trust your wine people

I bought this bottle because Vanessa Harris posted one on Instagram.

That is the whole origin story. Vanessa co-owned and ran Beso Bar & Bottle here in Lake Oswego, one of the best wine bars this town has had. The room closed last October with a Portland move in the works, which is our loss and Portland's gain. If she is drinking something, my working assumption is that I should be drinking it too. No algorithm sent me here. No shelf talker. Just somebody whose palate I trust holding up a glass. I went looking for it and found it at Barbur World Foods, which is a Mediterranean market with a deli counter and a wine section that has no business being as good as it is. Add that to the list of people to trust.

The bottle: Antoine Lepetit de la Bigne, Bourgogne Aligoté Jeunes Vignes, 2024. Lepetit spent years at Domaine Leflaive, which is roughly the white Burgundy equivalent of putting Cooperstown on your resume, and he now farms biodynamically under his own label. The point being: this is a serious winemaker who decided to take the unserious grape seriously.

the grape nobody bothers with

Burgundy has two white grapes. Everyone can name the first one. Aligoté is the other one, and for about a century it was treated as filler, the stuff you planted on the flat land nobody wanted and then drowned in crème de cassis to make a kir. That is not a slight on the grape. That is a slight on where it was planted and how little anyone cared.

Put it on real limestone, farm it properly, keep the oak out of the way, and it does something Chardonnay mostly cannot: it stays nervous. Citrus pith, wet chalk, a saline thing on the back end, and acid that stands straight up. There is a whole appellation, Bouzeron, that exists solely for Aligoté, which tells you somebody figured this out a long time ago.

I opened this one straight out of the fridge and it was tight and a little mean. That is on me, not the wine. Twenty minutes on the counter and it unwound completely, went round in the middle, and turned into something I did not want to stop drinking. If you take one thing from this post: fridge-cold is about 38°F and this style wants 50 to 55°F. Pull it early. Same bottle, entirely different wine.

what I'm buying next

Aligoté is having a moment and it is still the best value in Burgundy, mostly in the $25 to $40 range. The list I am working through:

- Sylvain Pataille in Marsannay. The reference point. Start with the straight Bourgogne Aligoté, then chase the single vineyards. - Aubert & Pamela de Villaine, Bouzeron. The people who basically rescued the grape's reputation. Textbook version. - Alice et Olivier de Moor. Chablis-based, low intervention, wilder and more tense. Closest in spirit to the bottle above. - Claire Naudin, Clou 34. Zero sulfur, a little feral. The one for when you want an edge. - **Lepetit's own Vieilles Vignes. Same hands, older vines, more depth. The obvious next step.

And if Aligoté is nowhere to be found on your shelf, the same lane runs through Muscadet sur lie from Pépière or Luneau-Papin (absurd value at $18 to $22**), Chablis from Pattes Loup or Moreau-Naudet, and Jacquère out of Savoie. Lean, chalky, high acid, no makeup.

So: find the people whose taste you trust and then actually act on it. Vanessa posted a bottle. I chased it down. Best white I have had all year, and I would have walked right past it otherwise.