2013 Bienvenues Batard Montrachet

Bright yellow. Tangy orange zest and a whiff of spearmint on the inviting nose. At once silky and bright, with noteworthy precision to its orange zest and peach flavors. Solid, subtly saline wine with a slowly building, palate-coating finish.

The 2013 Bienvenue-Bâtard-Montrachet Grand Cru is extremely backward on the nose despite rigorous coaxing. The palate is balanced with a saline entry, a chalky texture, but needing just a little more weight to develop on the finish. Give this a couple of years in bottle - at the moment it feels a little dwarfed by Boillot's other '13 white Grand Crus.||Although I have tasted Henri Boillot’s wines for many years, usually at one of their London agent’s offices, I have never actually visited the winery itself, located on the “other” side of the RN74 in an estate that includes the Damy cooperage. This impressive facility affords Henri far more space then if he were couched in some medieval maison in one of the villages, which is mandatory when you have such an all-embracing portfolio of wines. Of course, he is a scion of the Boillot family who established themselves in the region in 1885. Henri represents the fifth winemaking generation and on this visit he was accompanied by the sixth in the form of his son Guillaume, who has graduated from his viticulture studies. The portfolio of what you might call this “mini-négoce” is impressive, studded with a number of Grand Crus, spanning red and white. In 2013, he told me that he picked September 27 until October 5, yields incredibly low, hovering between 12 and 16 hectoliters per hectare. Henri seemed enraptured by the 2013s, describing them as having a “big definition of terroir.” That is true, though as usual his use of new oak means that in their youth, that tends to be slightly obscured by the wood and they require time to assimilate that oak. As Henri was keen to stress, he uses mainly 350-liter barrels that lessen their impact. Something to bear in mind when you see the percentages. eRobertParker.com.December, 2014

There is enough reduction to push the honeysuckle and citrus aromas to the background and I would firmly advise decanting this first. The highly energetic and tension-filled medium-bodied flavors possess very fine mid-palate concentration along with excellent levels of dry extract that both impart a seductive mouth feel as well as buffer the firm acid spine on the beautifully complex and impressively persistent finale. This is drop dead gorgeous and should generously repay up to a decade of cellaring. Jun 2015, www.burghound.com, Drink: 2021+