Springtime Bottles

This week at Bar Boulud, our sommelier team goes deep into the cellar and comes back with a few of our absolute favorites.

As we go about our work in the cellar, we often have our eye on certain bottles of wine, pining over opening this, or fawning over a certain vintage of that, and with springtime here, we are finally ready to pull the corks on these big bottles.

On Monday, we will open Bénédicte et Stéphane Tissot’s ‘Patchwork’ Chardonnay from Arbois in the Jura. For some information on this special bottle of wine, we reached out to beloved natural wine importer Camille Rivière for her thoughts—

“It’s a blend of selection massale chardonnay farmed biodynamically in Arbois by Stéphane Tissot. Younger vines coming from clay soils (Lias and Trias) bring a spicy minerality and vines planted on limestone soil (Bajocien) will bring more tension and lemony notes. This wine gives you a snapshot of the different soils one can find in the Jura, hence it is a Patchwork, along with the style of reductive vinification of Stéphane Tissot. The wine was aged for one year in a barrel prior to being bottled. April 24, 2017 saw a very bad frost (as it did two weekends ago in the Jura) and the result is a concentrated 17.5 hectoliter/hectare wine. Santé!”

On Tuesday evening, we will open our final magnum of Gérard Duplessis, Chablis 1er Cru ‘Vaillons’ 2013, one of the great traditionalist cellars of Chablis, and a very special vineyard at that. With the recent swath of spring frosts in Chablis, this wine has been increasingly difficult to find as yields have been painfully low, and we are really grateful to open and share this with our guests on Tuesday. Wednesday, we will stay with Burgundy, and open Hubert Lamy’s Saint-Aubin 1er Cru ‘En Remilly’ 2016. Olivier Lamy is considered to be one of the greatest farmers in Burgundy, with a deft hand in the vineyard and knack for successfully utilizing organic practices, and En Remilly is a great premier cru vineyard with a compelling exposition and a famous neighbor, it is adjacent to Montrachet.

Thursday, we will venture to Crete, and open Giannis Economou’s Thrapsathiri-Vilana’ 2009, a blend of two little known indigenous grapes. Two years ago we did a dinner at Daniel with our Wine Director Daniel Johnnes, and New York Times Wine Critic Eric Asimov lauded this particular wine in this particular vintage with very kind words. You can read that compelling article here, and you can taste what all the buzz is about this Thursday at Bar Boulud.

 

One of the greats, Giannis Economou from the Greek Island of Crete – Photo Credit: Alex Alan

We will close down the week with a beautiful Pinot Noir from Athénaïs de Béru, her 2012 Côtes d’Auxerre, followed by two beauties from the Northern Rhône on Saturday and Sunday.

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