Montauk Club Wine Class Learns Burgundy Is Not Just a Color

At our December 18, 2008 class we explored different rankings of white and red burgundies. Wines in Burgundy are actually ranked according to the quality and prestige of the neighborhood in which the wine is produced. So in our blind taste test to determine whether we could distinguish this quality we compared a 2006 Jean Marc Brocard Chablis Montmains Premier Cru (13% alcohol) with a 2005 St. Jacques Rully Premier Cru Marissou (13.5% alcohol) and a 2006 Louis Latour Pinot Noir (13% alcohol) with a 2004 Joseph Drouhin Beaune Premier Cru (13% alcohol). Well, we easily distinguished the two whites from the two reds, and we picked out the higher quality white, but the reds stumped most of us. Here’s what we thought about each.

Our first white seemed to have slightly more legs and a more golden color compared to the second. The smell appeared more complex with grassy and more toasty aromas. We found the wine to be bolder and rounder with flavors of green, baked apples showing through. The taste was also oakier while at the same time being sharp and tart. Some thought it had more alcohol.

In comparison our second white was paler in color and had a brighter, fresher and decidedly fragrant floral small, as one person put it “like electricity after it rains.” The taste was sweeter than the first wine, although it seemed blander and softer and at times somewhat chalky. Most of us correctly identified the first wine as the St. Jacques Rully Premier Cru Marissou and the second as the Jean Marc Brocard Chablis Montmains Premier Cru, being of a slightly lower quality. And a majority of us favored the higher quality St. Jacques Rully.

When we turned to the two pinot noirs we found the first to have more going on. It was lighter, brighter and sharper. We detected more oak or smoke and some cinnamon in the flavor. The mouth feel was rougher and more granular, and as time passed the color changed, becoming tawnier. Perhaps it was the rougher mouth feel that led most of us to misidentify this as the lower ranked Louis Latour Pinot Noir, when what we were actually tasting was greater tannins in the Joseph Drouhin Beaune Premier Cru.

Our second red, what turned out to be the Louis Latour, had a slightly darker color, and its legs were slower to develop and drip. Perhaps we should have known from the cherry pie flavor that this was a less sophisticated wine. Although to some it had a deeper, richer and spicier flavor, some thought it had a calmer taste. We thought it held up better on its own, and there were some of us who thought this wine was more tannic and complex. So as you see, we were all over t he lot on this one, which is why it had us fooled. Even though this was the lower ranked wine, all but one of us preferred it to the premier cru. Just goes to show you we need MORE PRACTICE!!

But that won’t stop us from traveling on, this time to the Rhone Valley where we will explore a cheap, but good Cotes du Rhone, a more classic Chateauneuf-du-Pape and a Muscat Beaume-de-Venise. If we can’t tell the desert wine from the other two, well we’ll just have to KEEP PRACTICING.