Red Burgundy
by Chris Santini
2021 Côte de Nuits-Villages
France | Burgundy
While 2021 was a year most vignerons would like to forget (a devastating April frost, a cold, wet summer spent warding disease away from grapes, harvesting amid ongoing Covid restrictions—and I could go on), there is a silver lining. The vintage is a throwback to Burgundy I remember from twenty years ago, with its bright fruit, crisp acid, and approachable fun. Sure, there’s something to be said for the ripeness and depth of the warmer years, but I swear I haven’t tasted anything with this kind of simple pleasure and cool-climate charm since the 2004 vintage. I say crack a bottle and enjoy it now; it’s open and ready. Otherwise, you may need to wait another twenty years to get such an opportunity again.
In a remarkable act of virtue and solidarity, Nuits-Saint-Georges declined to put forward any of their vineyards for consideration of grand cru status when the classification was made in 1936. The idea was to step aside and let the smaller, more struggling villages of Chambolle, Morey, and Gevrey take advantage of the new classification to get on the map, so to speak. If Nuits had chosen a more self-centered approach,
Les Pruliers—with its mineral-rich, wind-swept, mid-slope characteristics—would have been a shoo-in for the top tier. Today, Boillot’s Les Pruliers, eked out of vines now well over one hundred years old, would most certainly be considered one of the grandest of those grands crus. With its floral intensity and dense yet delicate layers of dark fruit, grand cru or not, this is Boillot at his best.