2013 Puligny Montrachet Les Folatieres

Bright light yellow. Peach oil and a sexy smoky note on the nose; smells concentrated! Dense, sweet and fat, conveying a tactile impression of strong dry extract. Very classy and concentrated wine with superb smoky, saline length and exhilarating sucrosite for a wine that reportedly finished its fermentation with barely one gram per liter of residual sugar. A splendid Folatieres at grand cru level.

The 2013 Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru les Folatières has a crisp, citric bouquet that neatly carries the 50% new oak. The palate is well defined, but does not quite have the finesse and delineation that I was expecting on the finish…at least at the moment, hence my parsimonious score.||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