Francois Confuron-Gindre Gevrey-Chambertin 2021

The Gevrey-Chambertin is the most structurally serious of the five village wines at Domaine François Confuron-Gindre — and the one that most clearly reveals the contrast between this domaine's Vosne-Romanée heartland and Gevrey's altogether more muscular, spice-driven character. The wine is assembled from three parcels — Les Crais, Les Seuvrées and Champs Chenys — with vines of 30 to 50 years of age grown on the shallow soils that characterise the best Gevrey village parcels, favouring wines of subtle aromatics and harmonious structure. Vinification uses 30% new wood and 20% whole-bunch, a proportion that since Edouard Confuron's increasing involvement has added a distinctive freshness and perfume to the house style — and the word is now out about this long under-the-radar domaine. The wine is aged for 18 months in barrel before bottling, in keeping with the unhurried traditional approach that six generations of the Confuron family have maintained. 

A rich, intensely fruity wine with notes of blackberries, redcurrants, black pepper and violets — rich tannins that fill the palate and linger on the finish. A concentrated, lively purple in colour, with a huge wealth of red fruit behind it — Gevrey in its most generous and aromatic register rather than its most austere, the Vosne-based perspective of the winemaker perhaps lending the wine a touch more perfume and accessibility than some of the appellation's more uncompromising expressions.