1996 Beaune Teurons

The 1996 Beaune Teurons is a blockbuster. It is dark ruby-colored and offers a super-ripe, intense, and complex nose of black cherries, earth, leather, violets, and perfume. Prodigious quantities of sweet, ripe, juicy, and powerful black cherries captivate the palate in this thick (where's my knife and fork?), profound, and chewy wine. As the French would say "quelle mache!" Its fabulously long finish reveals loads of soft and round tannins drowned in copious quantities of fruit. Bravo! The score, on a range and in parentheses, indicates that the wine was tasted from barrel. How appropriate it is to follow one grande dame de Bourgogne's wines with another's! Mademoiselle Chopin, the estate's owner and manager, has fashioned (with her young and able assistant, Joel) a first rate line-up of wines from the hillside vineyards overlooking the town of Beaune. When I first met Mlle. Chopin my initial (and incorrect) impression of frailty was immediately squashed by her self-assured look, her rapid step, and her high level of energy. Young women in Burgundy owe a great deal to the efforts of this lady who has made superb Beaune's in the cold and damp cellars of her beautiful old home. There was a time when winemaking was considered a man's job (ignorants and a few old timers stuck in their ways still believe that a woman's presence in a cellar will "turn" their wines), yet Mlle. Chopin's track record over the years - in many vintages crafting the finest wines from Beaune's hillsides - has proved that a woman's place can be the cellar. Due to her severe pruning and green harvesting, Mlle. Chopin's vineyards yielded between 30 and 35 hectoliters/hectare, admirable figures in any vintage, they are superb in this one. She laughed and said, "after tasting the wines I wished I had not dropped as much fruit in green harvesting, I think I could have done just as well and made more." My impression, having tasted hundreds upon hundreds of 1996s, I think I could have done just as well and made more."