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No one, outside of the growers who have long resided in this tiny Burgundian village itself, has deeper roots (as it were) in the Côte Chalonnaise village of Mercurey than Domaine Faiveley. The family’s holdings in the appellation go back centuries and are unparalleled in both breadth and quality. Their multitude of single-vineyard bottlings of both Mercurey Rouge and Blanc are some of the most coveted, long-lived examples from the appellation you will ever find. 

In addition to several wonderful Mercurey village-level wines, they bottle several wines from the best-known crus in the appellation including having exclusive ownership of the two most famous, Clos Rochette and La Framboisière, monopoles the Faiveleys have presided over since 1933. Called ‘Framboisière’ (raspberry bush) for a reason, this rocky, pebbly site was once home to a massive berry patch. Now organically farmed to Pinot Noir, some of which was planted as far back as 1949, the vineyard is known to produce, maybe via the power of suggestion or maybe via the actual influence of its previous inhabitants, wines with a distinctive, ravishing set of berry-like fruit aromatics that lend it a charm quite unlike its immediate, rockier, more austere neighbor, Clos Rochette. 

Like Rochette, though, the yields in Framboisière are, at best, parsimonious, and the wines are substantial and built for the long haul but with a finer texture, a bit more finesse and a lot more of fine minerality on the finish. In the vernacular Burgundy lovers would understand, Rochette is Mercurey’s Pommard while Framboisière is its Volnay, which is to say there’s a layer of gras, a veneer of lovely fruit compote, sitting atop this Pinot Noir’s bare Mercurey bones and old vine concentration we find totally entrancing. 

It’s a lovely, lovely wine that reveals its charms slowly as it warms in the glass and those charms will only develop further as the wine ages. A Provençal roast or grilled lamb (don’t hold back on the rosemary) would be perfect or you could go after that sweet berry fruit component with a pan-roasted duck breast with a savory cherry or berry gastrique. Now I’m hungry! 

Mercurey is still the best value we know in old-school styled red Burgundy, and $60 is not too much to spend for this kind of quality!