Bonnes Mares Grand Cru Reviews

A pungent nose presently consists of wood toast and reduction. Interestingly the massively constituted flavors are even bigger, richer and more powerful and the copious amount of dry extract is seriously impressive and this is just as well as the tannic spine is markedly prominent on the driving and strikingly long finish. This is a brute of wine yet like the Mazoyères it manages to avoid being rustic though with that being said, no one is likely to find this to be particularly refined. A "buy and forget you own it" wine.

The 2010 Bonnes-Mares is at once powerful yet sensual and totally enveloping. Layers of fruit resonate from this deep, baritone Bonnes-Mares. All of the elements continue to build towards the huge, explosive finish. The Bonnes-Mares is a wine with a bright future, but it will require considerable patience along the way.

The 2009 Bonnes-Mares is wonderfully nuanced and detailed. It is easily the most reticent of the estate's 2009 grand crus. The wine's energy and length come through most clearly at this stage. The Bonnes-Mares deserves to be cellared for at least a few years, but its pedigree is ample and significant even today. Readers will need to be patient.

Bright full red. Reticent, very pure aromas of candied cherry, rose petal, white pepper and blood orange. Lovely delicacy and inner-mouth tension to the penetrating flavors of pomegranate, cranberry and spices. A wine of outstanding finesse, finishing juicy, vibrant, perfumed and long. This classic Bonnes-Mares will need extended aging: I wouldn't think of uncorking a bottle for at least eight to ten years.

Full medium-deep red. Sexy, soil-inflected aromas of briary raspberry, brown spices, woodsmoke, white pepper and truffley underbrush. Sappy and sharply delineated, showing rather powerful wild red berry fruit along with complicating notes of minerals, roasted herbs and brown spices. A superb, nuanced expression of this great grand cru, offering a complex blend of light and darker soils (70% of the estate's vines are in Chambolle-Musigny). Powerful acidity gives this wine a whiplash of a finish.

Good medium red. Very ripe, soil-driven aromas of mocha, game, tobacco and cocoa powder. Strong red fruit and spice flavors emerge on the wonderfully dense, sweet palate, with an element of saline minerality providing another dimension. The wine's superb energy gives the highly concentrated fruit a bulletproof quality. Impressively dense and large-scaled for the year, finishing with substantial ripe tannins and excellent balance and length. Vincent's wines have been distinctly fresher and firmer since 2010 as he's now picking a bit earlier to avoid surmaturité.

Very good deep, healthy red. The most floral of these 2014s, conveying lovely perfumed lift to the aromas of black fruits, spices and honeysuckle. Communicates wonderful ripeness and detail without any impression of heaviness or weight. Really superb energy here, no doubt partly due to the vinification with 80% whole clusters. Most impressive today on the very long, fine-grained finish, where the savory red fruit and blackberry flavors build slowly and linger long. This should be long-lived.

Bright medium red. Sexy, almost exotic sweetness to the aromas of cherry, raspberry, wild herbs and stone. Wonderfully ripe but dry, conveying a rare combination of outstanding volume and great finesse without any impression of dryness--or easy sweetness, for that matter. A classic uncompromising young Bonnes-Mares but without the hardness of old-style wines from this long-aging grand cru. The spicy finish rises inexorably. As youthful as this is, its remarkably fine-grained texture gives it an easy digestibility. This protected site really seals in the heat, said Vincent, who brought in this fruit at close to 13% potential alcohol and did not chaptalize.

The 2009 Bonnes-Mares is wonderfully nuanced and detailed. It is easily the most reticent of the estate’s 2009 grand crus. The wine’s energy and length come through most clearly at this stage. The Bonnes-Mares deserves to be cellared for at least a few years, but its pedigree is ample and significant even today. Readers will need to be patient. Anticipated maturity: 2019-2039.

The 2010 Bonnes-Mares is at once powerful yet sensual and totally enveloping. Layers of fruit resonate from this deep, baritone Bonnes-Mares. All of the elements continue to build towards the huge, explosive finish. The Bonnes-Mares is a wine with a bright future, but it will require considerable patience along the way. Anticipated maturity: 2025-2040.  

Tasted blind at the Burgundy 2011 horizontal tasting in Beaune. Lighter in color, there are plenty of pretty, demure red berry fruits on the nose of the Bonnes-Mares 2011 from Domaine de la Vougeraie: very pure and translating the essence of Pinoté, albeit not the kind of aromatics for someone seeking opulence. The palate is medium-bodied with very well-judged acidity. This just glides across the palate and down the throat in effortless fashion. Bon vin.

Tasted blind at the Burgfest tasting in Beaune, the 2013 Bonnes Mares Grand Cru was missing some complexity on the nose compared to the Bonnes-Mares from Bruno Clair, with sweet red cherries and a touch of kirsch. Yet it needs to show more mineralité and terroir expression. The palate is medium-bodied with ripe red cherries and strawberry and showing quite a lot of structure towards the finish that grips the palate. I would just like more persistence to show through here. Tasted September 2016.

The 2015 Bonnes-Mares Grand Cru comes from the domaines parcel in "Terres Rouges", in fact, the last vineyard before you reach Morey-Saint-Denis. It has a very correct, almost reserved bouquet at first, like several wines from this vineyard at the moment. It is very terroir-expressive with hints of slate and gun flint emerging with time in the glass. The palate is medium-bodied with a sorbet-like freshness on the entry, here more of the Bonnes-Mares opulence and richness coming through, building to a bravura finish of orange zest, black fruit and spices that leaves the tongue tingling long after the wine has departed. Outstanding.