2015 Savigny Les Beaune Les Lavieres
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Tasting notes
From vines planted in the 1950s, the 2015 Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru Les Lavières is a one of the highlights of the range this year, wafting from the glass with a fragrant and projected bouquet of orange rind, potpourri, plum, raspberry and incipient forest floor. On the palate, the wine is full-bodied, velvety and sapid, with a rich attack, succulent acids, an ample chassis of fine-grained tannins and a long, saline finish. A superb Lavières that has yet to shut down.
Critic scores
Average Score
Allen Meadows, Burghound
Neal Martin
More reviews and scores
(almost 14% alcohol, with a pH of 3.8, from a crop level of 25 hectoliters per hectare; bottled in May of 2016): Full, dark red. Very ripe aromas of black raspberry, dark chocolate and savory soil tones. Quite silky, ripe and chocolatey; in fact, very rich and a bit aggressive for Savigny-lès-Beaune, and just this side of heavy. Supple and broad but without any easy sweetness, finishing with substantial tannins. This savory, chocolatey, rather powerful wine is in a less fruity style than the estate's 2016s and comes across as a bit youthfully disjointed and in need of patience. (Incidentally, Chandon de Briailles also bottled a tiny quantity of this wine with any added sulfur, but even this cuvée has only 36 ppm of total sulfur, according to Claude de Nicolay.)
Relatively pale crimson. Lots of earthy terroir evident on the nose. Masses of sweetness and chew but also admirable life. (JR)
(14% alcohol; made with 40% whole clusters; owing to its early malolactic fermentation, this wine was slated to be bottled shortly after Christmas): Medium-deep red. Pungent stony minerality gives lift to the superripe aromas of black raspberry, cherry and violet. Superripe and creamy, showing an almost exotic sweetness to its red fruits flavors, along with notes of pepper, spices and earth. This plush wine will drink early, although a few years of aging may help the slightly dry tannins resolve. The wine's high 3.8 pH is partly buffered by minerality--not to mention concentration (the crop level here was just 20 hectoliters per hectare).