A solid, unequivocal 100/100…
Christmas Arrives Early in London as Domaine Bizot Previews Their New 100 Point Charlemagne Grand Cru 2022 at a Bespoke Michelin Star Dinner…
A recent November 2024 visit to the cellars of Jean-Yves Bizot was undoubtedly the highlight of a week of 2023 En-primeur barrel tastings in Burgundy ahead of the new release campaign starting in January 2025. Domaine Bizot will not offer their 2023s for many more months, preferring to release their exceptional red and white wines after longer élévages and after the wines have already been bottled, as is becoming the trend with most top end producers in Burgundy.
So, there was of course a lot of excitement when it was announced that Victor Mignardot, the Assistant Commercial at Domaine Bizot, would be coming to London in late December to host an exclusive private client tasting with their UK importer Musigny. The wines of Domaine Bizot are widely regarded as the pinnacle of premium quality red Burgundy with global collectors and connoisseurs chasing the meagre allocations of Jean-Yves’s wines that are released annually.
With wines as collectable and sought-after as Domaine Bizot, Jean-Yves and his numerous global agents must work very fastidiously to make sure the wines reach the cellars of the most deserving collectors rather than letting the wines merely disappear into the black hole of wine investment portfolios.
Part of this process naturally involves tasting new and archive releases in person with as many loyal collectors of the wines as possible, and I was very fortunate to be invited to join one such gathering at the exceptional London Michelin Star restaurant, Chez Bruce, to sample a selection of back vintages of Domaine Bizot’s wines but also to re-taste the first ever public showing of Jean-Yves’s maiden release Charlemagne 2022 that is now bottled and scheduled to be offered in global markets in early 2025.
The highly anticipated Domaine Bizot Charlemagne 2022 that I last tasted and reviewed from barrel in January 2024. This was, at the time, a wine that redefined premium white, Burgundy wine quality for me, coming from two small plots of 0.14 hectares in the famed Le Charlemagne vineyard.
As Victor mentioned, when Jean-Yves bought the two plots, the vines were fortunately in very good health, allowing for a wine of exceptional quality to be made without the need for extensive regenerative vineyard work. Tasting this incredible wine once again, I was so pleased to see all the complex traits I described in my original barrel note, but now all just a little more polished and integrated as a finished bottled wine.
The clients tasting this wine were literally speechless, the complexity on the nose and palate simply astonishing, the power, poise, and concentration unlike anything anyone had ever tasted from Burgundy, let alone Corton-Charlemagne. The closest we could get to a fair comparison from elsewhere in Burgundy was perhaps identifying several similarities with a top-notch vintage of Chevalier-Montrachet Grand Cru, as both wines share an incredible limestone minerality. I am very happy to elevate my barrel score from a potential 99-100/100 to a solid, unequivocal 100/100 GS MW.