2021 Domaine Hubert Bouzereau-Gruere Puligny-Montrachet 750 ml

The Montrachet hillside is the world’s greatest white wine slope, and bottles from its most prized parcels—those skirting the municipal boundary between Puligny-Montrachet and Chassagne-Montrachet—fetch prices that match the terroir’s stature: Grand Cru Montrachet starts at around $500 and can surpass $9,000. 

But every once in a rare while, it’s possible to get your hands on a bottle that expresses this sacred soil but doesn’t bear an exorbitant price tag. A bottle like the 2021 Domaine Hubert Bouzereau-Gruere Puligny-Montrachet.

Legally, Bouzereau-Gruere’s Puligny could have come from any vines in the village. But this is no snapshot of varied terroirs. It’s a Chardonnay grown on 50-year-old vines in a one-acre plot known as Les Houillères, which sits right on the Puligny-Chassagne line. We’re talking a few dozen rows downhill from the Grand Cru sites that produce the world’s greatest white wines.

Puligny-Montrachet is famous for its compact limestone and white-marl soils that become more rich with clay and pebbles as one moves down the grade. The harder soils above the fault lines produce wines that need at least a decade of aging. The looser soils of Les Houillères, combined with the wine’s comparatively light brush with oak barrels (one year, sur lie), leave this bottle deliciously accessible by Montrachet standards. 

It’s a wine that tantalizes with wave after bracing wave of fruit and acid and earth, and beckons you long after the last sip is gone.