Domaine Bizot

My last trip to Burgundy in 2025 was slightly later than usual, in early December instead of the usual early to mid-November. This actually worked exceptionally well as all the growers had recovered from the bravado of the Hospice de Beaune Auction events as well as the tsunami of global wine merchants and critics that descend upon Burgundy every year around this time ahead of the En-primeur campaign. Arriving later was a masterstroke as not only were the winemakers feeling a lot more relaxed, but so too were their wines… in this case the 2024 whites and reds from one of the smallest and most difficult harvests on record.

Unfortunately, the slightly later schedule meant that we (myself and Domaine Bizot’s exclusive UK importer) would miss seeing Jean-Yves Bizot at his cellar in Vosne-Romanee when we went to taste the meagre quantities of 2024s from barrel as he would already be in Asia on tour attending events in China and Korea. But fear not, we were expertly guided through the sublime barrel tasting by Jean-Yves’s right-hand man, Victor Mignardot, who would also be in London the following week to help tutor two sensational private client collector tasting dinners featuring some of Jean-Yves’s finest wines.

With access to the Domaine Bizot cellar incredibly limited, I feel blessed every time I am able to visit to taste these unbelievable wines from barrel at the domaine, where their perfection, precision and true brilliance is laid bare in all their glory. Jean-Yves’s Burgundies do fortunately travel very well, but there is certainly nothing like tasting the new vintages from barrel to experience their purity and finesse which is amplified by Jean-Yves’s lack of sulphur use during the winemaking and elevage process, preferring a more modest, considered sulphuring of his wines before bottling. For the exceptional 2024 releases, demand will be incrementally greater due to their excellent quality, but tiny quantities of wine produced. To compensate UK buyers and loyal followers of Jean-Yves’s wines, two incredible dinners were arranged in London to which I was graciously invited.

The first of these two incredible events in mid-December featured mostly new release “in-bottle” vintages of Domaine Bizot’s 2023 wines alongside a small array of slightly older vintages. Expertly matched with some incredible food pairings at one of London’s top Michelin Starred restaurants, Chez Bruce, Victor and Andrew Pavli from Musigny Wines, Bizot’s exclusive UK importer, guided the guests through a delectable line up of wines that started with two phenomenal whites.

The Domaine Bizot Bourgogne Hautes Cotes de Nuits Blanc 2022 was a rich, broad, expansive expression that showed beautifully expressive aromatics and fruit power. Layered with leesy lemon and saline, briney maritime notes, and delicate wood spice complexity. The intensity and piercing tangy acids were classic Bizot with a little extra horsepower from this punchy vintage. A really exceptional wine. (95+/100 Greg Sherwood MW)

This was followed by the Domaine Bizot Bourgogne La Violette Blanc 2023, an incredibly elegant expression with plenty of textural finesse and effortless intensity. Sweet savoury lemon aromatics, lime peel and a wet stone minerality carry the palate with a beautiful harmony, tight grained phenolics and finely integrated acids. Showing simply sublime balance and finesse. (94+/100 Greg Sherwood MW)

Clos de la Bidaude Monopole just above Clos des Lambrays.

The next four wines, poured in two flights, excitingly featured a wine that I rated as one of my top Burgundies tasted in 2025… the Domaine Bizot Clos de la Bidaude Monopole 2023. From one of Jean-Yves’s newer vineyard purchases, the maiden vintage was only produced in 2021 with no 2022 released, upping the pressure and expectations from collectors for the follow up. Thankfully, the Bidaude 2023 is a knockout expression, the concentration, depth, elegance and sublime precision simply staggering. This is certainly a wine I am happy to highlight individually in more detail as one of my true favourites of 2025.

Domaine Jean-Yves Bizot Clos de la Bidaude Monopole 2023

A wine that is simply mesmerizingly intense with piercing aromatics of violets, saline crème de cassis, oyster shell, and sloe berries with a tightly knit complexity of smoky sapidity, crushed limestone and chalky spice. Piercing and powerful, the purity and intensity of fruit is awesome, the precision, polish, and concentration simply majestic. The perfect marriage of intelligent winemaking harnessing super fruit purity and perfect hillside terroir. A really super impressive success for the vintage. Drink from 2028 to 2040+.

(Wine Safari Score: 98/100 Greg Sherwood MW)

With minuscule amounts of the Clos de la Bidaude 2024 produced, all eyes will certainly return to this wine for the potential 2025 release. This is a wine that you just feel Jean-Yves believes can match and even perhaps surpass, with time and further viticultural and winemaking tweaking, his iconic Vosne Romanee les Jachees and his Echezeaux Grand Cru. I myself, having tasted all bottled expressions, have no doubts whatsoever. So, with the 2023 Clos de la Bidaude upping the temperature on this cold wintery December evening in London, the follow up wines proved equally impressive.

Next up, the eye-wateringly delicious Domaine Bizot Vosne Romanee 2020 village, a wine with profound lifted aromatics, a savoury red and black berry fruit intensity, and a beguiling whole bunch sapidity that simply added the perfect ‘salt and pepper’ to this fine wine recipe. Youthful but drinking so incredibly well already, this wine, with the ripeness of the 2020 vintage, was one of the crowds’ absolute favourites on the night. (96+/100 Greg Sherwood MW)

The last pair featured the well-priced Domaine Bizot Le Chapitre Rouge 2020 and the Grand Vin of Jean-Yves’s range, his Echezeaux Grand Cru. The Chapitre 2020 shared many similarities with the delightful Vosne Romanee 2020 without being quite as powerful and intense but perhaps, slightly more perfumed and ethereal. What this pair of 2020 reds certainly proved was how well they were drinking on the eve of their 6th anniversary. Certainly no rush, but a beautifully elegant wine. (95/100 Greg Sherwood MW).

Last but not least, the Echezeaux Grand Cru, one of the wines that has helped put Jean Yves on the global “most collectable” Burgundy map. As per my barrel tasting last year, a uniquely impressive expression but perhaps just 5% behind the Bidaude 2023 in both aromatic power and fruit intensity. But the brooding depth might make this the dark horse of the vintage for a late resurgence. (97/100 Greg Sherwood MW)

While Jean-Yves might not have been there to share some of his own vinous treats, the evening nevertheless ended with one of his favourite sweet wines, the Vin de Constance 2017, a wine I tasted again earlier in the year with winemaker Matt Day at Klein Constantia during a vertical tasting. This is a bright, intense, seductive sweet wine that wears its greatness with effortless ease. A delicious end to a memorable evening of fine food and wine. (97/100 Greg Sherwood MW).

The wines of Domaine Jean-Yves Bizot are imported exclusively into the UK by Musigny Wines. Contact them to request an allocation.

Andrew@musigny.wine

A recent November 2024 visit to the cellars of Jean-Yves Bizot was undoubtedly the highlight of a week of 2023 En-primeur barrel tastings in Burgundy ahead of the new release campaign starting in January 2025. Domaine Bizot will not offer their 2023s for many more months, preferring to release their exceptional red and white wines after longer élévages and after the wines have already been bottled, as is becoming the trend with most top end producers in Burgundy.

So, there was of course a lot of excitement when it was announced that Victor Mignardot, the Assistant Commercial at Domaine Bizot, would be coming to London in late December to host an exclusive private client tasting with their UK importer Musigny. The wines of Domaine Bizot are widely regarded as the pinnacle of premium quality red Burgundy with global collectors and connoisseurs chasing the meagre allocations of Jean-Yves’s wines that are released annually.

Tasting with Jean-Yves in Vosne Romanee November 2024.

With wines as collectable and sought-after as Domaine Bizot, Jean-Yves and his numerous global agents must work very fastidiously to make sure the wines reach the cellars of the most deserving collectors rather than letting the wines merely disappear into the black hole of wine investment portfolios. Part of this process naturally involves tasting new and archive releases in person with as many loyal collectors of the wines as possible, and I was very fortunate to be invited to join one such gathering at the exceptional London Michelin Star restaurant, Chez Bruce, to sample a selection of back vintages of Domaine Bizot’s wines but also to retaste the first ever public showing of Jean-Yves’s maiden release Charlemagne 2022 that is now bottled and scheduled to be offered in global markets in early 2025.

After several bottles of delicious Bollinger RD 2002 to clear the palate, the first flight of whites was poured, namely the Domaine Bizot Bourgogne Blanc Les Violettes 2019 and the Charlemagne Grand Cru 2022. The Les Violettes is made from a small 0.16-hectare parcel of Chardonnay just near the Bizot winery in Vosne Romanée, but which can only be classified as humble Bourgogne Blanc within this red appellation. Fabulously taut and linear, the Les Violettes displayed a taut structure and steely power way above any Bourgogne level wine, and the 2019 was incredibly youthful and crystalline with a pronounced limestone minerality, crisp bracing acids together with a seamless pear and pithy white citrus concentration. Really very special, but sadly only made in incredibly small quantities, so a real privilege to taste. (96/100 GSMW)

The second white was the highly anticipated Domaine Bizot Charlemagne 2022 that I last tasted and reviewed from barrel in January 2024. This was, at the time, a wine that redefined premium white Burgundy wine quality for me, coming from two small plots of 0.14 hectares in the famed Le Charlemagne vineyard. As Victor mentioned, when Jean-Yves bought the two plots, the vines were fortunately in very good health, allowing for a wine of exceptional quality to be made without the need for extensive regenerative vineyard work. Tasting this incredible wine once again, I was so pleased to see all the complex traits I described in my original barrel note, (see here…https://gregsherwoodmw.com/2024/03/04/domaine-jean-yves-bizot-prepares-to-release-its-maiden-corton-charlemagne-grand-cru-2022-from-le-charlemagne/) but now all just a little more polished and integrated as a finished bottled wine. The clients tasting this wine were literally speechless, the complexity on the nose and palate simply astonishing, the power, poise, and concentration unlike anything anyone had ever tasted from Burgundy, let alone Corton-Charlemagne. The closest we could get to a fair comparison from elsewhere in Burgundy was perhaps identifying several similarities with a top-notch vintage of Chevalier-Montrachet Grand Cru, as both wines share an incredible limestone minerality. I am very happy to elevate my barrel score from a potential 99-100/100 to a solid, unequivocal 100/100 GSMW.

After the mind-blowing Charlemagne, the first of the reds was poured to transition to the Pinot Noirs with main courses. Once again, another exceptional new wine, a joint venture between Jean-Yves Bizot and Le Clos des Fées called Domaine du Clos des Fées ‘100 Phrases Pour Eventails’ Pinot Noir 2022, the third release from this IGP Cotes Catalanes project. This was my first tasting encounter with this wine that I have been hearing about for the past two years: Seductive opulence with a ripeness and density of black berry fruits offering aromas that are incredibly pristine, pure, and fragrant showing notes of lavender, black currant, black cherry, damson plum, cured meats and savoury black fruits with a subtle tilled earth complexity. The texture resonates true class, being creamy and plush with delightful hints of garrigue, black plums, and raisined black cherry framed by silky creamy tannins with gun smoke, graphite, and peppercorn spice on the finish. You can taste the sunshine and ripeness, but the fruit purity and precision are exceptional. A real beauty. (96/100 GSMW)

The final flight was another impressive selection of benchmark Pinot Noirs, two beautiful back vintages from Domaine Bizot accompanied by a Domaine Dujac Clos de la Roche Grand Cru 2007. With the collectability of Domaine Bizot’s wines reaching fever pitch globally, any opportunity to taste slightly more mature back vintages is an enticing proposition. The Domaine Bizot Vosne Romanée Village 2014 was initially tight and a little broody, offering up earthy forest floor aromatics, Christmas spices, and bramble berry fruits. But before long, the wine really started to fan its peacock tail, boasting delicately perfumed notes of pink musk, violets, and wild strawberries, beautifully balanced and seductively complex with a real translucent terroir quality. At 10 years old, there is still plenty of life ahead of this classy village wine. (95/100 GSMW)

The Vosne Romanée served as the perfect introduction to the next wine, Jean-Yves’s famed Domaine Bizot Echezeaux 2018, selected for its accessibility, generosity, and seductive depth of fruit. 2018, like 2023, was another one of the rare vintages that offered both quality and quantity. On the face of it, 2018 was a relatively straightforward vintage with a wet winter and spring topping up the vineyard water reserves, and a warm, sunny summer that ensured all the grapes reached optimal ripeness without difficulty. This Echezeaux 2018 was incredibly fresh and youthful with aromatics of saline crème de cassis, black cherry, nori seaweed, and strawberry compote. The palate was dense, broad, and fleshy, generously open and forthcoming, with creamy sweet tannins, a subtle underlying limestone minerality and a long, sleek, finish with a notable ripeness and concentration. While you can feel the ripeness of the warmer vintage, the purity of perfume and palate fruit is pinpoint and precise, with grapes picked just at the optimal time so as to be able to convey Jean-Yves’s style that is both terroir driven but incredible pure and precise with all the requisite wound spring tension you’d expect on a Grand Cru red of this pedigree. This was an utter joy to drink already. (97/100 GSMW)