JCB No. 69 Crémant de Bourgogne Rosé NV
£17.75
The wine
A lovely pale pink colour, with forest fruits and nuances of rose on the nose.
Sparkling rosé is usually made by blending a little red wine into the base before the second fermentation, which gives more control over colour than skin contact would. Crémant de Bourgogne is made by the traditional method, with the second fermentation in bottle and long lees ageing, exactly as in Champagne, from Burgundian Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. It is the most sensible sparkling wine bargain in France, made a hundred miles from Champagne with the same grapes and the same technique.
The producer
JCB by Jean-Charles Boisset
View all JCB by Jean-Charles Boisset winesJean-Charles Boisset was born into one of Burgundy's great winemaking families. With his sister Nathalie and their parents Jean-Claude and Claudine, he is proprietor of more than twenty estates across the world's pre-eminent wine regions, among them Jean-Claude Boisset and Château de Pierreux in Burgundy and De Loach in Sonoma.
The JCB label is his own, and it is deliberately unlike the family's estate wines. The bottlings are numbered rather than named, presented with a designer's eye, and drawn from both Burgundy and California, which reflects a career spent moving between the two. The approach has attracted comment, not all of it kind, but the wines are made seriously and the sourcing is genuine.
What connects the range is a preference for sites over labels. Boisset has been an early and consistent advocate of biodynamic farming across the family holdings, at a scale that made the argument harder to dismiss, and the winemaking favours gravity handling and restrained extraction. Whatever one makes of the presentation, the underlying philosophy is orthodox Burgundian: the vineyard decides, and the cellar tries not to get in the way.
