2018 Domaine de Villaine Aligoté Bouzeron 750 ml

As the co-director of Burgundy’s Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Aubert de Villaine makes what may be the world’s most famous wine.

He also makes this white wine steal of spine-tingling freshness and complexity. Perfumed with white flowers and infused with racy minerality, Aligoté is a grape loved by knowledgeable devotees of clean, crisp white wines, and Aubert de Villaine is among its most passionate proponents. But this incredible grape variety is a rare find—while Chardonnay is the grape most associated with white Burgundy, Aligoté is the insider’s choice, bearing the same graceful complexity and often for a remarkable value.

His 2018 Bouzeron—drawn from low-yielding, ancient vines, some 90-years-old—is arguably the finest expression of Aligoté in Burgundy. It’s a bottle that every lover of Sancerre or Chablis should snap up while they have the rare chance.

Located in the Côte Chalonnaise village of Bouzeron, Domaine de Villaine is where Aubert and his wife settled in order to escape the international limelight on DRC. With his nephew, Pierre de Benoist, now in charge of daily operations, “the wines deliver what followers of this address have come to expect: tensile, mineral wines that are refined and unstated,” says Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate of Domaine de Villaine.

Vinous’ praise for this estate and wines like today’s is even more direct, calling the releases “quite simply, superb. They come highly recommended.”

We’d be obsessed with this wine even if it wasn’t backed by that level of impeccable pedigree and prestige. In its sleek tension, floral freshness, and crisp energy, it reflects back the vivacity of the spring’s early blooms, and is this season’s greatest pairing. Lighter than Chablis, but with more body than Muscadet, it’s succulent and delicious, razor-sharp with a creamy core.

In an essay dedicated to Domaine de Villaine’s Aligoté, literary lion and gourmand Jim Harrison quoted a friend commenting on its incredible drinkability: “It’s one of those wines that seems mysteriously to evaporate from your glass.” Sipping it on a boat in a Montana trout stream, Harrison writes: “The wine seemed as mysteriously delicious as the flowing river.”

This is a winemaker’s wine, and in many ways provides the key to understanding the mindset of Burgundy vignerons even more than the region’s best known white grape, Chardonnay. If winemakers were motivated by nothing but profit and efficiency, they would only rarely give Aligoté a chance. Chardonnay grows and ripens more easily, and commands higher prices.

Yet for people like Aubert de Villaine or Sylvain Pataille, Aligoté—once planted widely—transmits a native tradition, part and parcel of the local vinicultural legacy. The difficulty of growing it is the prerequisite to its satiny transcendence and glimmering terroir transparency. In the hands of the right winemakers, it may be even more reflective of soils than Chardonnay. Says one winemaker: “Aligoté eats minerals.”

Grown organically on the appellation’s best hillsides, where roots search into nutrient-poor, limestone soils, the Aligoté Doré vines produce extremely low yields—less than half of what you’d get from the great Grand Cru sites. The fruit of intense labors, it’s a unique white Burgundy you can’t afford to miss.