Faiveley, ‘Les Lavières’ 2004 (Nuits-Saint-Georges), $50, 13% abv

Stood up on a Saturday night.

If a guy says ‘don’t worry, I’m not a player’, that means he’s totally a player, right?

Could someone remind me why I should be all enthusiastic about being single?

*sigh*

Oh wait! Ha! I just remembered: being alone means I can order up whatever wine I want without having to consider stylistic or budget preferences of my significant other!

Burgundy it is. (Nah nah.)

The evening is starting to look up.

The 2004 vintage was not a ripe year for Burgundy and some wines I’ve tasted are downright mean & green. I bought some anyway because it’s the clichéd wine to drink while you’re waiting for your 2005s to mature. Still, I have some friends who gag at the vintage the same way they would gag if presented with pureed White Castles at a dinner party (ha! You thought it was paté!!) But I’m not a hater on the 2004 Burgs because a) I’m not overly sensitive to green notes, and b) it’s nice to know that the wines of this under-ripe vintage were not Tammy Faye’d out to be something bizarre.

Faiveley is a fairly large (for Burgundy) vineyard owner and winemaker based in Nuits-Saint Georges. ‘Les Lavières’ is not a 1er Cru (as it is in Savigny-les-Beaune) , but a lieu-dit, or named vineyard without being all special enough to be classified. A few other producers (including Daniel Rion and Domaine Leroy) make wine from the same vineyard.

This Burgundy was not showing that green note typical of the 2004 vintage, though rather stemmy on the palate. Overall, I find wines from Nuits-Saint-Georges to be more towards the masculine side, but this wine was bursting with full-on strawberries, like the first strawberries of the season that are stronger in florals than ripe aromatics. And there was a really strange floral thing going on. Strange because it wasn’t white blossoms or red roses but it was so familiar. It was…fabric softener scent: fresh and borderline soapy.

Huh.

So not quite the happy ending I was looking for on this solo Saturday night either, but the wine paired just fine with last week’s episode of The Biggest Loser (courtesy of hulu.com).

Lapierre, 'Cuvee Marcel Lapierre' 2007 (Beaujolais), $39, 13%

“Just looking.”

I was wandering the aisles of Astor Wine and Spirits (has anyone who reads this website ever been able to leave that store empty handed?) and I thought: I haven’t had much New World wine lately.

I’ll pick up something from the New World for dinner tonight.

Ok, New World section, here I come.

I can do this.

New World.

New.

New, new, new.

Nuevo.

Nuovo.

Neu.

Nouveau.

As in Beaujolais Nouveau.

Est arrive!

Ok, focus. New World.

What is Astor’s Beaujolais selection anyway? Oh look! Lapierre!

Oh! Lapierre was the wine of summer 2008! That was the summer I lived in Paris and the Morgon AC was easily available throughout the city and I could afford it. And the half bottles were novel: instead of the traditional sloping shoulders, they were bottled in tall thin bottles, like the way Canadian ice wine is usually bottled.

Anywhootle, that’s how I went from looking for a New World wine to Beaujolais.

Lapierre is a wonderful producer in Morgon who practices a minimalist intervention style of winemaking in both the vineyard and the winery. Most of their fruit is from Morgon, and the Cuvée Marcel Lapierre is one of their top bottlings. Indeed, my friend Nick Gorevic (the genius behind HomeWineSchool.com) worked the 2009 harvest at Lapierre and said the Cuvée Marcel Lapierre is not made in every vintage, includes a selection of the best grapes, and is released later than the regular AC bottlings.

I had it on a slight chill and gave it a quick splash decant. The underlying fruit profile of sour strawberries and black cherries was similar to my memory of the Morgon AC bottling though this was more advanced in tertiary development with respect to a dry earthy note and had was more round on the palate.

A really beautiful Beaujolais with my duck confit (what were you expecting I would have for dinner?) and though I would wait a few years before opening the next one…