2017 Vincent Girardin Puligny-Montrachet Vieilles Vignes, Cote de Beaune

The 2017 Puligny-Montrachet Les Vieilles Vignes is still a little shut down after bottling, opening in the glass with notes of white peach, orange oil, wheat toast and pastry cream. On the palate, the wine is medium to full-bodied, satiny and incisive, with a delicately textural attack, lively acids and a long, precise finish. Even though this is one of the house's more accessible cuvées, it will really reward a year or two of bottle age with greater plenitude and expression.

89 points Robert Kelley winecompanion.com.au

As I wrote last year, Vincent Girardin debuted as a winemaker in 1982, creating his négociant maison in 1990 with his family domaine holdings at its core, distinguished by insisting on purchasing grapes as opposed to must or finished wines. When Girardin's expanding holdings became too much to handle, Eric Germain—brother of Jean-François Germain, who presides over Meursault reference point Domaine Henri Germain—was brought in to supervise winemaking in 2002. Germain, as he puts it, harbored the ambition "to make not merely good wine but instead great wine," and also wines that could age. He presided over a wholesale change in winemaking practices that has continued to progress since the maison's purchase by the Compagnie des Vins d’Autrefois in 2011. Wines that were once oaky and somewhat exaggerated are now deep, precise and beautifully differentiated by site. There's more work in the vineyards—fully 21 hectares of which are now owned—and they are increasingly being converted to biodynamic farming. Élevage is longer, with the last of these 2017s set to be bottled in April 2019. And Germain uses much less new oak and little bâtonnage. This is now a very serious source for high-quality white Burgundy, and the reflex to dismiss this producer as "commercial" is entirely misplaced. This year, I decided to revisit the domaine's 2017s from bottle rather than tasting unfinished barrel and tank samples, and I am glad I did so, as they have realized all the considerable promise they showed last year.