2008 Jean-Marc Burgaud Morgon Côte du Py Reserve

Smoked meat, marine minerality, and Szechuan pepper inflect the ripe but tart black fruits of Burgaud’s 2008 Morgon Cote de Py Reserve, a juicy, vibrant bottling exhibiting an invigorating graininess rather than anything remotely resembling the remarkable polish of its 2009 counterpart. That said, this is a lovely wine that will be especially interesting to compare over the next 2-3 years with Burgaud’s no less distinguished “regular” Cote de Py bottling. If there were any doubt that Jean-Marc Burgaud’s talents match his considerable ambitions, his 2009s should put them to rest, as few if any finer collections of Beaujolais are likely to have been rendered in this or any other vintage. “They tasted good on the vine, good in the fermenter, good before malo, good after malo, and, so far, good in the bottle. Good balance, fine acidity, perfect maturity, zero grams of unfermented sugar, and alcohol from 13% to 13.5% – excellent but not excessive,” is the way Burgaud laughingly litanizes his results, but the wines are far more colorful – indeed, exciting – than that summary suggests. Given their quality and distinctiveness, one has to forgive Burgaud his proliferation of cuvees – indeed, anybody lucky enough to latch onto a share of his limited bottlings from this vintage will want to profusely thank him! Burgaud elected to give his early bottlings a light filtration – and was contemplating the same approach for his (“regular”) Cote de Py – because he said he wanted to preserve their vivid fruit, whereas they would have had to stay in barrel through summer to clarify sufficiently on their own. (If there were any ill-effects of that filtration on his early bottlings, I clearly couldn’t discern them.) Except for his three rarest cuvees – aged entirely in demi-muids or barriques – elevage of each Burgaud wine is spread between tank and demi-muids. A Thomas Calder Selection (various importers), Paris; fax 011-33-1-46-45-15-29; also imported by Ideal Wine and Spirits, Medford, MA; tel. (781) 395-3300