“Show Your Arse” (2020), Chateau de Marsannay

This wine I bought because of its silly name and obscure classification. Also, I visited the Château many years ago.

The 3.50ha lieu-dit is found at the extreme northern point of the Côte de Nuits. So far north, in fact, that historically it was considered part of the "Côte Dijonnais" – which is a more-or-less defunct term since houses and industrial estates were built over most of the vineyards during the late eigteenth and early nineteenth century. Dr Jules Lavalle, in 1855 lamented the loss of the vast vineyards that had been there "hardly a century ago" and that the remaining ones had been planted with Gamay with "Les Marcs-d'Or, Les Violettes and Montrecul [being] nearly alone a witness to [the area's] former reputation". At that time, En Montrecul was famed for its "Pinot Blanc" (which may well have actually been Chardonnay as historical cépage naming was somewhat flexible) which apparently were "equal of the good wines of Meursault" and Camille Rodier noted that it was a very good accompaniment to snails.

Today, as you can see from my pictures, it is planted with Pinot Noir.

The name of the vineyard comes from a combination of its proximity to Dijon and the steepness of the slope. Being close to the city meant that the vineyards could be worked by the women who lived there. More distant vineyards had to be worked by men who would stay nearby overnight, whereas the women needed to be home to run their households and this vineyard was close enough to allow that.

Being thus worked by women, and being a steep slope meant that anyone walking along the road at the lower edge of the vineyard could see the arses of the women working the fields up their skirts as they bent down to work the vines; hence the name "show your arse". Whether this was literally true or simply hyperbole I will leave to the reader to deduce.

Alas it was this proximity to the city that drove down the quality of the wine – more productive Gamay was planted to make lots of cheap wine for city workers, rather than fine Pinot, and eventually the reputation was lost, the prices dropped and the land was worth more for development than for viticulture.

As to the wine itself, I can see why this is classified as "Bourgogne" (albeit one of the few entitled to show a lieudit on the label) rather than being encompassed to the Marsannay communal appellation like its Côte Dijonnais neighbour Le Chapître has recently been. The wine is good at this level, with black fruits on the nose – blackcurrant and blackberry with a little cherry and light spice. The body is fairly robust with nice tannins, although it presents as if it were from a hotter year than 2020: I would have guessed 2018 if blinded. The wine is young – 48h open recorked in the fridge hasn't really changed it a huge deal so maybe this will gain complexity over the next few years. After all Lavalle does state that the neighbouring vineyards needed age to shine (remember that he couldn't taste Montrecul rouge as it didn't exist back then) and that this requirement for ageing was hurting them commercially.

9700 bottles produced in 2020, £26 The Wine Society, my first bottle from Château de Marsannay since visiting for a tasting with a now-long-ex-girlfriend in circa 2012. I even still have the branded tasting glass you can see in the first picture although the wine tastes significantly better from my Spiegelau Definition Burgundy bowl. It's like the difference between mono and stereo recordings of the same song.