- 90 points -

William Kelley, January 2021 (Vintage 2018)

he 2018 Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru Les Fournaux exhibits notes of cherries, berries and potpourri. Medium to full-bodied, velvety and supple, it's built around powdery, youthfully chewy tannins that lend the wine more obvious structure than its 2019 counterpart.

I can't remember tasting a more thrilling young vintage at Domaine Simon Bize. Certainly, the frost-depleted 2016s were brilliant, but those wines were more introverted from barrel and tank. The 2019s are concentrated, vibrant and strikingly perfumed, almost without exception soaring from the glass with captivatingly floral aromas. Chisa Bize and her team, in short, have excelled themselves, and this visit stood out as one of my finest tastings of the year. As ever, whole-cluster fermentation was the order of the day, with comparatively little pigeage—less than in 2018, a vintage revisited in bottle in the accompanying notes—to moderate extraction. I will be adding a case or two of the Bize 2019s to my personal cellar, and I warmly recommend readers to do the same.

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