2018 Faiveley Mercurey 1er Cru Le Clos du Roy, Burgundy

Wafting from the glass with aromas of black cherries, cassis, raw cocoa and subtle spices, the 2018 Mercurey 1er Cru Clos du Roy is medium to full-bodied, supple and enveloping, its deep core of fruit framed by succulent acids and velvety tannins. This is quite a lavish, gourmand Clos du Roy from Faiveley in the making, but it will require a little bottle age to reach its peak.

92+ points William Kelley robertparker.com

As I wrote last year, the Faiveley family first produced wine from rented vines in Mercurey in 1933, finally beginning to acquire land there three decades later. Today, with over 72 hectares to their name, they number equally among the Côte Chalonnaise's most important landholders and its qualitative reference points, so I'm happy to resume coverage of their wines in these pages. Unsurprisingly, the style bears a certain resemblance with the contemporary Faiveley style as expounded in the Côte d'Or: that's to say, pure and precise wines that no longer display any trace of structural asperity for which the house was once known and often carry a judicious veneer of new oak in their youth. The Faiveley reds and whites from Mercurey, Montagny and Rully are more immediately accessible and see less new wood, but they play off the same themes and rank among the region's finest. What's more, the domaine's significant holdings mean that many of these bottlings are unusually accessible by Burgundian standards.