Serving temperature

What works best: 16-18°C (61-64°F) for the reds, 12-14°C (54-57°F) for the whites.

Indeed, generally speaking, wines are served too warm ("room temperature” no longer means the same as it did 50 or 100 years ago!).

If you wish to refine this rule of thumb, the following correctives may be applied for the reds: a ripe and warm vintage, such as 2009 or 2012, should be served cool, otherwise the alcohol will dominate; a cool vintage with pronounced acidity should, on the contrary, be warmer (around 20°C or 68°F) so as to give the wine some roundness and not bring out the tannins and the acidity.

Decanting

In general, Burgundies don't need to be completely decanted into a carafe in the way the wines of Bordeaux do, but they ALWAYS need a little airing before being drunk.

The best thing is to open the wine two hours before serving it, to pour oneself a glass so as to smell it (and thus detect any possible problem) and to put the contents of this glass back into the bottle. The emulsion thus created will enable a little air to be introduced into the wine, and this will help greatly to open up the nose and the palate.

It's not really very elegant.., but perfectly efficient and respectful. In some rarer cases, we recommend that you decant and this will be indicated with a pictogram.

Lay down? Or drink straight away?

A few simple rules will be useful in most circumstances:

- young wines offer intense fruit and a brightness which won't be found later on. After bottling, you have 18 to 24 months (so 3 to 4 years after the vintage) to take advantage of that. Then the wine will close up: the aromas will not be so fresh and at the same time, the palate will not have mellowed yet. The worst of both worlds, so to speak.

- for the mouth to become less tart and for the roughness of youth to be polished out while still maintaining good aromatic liveliness, 5 to 7 years on average are required after bottling. So to be more precise and to leave a little leeway, add 7 to 10 years to the vintage. This is the point at which the right balance should be achieved and when all the complexity of the wine should begin to show itself.

- It's impossible to give a drink-by date! As it evolves, the wine's balanced phase may last a very long time. It's for you to see whether you are sensitive to the finesse and the emotion experienced when drinking an old wine.

These simple principles will work in most cases, but you must understand that the adaptations and exceptions are numerous. The less prestigious appellations are normally made to be drunk a little earlier, but a lot of pleasure can be derived with a Bourgogne or a 10-year-old Marsannay. Certain vintages mature more quickly than anticipated (2007) or, on the contrary, require more patience (2010). Certain wines are full of charm when young (Fixin, Chambolle Cras, for example), while others really need to wait to reveal their potential (most of them...). In any case, it's necessary to open the bottles in advance to oxygenate the wine (cf. "Decanting”) and to taste it at the right temperature (cf. "Serving temperature”).

But if wine-lovers are to get to know their own preferences, they must make the effort to acquire experience and self-knowledge, and what's more, these elements will constitute all their pleasure.