From €9.50, 15.90 Swiss francs, £10.65, $21.41 and NZ$35.86 a bottle. To judge from how many stockists winesearcher.com lists for this wine, J M Boillot, Premier Cru 2006 Montagny must be made in an impressively large quantity for a fine white burgundy, but at £13.50, provided it is bought as one of a dozen wines, it jumped off the table for user-friendliness at a recent tasting of more than 100 wines listed by London retailer Lea & Sandeman. Burgundy specialists Domaine Direct are offering it at £12.93 a bottle. Truly a white burgundy for recessionary times.
Jean-Marc Boillot, pictured here, makes wines that are always notable for their winning ways – so much so that they are viewed almost with suspicion by Burgundy purists – but this seems to me a rather perverse way to react to so much pleasure in a bottle. The label of the 2005 appears below, just to show you that the wine looks very respectable.
Boillot’s may not be the longest-lasting burgundies made, but they are far from the earliest to give up the ghost. I’d happily drink this 2006 any time over the next two years and loved the smoky nose, tense and tight build, and the bright, flattering fruit. The fruit for this wine was bought as must from six different Côte Chalonnaise growers as well as from the admirable Buxy co-op there (the one that supplies Louis Latour with so much raw material for their well distributed and beautifully packaged Montagny). The Premier, or 1er, Cru bit doesn’t mean too much in the Côte Chalonnaise, by the way. A very high proportion of vineyards are so designated.
I tasted this wine just before Dom Anne Gros, Blanc Cuvée Marine 2006 Hautes Côtes de Nuits Blanc, which is certainly more elegant and refined – and I would recommend this Côte d’Or wine with its strong mineral element and soaring quality for burgundy purists. But its price chez Lea & Sandeman is £3.45 more per bottle: £16.95.
As you can see from the prices cited above, the Montagny is easy to find in the UK and the US and can also be found in France, Holland, Switzerland and New Zealand, according to winesearcher.com.
Several merchants offer it by the dozen, including Bibendum in the UK, who list 80 cases at £128 a dozen (or £133 for six magnums), duty paid delivered – so just over a tenner a bottle.
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