Saint-Romain Blanc Combe Bazin, Dom Chassorney

2007 Saint-Romain Blanc, Combe Bazin, Domaine de Chassorney
Fred Cossard, from Domaine de Chassorney, makes small quantities of exquisitely natural wines most of which seem to gravitate to Japan. Sayonara, delicious Burgundies! His organically farmed vineyards are scattered around the very pretty village of Saint Romain, located just beyond Auxey-Duresses, where the terrain starts to get more rugged and hilly. He also owns a small parcel of land in the Cotes de Nuits from which he makes his sublime Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru “Clos des Argillières”, a satin-textured, ethereal Pinot Noir, which when we showed it at a tasting last year, elicited nary a bat-squeak of approbation, the consensus amongst our customers being that it was too light. The character of the Cossard’s wines is trippily light fantastic rather than essence of black night. I think the Nuits was the perfect example of iron stiletto in velvet wrap; its reserved subtlety would be missed if people were searching for noisy hedonism.

Fred has set up his new winery just outside Saint Romain, in a picturesque woodland clearing. As well as the domaine wines he also buys in grapes from other small growers and vinifies the wines under his own name. Purity and quality are the watchwords from the grapes he grows and harvests to the vinification, with no added chemicals, apart from a tiny amount of sulphur to keep the wine stable (but still enabling the wine to develop naturally). The wine is the wine is the wine – there is no filtering or fining.

My heart stirred for a (lemon) curd. From low yielding sixty-plus year old vines the Saint-Romain conveys complexity and harmony between the fruit and minerality. Limpid light gold colour this white Burgundy has a distinctive, intense, ripe citrus nose with some honeyed richness and notes of patisserie. Crystallised fruits and roast pineapple dominate a palate marked by penetrating acidity and biting minerality. After half an hour the fruit becomes mute and the wine slides inexorably back into its steely shell. A couple of days later – yes, I can wait – the wine had begun to shed its armour and revealed a rich marzipan texture with the familiar crystallised lemon peel.

“Huge lemons, cut in slices, would sink like setting suns
into the dusky sea, softly illuminating it
with their radiating membranes, and its clear,
smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence.”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Drunk and highly enjoyed with a coconut-creamy prawn laksa.