2012 Bonnes Mares

The 2012 Bonnes-Mares Grand Cru has a wonderful bouquet with bright red and black fruit, superb mineralite and freshness. The palate is precise and focused with great harmony and depth, leading to a passionate, rounded, sensual finish with an abiding sense of symmetry that I hope will be translated once in bottle. It is always a pleasure to visit the indefatigable Mounir Saouma at his hideaway winery just off the Beaune periphique. He is a winemaker you can jest with, and he is often victim of my sardonic Essex humor (for example, when enthusing about obtaining one of five barrels of a premier cru, I dryly enquired whether the other four were sold off for distillation - I would not say that to Aubert de Villaine.) And I appreciate Mounir's wines. They used to taste a little too fat and almost over-powering in their youth, but I think he is fine-tuning his reductive winemaking style, achieving more freshness and vitality. I tasted his 2012 reds since the whites were still undergoing malolactic. Among the tidal wave of opinions, one that he emphasized was that to capture the quality of the vintage under cork, the wines should be bottled late, and not in spring when Burgundy will resound to the clinking of glass. Mounir also told me that he paid 50% more from wines in 2012 than in 2011, but that he intends to keep prices within 15% increase. Importers: Vintus LLC, Pleasantville, NY; tel. (914) 769-3000, Atherton Imports, Menlo Park, CA; tel. (650) 328-6639