Match of the week

10 year old Bonnes-Mares grand cru burgundy and confit duck

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on November 11 2013 at 09:11

Rooting round the cellar (well, cupboard under the stairs) in France last week I stumbled across a bottle of 2003 Bonnes-Mares, a Grand Cru burgundy from Jean-Luc Aegerter I’d been sent as a sample about eight years ago and furtively stashed away until it was ready to drink.

The sensible thing would have been to put it to one side - it still had plenty of life in it but sometimes you just think ‘what the heck?’. We decided to crack it open.

I can’t claim the food we had - confit duck and hasselback potatoes - totally did it justice but it was fine. With great bottles like this you don’t necessarily want the food to eclipse the wine.

I might have cooked a roast duck, had I had time to find a good one locally which would have been less aggressively salty. A simply roast chicken, guineafowl or partridge would also have been a good match as would a roast rack of lamb or even a fillet steak. But no heavy extracted sauces.

And definitely not a pungent Epoisses - a pairing of which the French seem inordinately fond but which IMHO would have killed it stone dead.

And the wine? Bright, fine, delicate with a lovely waft of raspberries and redcurrants and a beautiful silky finish - pinot noir at its delectable best.

For more information about Bonnes-Mares, a 15ha vineyard which spans the communes of Chambolle-Musigny and Morey-Saint-Denis see Clive Coates' website here.

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