Our long-time Rossignol fans have a lot to look forward to as we're kicking into high gear with his long-awaited 2022s. As many of you know, Rossignol doesn't release his wines on the same schedule as everyone else. He basically sends them to market when he feels like it, so we've been waiting patiently for these for quite some time. Well, that time is now, starting with a stellar value pick to whet your whistle in the excellent 2022 Bourgogne Rouge. Sourced from Rossignol's village plots in Pommard and Volnay (he has so many!), it's a wine of real pedigree, and of course the winemaker's talents go a long way toward making this perform like a classic village wine. It's really the best of both worlds, exhibiting in equal measure everything Burgundy fans love about Volnay and Pommard, so you can count on a stellar performance. Best of all, the 2022 vintage's compact, robust character endows the wine with plenty of substance to take on more complexity with a few years in bottle.
Turning to his single-vineyard wines, his renowned Volnays were impressive, of course, but the real winners during our tasting last October were a pair of hidden-gem 1er crus, the Savigny-les-Beaune Les Fourneaux and the Pernand-Vergelesses Les Fichots.
The Fourneaux vineyard shares all the attributes of its more famous neighbors, the 1ers crus Vergelesses and Lavieres, but it hasn't seen quite the price jump as the other two in recent years, which is all to the good, of course. After all, the gentle slope and south-west exposure give a profile that can appeal to a huge audience of Burgundy collectors, so much so that the 2019 and 2020 vintages of this wine were some of our top sellers of those campaigns. The 2022 Fourneaux exhibits "silky, laced textures, the most sensual perfumes with restrained underlying power and richness with complexity and intrigue," all hallmarks of the site and the purest expressions of the 2022 vintage.
Pernand is also becoming a hotbed of overperforming cellar contenders, and it's bottlings like Rossignol's 2022 Fichots that demonstrate the top-shelf potential of this rising-star appellation. It won't be long before these wines are mentioned in the same conversation as top bottlings from Pernand's more famous neighboring appellations. Fichots' nearly flat topography at the bottom of the valley makes it unique among 1er crus in the appellation, but its full exposure to sun means the grapes ripen with remarkable precision and consistency, while the shallow limestone soils, which it shares with the neighboring Hill of Corton, endow its wines with real structural presence.
Of course, his 1er crus in Volnay, Beaune, and Pommard nearly always produce benchmark expressions in their own right, and you'll find exactly that in the 2022 Reversees, Charmot, and Les Vignots, as well as a pristine cellar gem in the 2019 Mitans, Rossignol seems to have truly nailed the warm 2022 vintage, as the wines themselves display plenty of prominent, expressive dark fruits, but the site signatures also come through in spades, as does Rossignol's top-tier winemaking skills.