy. Whole bunchy!”

Jancis Robinson, November 2, 2015
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Clos de Vougeot 2013s compared blind