Like many growers in the villages of the Côte d'Or, Claudine Blain has the history and traditions of Burgundy in her veins: She is the daughter of Jacques and Josèphe Gagnard and the granddaughter of Edmond Delagrange, and her family maintains the well-established Gagnard-Delagrange property. Claudine and her husband, Jean-Marc Blain, manage the Blain-Gagnard estate. Thirty-five percent of the estate's wine is sold to négociants. The rest of the white wine is put in Alliers oak (about one-third new) and bottled after 14-16 months in a cask. The red wines use the same percentage of new oak but age in a cask for 18 months before bottling. Blain believes in mixing wines from vines of different ages to capture the fruit of the younger vines as well as the richness of the older vines. Concentrated, low-yield wines in limited production. Essential burgundies for those who like rich but subtle wines.
Chassagne’s 1er Cru Les Caillerets is noted for the large numbers of limestone rocks called cailloux which litter the surface of the soils. Sitting at the northern end of the village, Les Caillerets sits on a bedrock of dense limestone marble, as can be seen in the quarry just above the vineyard site.
There is a whiff of the exotic on the white and yellow peach, citrus, and floral-inflected aromas. The texture of the medium-bodied flavours is at once rich but sleek with excellent minerality on the impressively persistent finale. I quite like this, and it should amply repay extended keeping.