Thursday VinopolPick 3-21-18
In Today’s Newsletter:
Matrot’s Charming and Value-Driven Burgundy
Champagne in Spring: Warming Weather=Bubbly Fun
Top Rated ’16 Beaujolais Featuring Foillard, Lapierre and Chignard
Top Betz: New Releases from the Washington Standard-Bearer
Wines from Olga Raffault’s Library
Monumental+Traditional / The 2015 Grand Cru Chablis of Vocoret
Matrot of Meursault
There’s an old axiom that you can’t trust a red-wine maker to make good white wines, but producers that are known for whites often make great reds. That’s certainly true of Matrot, the venerable producer of Meursault. Their whites are great and well known, but somehow the reds the family produces from the Cote de Beaune are sleepers—undervalued but delicious.
Burgundy of Charm and Value
There’s an old axiom that you can’t trust a red-wine maker to make good white wines, but producers that are known for whites often make great reds. That’s certainly true of Matrot, the venerable producer of Meursault. Their whites are great and well known, but somehow the reds the family produces from the Cote de Beaune are sleepers—undervalued but delicious.
Stylistically, the wines are charmers, pure and up front with their joy.
Cornas is the hot appellation in the Rhone, possibly in all of France. It’s coveted for its unique blend of elegance, power and raw character, with the top wines as good as any Grand Cru Burgundy or Hermitage. Unfortunately, pricing for the top producers is skyrocketing, to the point where if you have to ask, then…
March Madness is upon us—the madness of the March Clearance Sale. We love mags here at Vinopolis. Probably too much, if we’re being frank, so we’re doing a little spring cleaning (let’s see how many March/Spring metaphors we can mix, here, shall we?). We’ve got a sweet sixteen (plus one) bottlings that just got added to the sale, so your choices have expanded like the tourney field. 
Moet’s Grand Vintage bottling sits a tier below Dom Perignon and above their ubiquitous NV bottlings. Despite the incredible jump in quality from the low-end stuff, it’s much less expensive than Dom. The price we were able to secure on this was incredible, as well, compounding the relative value of the bottling. For not much more than the Imperial, you can enjoy the Grand Vintage, at least until we run out—we’re not likely to score this sort of pricing again any time soon!
James Suckling 97 points “This is one of the greatest wines I have ever had from here. So much ripe cherry, raspberry and floral character. Medium body, super-refined tannins and a long and flavorful finish. So much going on here. Better in 2021.”