Róisín Curley, Beaune Blanc 2023

This is another great wine from a super person, Róisín Curley. 

This is her Beaune Blanc, produced from some of the rare plantings of Chardonnay in the hills around the town of Beaune. This 2023 vintage of the wine is simply spectacular - it opens with scintillating freshness, complexity and generosity. It explodes out of the glass; you might have had to wait for development with the 2022, but this year it's all there and ready to go for you!

This is stellar Chardonnay taken from the heart of the town's Chardonnay plantings, vineyards that have given so many of the best wines in the world for nearly a thousand years.

Beaune is famed for the amphitheatre-like vineyards that surround its western flanks, with many being 1er Cru. The vast majority of these vineyards are planted with Pinot Noir, making the white wines a genuine rarity. Indeed, they are so rare that when made, they command serious and deserved attention. This is one such case as anyone who tries it will see. It is every bit the same calibre as other village-level wines in the Côtes de Beaune, which of course include Meaursault and Puligny Montrachet: though this wine is expensive, it represents excellent value when compared to these.

Broadly speaking, Róisín gives her wines a very light fining and filtration in order to preserve the natural character of the grapes terroir as much as possible. Indeed, some of her wines are left completely unfiltered. For the winemaking itself, she uses concrete tanks or small vats for fermentation, but seldom made with new oak.

In the vineyard at harvest, and in the winery, too, she does a massive amount of sorting of the grapes (called triage in the vineyard) which has sometimes reduced her potential output up to 50%, but such is Róisín's determination for the very best quality.

The standards that she achieves has allowed her access to some of the best coopers and she now uses a mix of different barrel suppliers, buying more in each of the last six harvests in which her wines have been made.

The grape suppliers for Róisín's wines are mostly all farming organically, as is the case for this wine, and the wine-making philosophy is very definitely hands-off and low-intervention, allowing for terroir and variety to shine. Regular trips to the region and long-term relationships with the growers allow for total control of the process, which again gives such scintillating quality. Certainly the reaction from the growers themselves is immensely positive and this has to be the highest form of praise one could wish to attain.

Róisín is not only a winemaker and micro-negotiant (which means that she buys the grapes rather than owning the vineyards), she is a full-time pharmacist in Ballyhaunis, County Mayo, and she is also a Master of Wine.

The enthusiasm she had for wine led to Róisín exchanging her hobby for an incredible alternate life which, via lengthy studies, led her to work in Chateau Latour (yes, that Chateau Latour), Chateau Grillet in the Rhone, and Geisenheim in the Rhein and Montpelier. And finally, to Burgundy where she is making just wonderful wines, but never enough for all of us.