2015 Louis Latour Puligny Montrachet Sous Le Puits 1er Cru 750 ml

1er Cru Puligny Dream Bottle

The greatest white wines in the world are made on the hillsides above three tiny hamlets, mere miles from each other. Meursault, Chassagne-Montrachet, and Puligny-Montrachet are home to cellars that hold priceless Chardonnays locked in suspended golden animation. Today’s stunning, golden Louis Latour 1er Cru “Sous Le Puits” was ranked as one of James Suckling’s top five greatest Puligny-Montrachets of 2015. He called it “incredibly perfumed” and awarded it 93 points. The others on his list — from the likes of Lucien Le Moine and Olivier Leflaive — will run you at least $100 a pop. This excellent white Burgundy costs $100 elsewhere, but from Wine Access today you can add it to your collection for just $79.99.

Today, practically every noteworthy producer sells out on release. Importers worldwide vie for allocations that are counted in bottles, not cases. In the U.S., nearly all the Premier Cru and Grand Cru white Burgundies are ticketed for the likes of Le Bernardin, Daniel, and Per Se in NYC or The French Laundry in Yountville, where they fetch $150 to $5,000 a bottle.

Despite all of our friendships on the Côte de Beaune, in recent vintages we’ve struggled to eke out tiny allocations of the great white Burgundies of Puligny-Montrachet, given the punishingly low yields. So when a mere 15 cases from the hands of Latour winemaker Jean-Charles Thomas came up for grabs, we didn’t take any chances.

“Sous Le Puits” sits at Puligny-Montrachet’s highest elevation, on top of a hill near the Blagny hamlet and a stone’s throw from Meursault. The soil is deep clay and limestone, responsible for what Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate has described as the complex “mineral vocabulary” of the site. Vines 35 years of age on average enjoy a warm south-easterly aspect, the thin surface layer of pebbles absorbing the sun’s rays and regulating temperature in chilly spring months.

The wines of “Sous Le Puits” are typically known for their crisp acidity and intellectual reserve, often requiring a few years to unfurl their full richness. That’s what makes this 2015 effort so special. At Vinous, Stephen Tanzer wrote that 2015’s warm, dry growing season “yielded Burgundy’s fleshiest, most opulent white wines since at least 2009.” Latour’s Thomas reported that fruit quality was so good, sorting tables were not needed, and that once a spell of blistering heat broke at the end of August, conditions were idyllic.

As a result, this is one of the most extroverted, immediately accessible wines ever to come off the site. If you love white Burgundy and have been waiting for the right moment, you won’t have to think twice about this one. Just 15 cases to go around.