Michel Mallard

For five generations Domaine Michel Mallard has been producing gorgeous wines in the Côte de Beaune, and virtually no one on these shores has ever encountered the wines. By way of introduction, then, here are a few quotes from the world's leading Burgundy authority:

"The Mallard wines are really quite good and almost completely unknown outside of Burgundy. I was impressed with what I found ... indeed Mallard is now one of the best domaines in Ladoix. I would observe that the quality at this domaine has skyrocketed in recent years and as the scores and comments confirm, not just for the reds, as the whites offer excellent quality and value." Allen Meadows, Burghound

The father and son team of Patrick and Michel Mallard jointly run the estate, which is named for Michel's grandfather. They own an impressive 27.17 acres of vines on the hill of Corton and the surrounding villages of Ladoix, Aloxe-Corton and Chorey-lès-Beaune -  including four exemplary Grand Crus.

Michel makes the wines, and he has an interesting side-hustle - he's also the winemaker for the revered Domaine d'Eugénie in Vosne-Romanée. (Locals will tell you, off the record, that his estate wines are better than what he makes for d'Eugénie, but I digress...)

One of the things that blew me away at Mallard is that they, by design, have older vintages for sale. Huge thanks to Michel's grandfather for starting the process - it takes guts to hang on to wines that you could be selling right away. They hold their wines for a long time before release (they won't even be releasing their high-end 2015 reds until fall 2018), and they routinely cellar decent quantities of much older things to release when the wines are fully mature. Michel explained that they (like me) find the fullest expression of beauty in wines that have been carefully stored and have reached new levels of maturity and complexity over years in the bottle.