£95 a dozen in bond.
A very brief wine of the week today; I have to go off and taste more delicious 2010 burgundies any minute. I have not dared count quite how many wines I have tasted so far but am confident that you will have many more than 1,000 reviews to help you sense of this attractive vintage. (I see that even at the time of writing there are already 982 Burgundy 2010 tasting notes in our four alphabetically listed tasting articles you can access here.)
This is a lovely vintage with many an attractive white as well as red – and by no means all of the good wines are expensive. One of the joys of Burgundy is discovering new producers. This is the very first vintage of Chanterives, a 'negociant-vinificateur' as one half of the team behind it, Tomoko Kuriyama, told me sternly.
She trained at Paul Fürst, Pinot master, and after Geisenheim and experience at some top addresses she was taken on as estate manager at Friedrich Altenkirch in the Rheingau. Her wines there garnered praise from the likes of Stuart Pigott and Gault Millau as well as doing well in major international wine competitions.
He is Guillaume Bott who has made wine with Gerard Boudot at Étienne Sauzet and then (and now) at Domaine Simon Bize where he has earned admiration for his excellent work on upgrading the white wines. During harvest he continues at Bize while Tomoko is in daily charge of Chanterives operations.
You can see their hands intertwined on the label shown here. They are currently building their own cuverie in Savigny. I assumed this first vintage was made chez Bize but in fact they rented a cellar in Pommard. (Talking of Savigny, I was actually quite impressed by a Gevrey made by Henri de Villamont recently!)
Flint Wines was showing four of their five wines on Tuesday and they certainly were impressive, whites as well as reds. The Winery of London W9 is currently offering their Meursault 2010, which I have not tasted, here. For value I was particularly taken by the Chanterives 2010 Bourgogne Rouge made, very gently, from fruit grown on the lower reaches of Pommard and the wine has some of the characteristic flavour of that village.
My tasting note: 'Cherry red. Clean, fresh and earthy on the nose. One of those rare wines where "earthy" is not a euphemism for funky; it really does smell of freshly turned earth. Intense cherry fruit too. Lovely pure, simple Burgundian Pinot. VGV 16 Drink 2012-14'
Flint Wines are offering this at £95 a dozen bottles in bond although, needless to say, they have not managed to add this new producer to their website at the time of tasting.
This is clearly a producer to watch. Buy now while stocks and reasonable prices last.