Domaine Billard Père et Fils, Hautes-Côtes de Beaune, Rouge 2023

The best value Burgundy we have tasted for years, this wine does far more than hit a price point: it is a really excellent wine made with a brilliantly large drinking window and loaded with complex flavours, gorgeous structure and a long finish. This is the way red Burgundy should be.

A generous perfume of ripe red and black berry fruits, with a palate of juicy ripe fruits, sweet spice and fine tannins. Text-book Burgundy with a bit more in reserve.

The Billard family have been managing their Domaine for five generations around the village of La Rochepot in the Hautes-Côtes de Beaune, to the south of the town of Beaune itself. Jérôme Billard inherited the mantle of control in 1999 pivoting from a company focussed on growing grapes to sell to other producers, to bottling their own wines, in an effort to showcase the character of each plot that they farmed - a facet that had been lost in selling the grapes to producers who didn't understand the land in the same way that the family did.

Biodynamics and organics are used in almost all of the vineyards including the use of cover crops and an adherence to the lunar calendar. The winery uses gentle pressing of destemmed grapes, all of which are hand-picked.

The wine is aged for 10 months in a mix of oak barrels from Alliers and Vosges just enough time and new oak to add complexity without overpowering the fruit. Though Jérôme doesn't call the winery a 'natural' one, he uses only a pinch of So2 at bottling and all fermentation is spontaneous.