2022 Domaine Jean Chauvenet Bourgogne Rouge "Noyer du Pendu"

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Thomas Zacharia

Thomas Zacharia

K&L Buyer

Review Date: 10/2026

Nuits-Saint-Georges eat your heart out! This perennial overperformer from Chauvenet comes from a tremendous old vine parcel that wraps around the Chauvenet family's house inside Nuits-Saint-Georges. Winemaker Christophe Drag crafted a stunningly powerful Bourgogne Rouge in 2022 that is indicative of the vintage. Dark fruited and full of structure, this is a Bourgogne that can use a 2 hour decant, or 2-3 years in the cellar, as it's absolutely brimming with potential energy. For $45, it's one hell of a bottle!

Notes

If Nuits-Saint-Georges has a reputation for wines with sharp elbows, Jean Chauvenet is the domaine that taught them manners. Jean founded the estate in 1964 at the northern edge of town, a few meters from the Vosne-Romanée line, and spent his career assembling premier crus and bottling them himself. His daughter Christine and her husband Christophe Drag took over when he retired, and Christophe, trained in Beaune and Dijon, has run the cellar since the 1990s. The domaine is about nine and a half hectares across nine appellations, seven of them Nuits premier crus, with Vaucrains the crown and Damodes, Bousselots, Perrières and Rue de Chaux close behind. The vines have been grassed over since 2003 to hold the soil and slow the vigor, treatments are kept low, and the farming is moving toward organic certification. In a good vintage, their Vaucrains is a wine that will make you ponder why it isn't a grand cru. sleep on the Bourgogne Rouge, either. It comes from a half-hectare of 40-year-old vines around the family’s house inside the Nuits commune, in a lieu-dit called Le Noyer du Pendu, which translates roughly as "the walnut tree they hang you from" (Burgundian place names were not written by the tourism board). They only make a couple hundred cases a year, and it drinks like village Nuits Saint Georges at a Bourgogne price.