Volnay 2005 - "achingly beautiful": Wines That Capture all that is Great in Burgundy

  The Volnay Village and surrounding from the hillside premier cru vinyards in the fall

When Matt Kramer calls Volnay wines “achingly beautiful” in his book, Making Sense of Burgundy, I understand. Volnay was my first Burgundy experience and is surely the reason that I’ve got so many sloped shoulders in my cellar today.

Matt Kramer goes on to say: “...the odds of getting a bottle worth drinking are greater in Volnay than in any other commune of the Cote d’Or. This surely is due to an unusually high standard among the commune’s growers…for one wine writer – this one anyway – there is no greater pleasure than to extol the virtues of Volnay. No other red Burgundy, except Chambolle-Musigny, can convey the perfume and finesse of Pinot Noir as well as Volnay. Few are more seductive.”

So now take that natural beauty of Volnay with its perfect composite of fruit and structure, put it in a bottle with 2005 on the label. And we’ve just hit the bull’s eye.

“the ’05 Côte de Beaune wines are indeed wonderful, pure and extraordinary, particularly in Volnay and Pommard...The best 2005s from the Côte de Beaune are quite simply sublime Burgundies that will be capable of exceptional longevity with 20 years being a given. As in the Côte de Nuits, it seems that each level of the Burgundian hierarchy transcends its usual quality category and ascends to the one directly above, which is to say that regional wines perform like villages wines, villages wines like good if not absolute top 1ers (crus) , good 1ers (crus) are like solid grands crus " -Allen Meadows, Burghound

It keeps getting better doesn’t it?

Volnay is surrounded by Meursault to the south, Monthelie to the west and Pommard to the northeast. Nearly all the towns of Burgundy with their twisty, narrow roads and stone houses with their internal courtyards are adrenaline-pumpingly beautiful. They sit at the base of the Cote d’Or vined slope with that uniquely extraordinary soil that extends for miles and miles, getting blasted by the sun.

It was a fortuitous moment when I met Paul Garaudet. Paul is serious. He is superbly capable. He is a workaholic who waxes poetic over his pneumatic press and doesn’t care overly much about the other kind of press. You probably already love his Monthelie or perhaps his Meursault or Pommard. He makes small quantities of all of these wines.

Paul only makes a bit more than 150 cases of his Volnays. 150 cases!

And Paul’s Volnays are not only rare, they are very high quality. Paul does not fine or filter. He uses a sane percentage of new oak – that is to say, about a third of his barrels are new. The wines are completely de-stemmed to eliminate vegetale flavors. His vineyard soils have those Volnay signature veins of iron which add to the aging properties.

Paul’s in it for the wine. You’ll like his Volnays. Cynthia Hurley