I’ve all but given up on buying wine from the Côte d’Or.
Last year, I called a local importer looking for a handful of different burgundies for my MW (Master of Wine) studies. Their wines hadn’t even yet landed in the US but he told me that every single bottle was spoken for.
I emailed one of the shops that was going to stock the wines to see if I could buy them before they came in. But no: they’d already offered them to their best customers who had bought them all up. The alternatives they had in stock were of the generic sort whose inflated prices are based on the reputation of the wines I wasn’t able to access.
I repeated the exercise twice more before I gave up, bought the generic wine, and went back to studying.
But the thing about not being able to access great burgundy is that you get used to being underwhelmed. And when you get the good stuff, you’re entirely unprepared.
Which is what happened one Wednesday evening when I was proofing wines for a WSET class (the owner of the school does the buying). The first burgundy was fine – a fresh and fruity red Bourgogne with nice balance. The second, a 2020 Volnay from Domaine Fernand & Laurent Pillot, was ridiculously, monstrously lovely. I stared down at it suspiciously – there’s no way that this was still available, and even if it was, I was sure it would be outrageously expensive.
As it so happens, at $59 or £48, it’s fairly priced for burgundy (I’d even go so far as to say good value!). And, while it may be a little harder to find than most of our wines of the week, it’s stocked by multiple shops and restaurants in the US and the UK.
The Pillot family traces their ancestry in Chassagne-Montrachet back to 1625, when they owned a small vineyard and made their living as coopers. In the 20th century, Alphonse Pillot decided to focus on grape-growing and expanded the family’s vineyards, eventually leaving about nine hectares of Chassagne-Montrachet, Puligny-Montrachet, St-Aubin and Santenay to each of his sons, Jean and Fernand. (Jean’s son, Jean-Marc, would go on to start Domaine Jean-Marc Pillot.)
In 1989 Fernand’s son Laurent married Marie-Anne Pothier of Pothier-Rieusset, who added five hectares of Pommard and Volnay to the family domaine. Three years later, in 1992, Fernand and Laurent began making wine under the label Domaine Fernand & Laurent Pillot. Then, in 2001, the domaine expanded again with the purchase of four more hectares of the Pothier-Rieusset property from Pothier’s uncle. In 2017, after three years of winemaking internships, Laurent and Marie-Anne’s son Adrien took over winemaking and, in 2023, the family purchased two new vineyards in Volnay. Today, the estate spans 15 ha across 57 parcels, 14 of which are premier cru, in eight villages of the Côte de Beaune.
The family’s Volnay, the wine I am recommending, is sourced from four parcels planted between 1960 and 1999. About a third of the blend is made from parcels in the premiers crus Le Ronceret and Les Brouillards (the latter pictured above) with the remainder coming from Grands Champs and ‘Petit Brouillards’ (a section of Les Brouillards that is not premier cru). The entire estate is farmed organically, though it will not be able to be labelled as certified by Ecocert until the release of the 2024 vintage.
For the 2020 Volnay, the Pillots completely destemmed the Pinot Noir before cold soaking it for 4–5 days. Fermentation was carried out with ambient yeasts over the course of 18 days with daily pumpovers, switching to punchdowns at the peak of fermentation. They then pressed it into French oak barrels (33% new) and left it to age 15 months.
2020, as our man in Burgundy Matthew Hayes pointed out in his thorough review of the vintage, was warm, not hot, and resulted in deeply coloured wines with dark-fruit profiles, supple tannins, fresh, succulent acidity and earthy, floral elegance. This wine is no exception – though it is an outlier on alcohol, clocking in at a high but well-integrated 14.5%. Its cola and cedar notes are very attractive and the generous fruit is well balanced by a spicy, herbal freshness.
Wine-Searcher tells me that the 2020 Volnay is carried by Vinopolis and Saratoga Wine Exchange in the US, by Harvey Nichols in the UK and by SG Wine Store in Singapore. If you can't find it, try the 2019, which Jancis rated and is listed by Lea & Sandeman in the UK, xtraWine in Italy, Grand Wine Cellar in the US, and again by SG Wine Store in Singapore.
Members can find many more wines from Domaine Fernand & Laurent Pillot in our tasting notes database, as well as lots of helpful background information on Burgundy and its wines in our online Oxford Companion to Wine.
