Domaine Hubert Lamy Saint-Aubin La Princee, 2019, 75cl

Aromas of pear, freshly baked bread, lemon oil and bread dough introduce Lamy's 2019 Saint-Aubin La Princée, a medium to full-bodied, layered and incisive wine built around a racy spine of acidity and chalky extract. Concluding with a saline finish, this has turned out beautifully. This year, as a flurry of early December snow fell outside, Olivier Lamy opted to show his bottled 2019s rather than his 2020s from barrel—a choice I warmly endorse, as wines evolve slowly in these cold cellars, where larger vessels predominate and nothing is done to accelerate the maturation process. As I wrote last year, in 2019 yields chez Lamy were reduced by frost, averaging around 25 hectoliters per hectare; yet the wines aren't defined by frost as they were, for example, in 2016, when an abundance of second- and third-generation grapes complicated the choice of harvest date. In the same report, I described the wines as concentrated and textural, with prodigious levels of dry extract, and that was borne out in bottle: these are remarkable wines, built for the ages, and it's hard to think of anyone in the Côte d'Or who more fully realized the potential of the vintage in Chardonnay. As my notes attest, these are brilliant wines, and it hasn't happened by accident: rather, it's the fruit of 30 years' hard work. Olivier Lamy has conclusively smashed the glass ceiling that for so long has imposed upon the wines of Saint-Aubin. All the white wines are bottled under DIAM.