2022 Blagny, La Pièce Sous le Bois, 1er Cru, Benjamin Leroux, Burgundy

The 2022 Blagny la Piece Sous Le Bois 1er Cru has a lively nose, black cherries, bilberry fruit, and great tension and focus. The palate is medium-bodied with supple tannins, fleshy and relatively smooth, with red cherries and a pinch of black pepper towards the finish. I prefer the nose to the mouth, but that might change.Leroux poured not his entire range of 50-odd cuvées…but most of them. “We started picking on August 26, and everything came in by September 5,” he tells me at his winery in Beaune, adjacent to the sprawling Albert Bichot buildings. “It was a pretty straightforward season after 2021, and we didn’t have stress in the vines compared to 2018 or 2019. There was just a bit in the lower parts of Savigny-lès-Beaune. Almost no sorting, chaptalization, acidification, or stuck fermentation was necessary. We use a pied de cuve from our vineyard to ensure all Saccharomyces. There is occasionally a lack of nitrogen in the vine, but you can correct that. We made four times as much wine for the whites: 40hL/ha instead of 10hL/ha in 2021.Drink 2025 - 2035Neil Martin, Vinous.com.com (January 2024)

From the top of the slope (lower elevations are planted to Pinot Noir), this delicious Meursault premier cru has retained a gratifying freshness even in this hot year, with notes of lemon peel, flint and fresh white flowers overlaid with a smoky reductive quality. The texture is lively and bright; the wine was finished in foudre on the fine lees to preserve its fresh appeal. The grapes come from Leroux’s 1.7ha of Chardonnay at almost 360m.Drink 2025 - 2045Charles Curtis MW, Decanter.com (July 2023)

Energetic mid purple, with a pure and high-class bouquet, quite tightly wound here, a darker style of raspberry, a good balance between fruit and acidity. A middleweight, attractive pinot.Drink 2028 - 2035Jasper Morris MW, insideburgundy_com (December 2023)