My Birthday Wine

“This is Chardonnay the way I like it.”

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I had a birthday this past Saturday, and I was in the mood for a good glass of white wine. I didn’t want a red wine, I didn’t want a pink wine, and I didn’t want a “wow” wine. I just wanted something good and white, and as Kim and I were browsing through the produce and wine departments at Westborn Market in Berkley that day, I found exactly what I was looking for.

We’ve been fans of Jean Manciat’s Mâcon-Charnay for many years. For the uninitiated, this is 100% Chardonnay, from one of the “lesser” appellations of Burgundy. We went through a lot of their Franclieu bottling back in the day, and I had been eyeing this one for a while, so it all seemed to come together as I finally took one from the shelf and added it to our cart. When I pulled the cork and poured myself a glass that evening, I was quite satisfied with the libation I had selected.
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A Right Tasty Mâcon-Villages

“This is pure Chardonnay, with no excessive oak bullshit to clutter things up.”

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Now that the weather has warmed to the point where my wife has followed through with her threat to turn on the air conditioning, our thoughts are turning more towards the appropriate seasonal wine selections. While dry rosé certainly hits the mark in that regard, we drink the pink stuff all year around. Our warm weather wines are more often white, and there is seemingly no end to the variety that can be found from all over the globe.

The last time I reviewed this wine, it was branded “Collovray & Terrier,” the names of the two families that own and operate Domaine des Deux Roches, in the southern Mâconnais. (They also have an operation in the Languedoc, the Domaine Altugnac.) Aside from the apparent rebranding, everything else seems much the same as it was in 2015, when I wrote the following: “Christian Collovray and Jean-Luc Terrier have been friends since childhood and shared the same passion for wines. Their friendship was further strengthened when they married sisters Brigitte and Florence, whose father was a winemaker. In 1986, they established the Domaine des Deux Roches, based in the village of Davayé in the Mâconnais; Christian takes care of the vines while Jean-Luc manages the cellar and the commercial end of the business, and Brigitte and Florence both hold administrative positions.

Christian’s son Julien Collovray joined the business in 2009, followed three years later by his wife, Caroline, and in 2019, Florence and Jean-Luc’s son, Pierre-Alexis Terrier. But for our purposes, what matters here is what’s in the bottle, which, from what I can gather, has also remained largely unchanged. The vines that produce the fruit are planted in the clay and limestone soils of Charnay, Davayé and Pierreclos, and fermentation and aging takes place entirely in stainless steel.
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