As you know, I have spent an adult lifetime searching for and getting to know a very special group of vignerons. They are found at small family domaines where knowledge has been passed down the generations, often working the same rows of vines as their grandparents.
Experience has long taught me that Burgundy is home to some of the very best. It is a patchwork quilt of tiny vineyards, old stone villages, and families who live completely in rhythm with the land. That is why the wines taste the way they do.
Every two years the region hosts the remarkable Les Grands Jours de Bourgogne which I have mentioned in previous missives. This is a travelling week of tastings that moves from village to village, cellar to cellar, with producers pouring their wines in the very places they are made. It is chaotic, exhausting, occasionally confusing, and completely wonderful — and it reminds you very quickly why Burgundy continues to hold such a grip on anyone who loves wine.
This year I stayed in a magnificent château overlooking the vineyards, with cherry blossom in full bloom across the slopes. The beauty of Burgundy in spring is difficult to describe — soft light, neat rows of vines running up the hillsides, church towers rising above the villages, and everywhere the sense that nothing much has changed for hundreds of years. It is a truly inspirational place. Even if you never order another bottle from me, I would still urge you to visit!
Nearby lies the world famous Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, where a single bottle can cost thousands. The hotel cellar holds vintages stretching back decades, a reminder of the extraordinary power and prestige that Burgundy can command. Yet one of the great joys of the region is that just down the road from the most expensive wine in the world you can still find the most wonderful wines, nurtured with no less care, similar same history, and often a remarkably similar character — at prices that are still within reach.
I will only mention two of them here.
Firstly, Domaine Lucien Boillot, whose roots go back to the late eighteenth century in the village of Volnay.
Like so many Burgundian families, their story is a web of brothers, cousins and inheritances, with vineyards divided again and again between generations. What sounds complicated on paper makes perfect sense in the glass, because each generation continues to work the same plots of land, often just a few rows at a time.
One of Pierre’s ancestors, Victor Boillot, was mayor of Volnay in the nineteenth century and corresponded with Louis Pasteur, sending wine samples to help the chemist understand why wine sometimes spoiled. Those exchanges helped establish the basic hygiene principles at the heart of today’s wine industry. Not many domaines can claim they played a part in the birth of modern fermentation.
Today the domaine is run by Pierre Boillot in Gevrey-Chambertin. His approach is deliberately traditional: low yields, careful work on the vines, and very little intervention in the cellar. His aim is not power, but balance — wines, like accents, that could only come from this very place.
The wines themselves are everything you hope Burgundy will be — precise, elegant and completely rooted in place. The Volnay is beautifully structured, the Pommard darker and more powerful, and the Gevrey-Chambertin has that unmistakable and unmatched combination of perfume and firmness.
I then visited Domaine Vincent Rapet, run by Robin and Vincent Rapet in the lovely hill village of Pernand-Vergelesses. The vineyards here were granted by Emperor Charlemagne to the monks of the Abbey of Saint-Andoche. If this is just legend, it is built on a certainty: the slopes above the village have been cared for, generation after generation, for well over a thousand years and still produce some of the most elegant wines in the Côte de Beaune.
I have known the Rapet family for many years. The domaine has converted to organic farming since 2020, and the small crop has produced wines of remarkable finesse — whites with beautiful minerality from the Pernand marl soils, and reds with the silky texture and delicate red-fruit character that only an obsessive vigneron can achieve. These are wines made by people with calloused hands, hardened by a lifetime on the land.
I can ship cases directly from the Boillot and Rapet families to coincide with longer, sunnier days back home. From Domaine Lucien Boillot I would particularly recommend:
- Gevrey-Chambertin
- Volnay
- Pommard
- Chassagne-Montrachet Blanc Premier Cru
From Domaine Vincent Rapet:
- Pernand-Vergelesses Blanc
- Pernand-Vergelesses Rouge
Quantities are small and stock won’t be available for long, so please do call me right away if you’d like to take advantage of some very special wines from some very special places.
Happy Easter!
John.