Louis Latour Beaune Blanc Collection

Lady Luck, A Time Machine, and Corton Charlemagne

Nine years ago, when we began this little adventure, we were determined to treat our membership to a steady diet of chiseled white Burgundy for less than $30/bottle. Burgundy has always been our forte, having visited the region at least once a year since 1979. For a while, we did pretty well. We knocked on cellar doors in the Côte de Beaune and Côte de Nuits and coaxed old friends into carving out allocations for WineAccess. It was looking like a cakewalk.

But beginning in late 2010, our cakewalk came to a halt. The dollar was shrinking against the euro. That was bad. To make things worse, as the world got smaller thanks to the internet, tiny-production white Burgundies found their way to markets never imagined in the 1980s. Prices skyrocketed, particularly on wines drawn from Meursault, Puligny, and Chassagne-Montrachet, and the Premier Cru and Grand Cru hillsides above Aloxe-Corton. As a result, bargain-hunting on the Côte de Beaune is something of an oxymoron. In order to ferret out exquisitely mineral white Burgundy under $40/bottle, we had two options: Build a time machine or get incredibly lucky.

Today, the latter, for a tiny allocation of two wines that, combined, have been rated 4.11 out of 5 stars by WineAccess members (see the chart above), making Latour’s inimitable Beaune Blanc one of the highest-rated white Burgundies in WineAccess history.

The northernmost of the Grand Crus of the Côte de Beaune, Corton-Charlemagne sits on the highest tranches above the variegated tile roofs in the hamlets of Corton and Pernand-Vergelesses. Le Charlemagne is known for the astounding richness and age-worthiness of its Chardonnays. Just to the south, above and just to the west of Beaune, are three priceless 1er Crus — Les Teurons, Aux Cras, and Le Clos des Mouches.

If you walk the steep limestone slopes above Aloxe-Corton, eyeball the Premier Cru vineyards of Aux Cras and Les Grèves and see Puligny and Chassagne in the distance and Meursault down the road, you have a sense of the rarefied air from which Louis Latour’s Beaune Blanc is drawn. As Bernard Retornaz, the Louis Latour exec whose knowledge of Burgundy borders on the encyclopedic, told us, “Our Beaune Blanc is the best-kept secret in the cellar.”

While Jean-François Coche crafts the most priceless Corton-Charlemagne ($2,000/bottle on release!), Louis-Fabrice Latour is the largest landholder in the appellation, stewarding a massive 25-hectare limestone parcel perched high on the hillside. If Latour’s Corton-Charlemagne is the crown jewel of Château Corton Grancey, it’s the several hundred case production of Beaune Blanc each year that is one of the last great bargains of a white Burgundy market gone wild.

Drawn largely from Latour’s Premier Cru Les Grèves and Aux Cras, with a splash of higher-toned Chardonnay grown on Montagne Saint-Désiré — all located a stone’s throw from Corton-Charlemagne, Latour’s Beaune Blanc is, in one word, stunning. Retornaz prefers to call it “PetitCharlemagne.”

A measly 120 bottles of each of the 2012 and 2013 Louis Latour Beaune Blanc have been earmarked for WineAccess, assembled into 60 4-pack samplers for those of you that, like us, find yourselves pining for the good ol’ days when white Burgundy was the wine world’s most valuable secret. Shipping included on all orders!