AUXEY DURESSES

2018 Domaine Comte Armand

EN PRIMEUR

Just lovely. Purple juice and concentrated flavour. Expressive, juicy and a lovely weight of just sheer joie de vivre.L&S (Nov 2019)

* This is a pre-shipment/primeur offer. All orders are accepted under the TERMS of this offer which differ from the terms of the rest of the site.

The 2018 Auxey-Duresses Village has a pure, floral bouquet with perhaps a little more precision than the 2019. The palate is well balanced with very good depth for an Auxey-Villages, traces of liquorice infusing the red fruit with very good persistency. Excellent. Drinking range: 2021 - 2030 Rating: 89 Neal Martin, www.vinous.com (Dec 2020)

An exceptionally fresh nose combines notes of essence of red berries with those of earth and a whiff of humus. The sleek, intense and well-detailed middle weight flavors possess a relatively refined mouthfeel for an Auxey villages, all wrapped in a sneaky long finish where a hint of bitter bit fruit character surfaces. Drinking range: 2024 - Rating: 88-91 Allen Meadows, www.Burghound.com (Apr 2020)

The 2018 Auxey-Duresses Village, which sees a small amount of new oak (usually the pressed wine), has a light undergrowth-tinged bouquet that just needs a little more cohesion. The palate is medium-bodied with quite rustic tannins and grippy and slightly ferrous in style, with a pinch of white pepper on the finish. Not bad, although I have a preference for the previous vintage. Drinking range: 2022 - 2029 Rating: 86-88 Neal Martin, www.vinous.com (Jan 2020)

Bright crimson. Racy and mouth-filling. This tastes as though it was made from pretty happy, possibly old, vines. Quite emphatic fruit and tannin. No hurry whatsoever to drink this! GV Drinking range: 2027 - 2040 Rating: 16.5+ Jancis Robinson OBE MW - www.JancisRobinson.com (Jan 2020)

A domaine totalling nine hectares, of which the most important part is a magnificent five hectare monopole of the Pommard Premier Cru Clos des Epeneaux, which was put together by Nicolas Marey in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (along with the DRC Romanée Saint Vivant 'Marey-Monge'). These vineyards were all sold, except for the Clos (it now been enclosed by a wall), which came to Jean-François Armand as a dowry when he married Nicolas' daughter in 1826. The Volnay vineyards were added in 1994, followed by parcels in Auxey Duresses.

The current Comte Armand is a lawyer living in Paris, but very supportive of the régisseurs who have looked after this domaine for the thirty years or so that L&S have been buying here. The 1980 vintage, made by one of the many Rossignols of Volnay who was in charge at the time, was for us a great introduction to the possibilities of the great Clos des Epeneaux vineyard. Then came the era of Pascal Marchand, a young Quebecois who came to do a harvest with Domaine Bruno Clair and just never left. He began a period of radical restructuring and the introduction of organic and then biodynamic farming, while making very dark, dense and long-lived wines. Benjamin Leroux, hugely respected amongst growers who approach things from an organic or biodynamic point of view, then took over, and refined this approach and changed the way the parcels of vines are divided up for harvesting, paying less attention to just the age of the vines, and more to the underlying soil types. Claude Bourguignon was employed to provide a full geological survey of the Clos as the basis for this. Under Benjamin the wines of the Clos gained in finesse and precision, while still having the depth and richness expected of a great Pommard.

Both Pascal and Benjamin were keen to expand beyond the confines of the Clos, and the Domaine also has vines in Volnay, and, a particular enthusiasm of both Pascal and Benjamin, in Auxey Duresses, where they are convinced of the great potential of some of this village's undervalued and neglected terroirs. Paul Zinetti, who had worked with Ben for four years, took over in 2014.

The vineyard is cultivated organically (ECOCERT certified) and biodynamically. The grapes are entirely de-stemmed, but left intact, for a five to eight-day cold maceration before the fermentation, which lasts five to ten days, and then the wine remains in the fermenters for between three and fifteen days, depending on the vintage. In most years, the total time with skin contact will be around four weeks, which is longer than most. The wines will then be aged in barrel for between eighteen and twenty-four months, with new wood limited to 30% for the wine from the old vines of the Clos, down to none at all for the village wines.

Paul said from the outset that he wanted to make to make a less tannic wine in the Clos, and one which is more about aromatic length. In this he is continuing the route that Ben was following, but perhaps taking it even further.

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STORAGE OPTIONS:

Wines bought en primeur are scheduled to arrive in the UK over the course of the next eighteen months. If you do not wish to take home delivery, you may wish to consider where you would like the wines shipped on arrival in the UK. Lea & Sandeman offers duty paid and in bond storage through a dedicated storage company called Elephant Storage. For more details on the terms and fees associated with storage please go to our Storage Homepage or contact our primeurs team for more information.

While helpful, we do not require a firm commitment on delivery destination to process your primeur order at this stage. Our team will be in contact with you when your wines arrive in the UK to confirm the necessary delivery details.

BURGUNDY EN PRIMEUR FAQ

OFFER: All wines are offered subject to availability and final confirmation.

PRICING: All prices are quoted IN BOND ex-VAT, by the case size stated. Please double check that the desired case size does match what is being offered as wines are variously listed in threes, sixes, dozens, halves and larger formats.

DELIVERY - TIMING: This is a primeur offer so the wines are not yet physically available for delivery. They will be shipped to the UK over the next eighteen months. Generally, wines are shipped to your nominated location once the whole order has landed in our London City Bond account. If you require wines to be delivered by a certain date, please advise us at the time of ordering.

DELIVERY - FEES: In bond delivery to an Elephant Storage account (for more information see 'Storage Options' opposite) is free of charge. Transfer of wines to any third-party bond (i.e. not Elephant Storage) will incur an administration charge of £16.50 + VAT for all orders under £1,000. Please indicate if you would like the wine duty paid and a duty & VAT invoice will be raised once all the wines on your order are available for shipment. Once the relevant duty & VAT has been settled, we will ship the wines to your nominated address as per our normal duty paid Delivery Terms.

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