Agnès Paquet, patience as a signature

Some wines give themselves away at once; others ask to be waited for. The Patience cuvée from Domaine Agnès Paquet belongs to the second family — and for once, the name is not a marketing find, but an exact description of the method.

Agnès Paquet was not destined for the vine. A business-school graduate, she made the leap in 2000 by buying three hectares from her parents around Meloisey, in the Hautes-Côtes de Beaune. What began as a gamble has become, in a little over twenty years, one of the most endearing estates of the Côte de Beaune: reds on the fruit, taut whites, and a way of working that owes as much to observation as to tradition — harvesting into twelve-kilo crates, punching down by foot, fermentations in large-format barrels, very little new oak.

Les Hoz, the founding plot

It all starts from one place. Les Hoz: five hectares in a single block on the hamlet of Melin, in Auxey-Duresses, facing due south, on a very chalky soil with deep white earth. This is the estate's founding plot, planted partly in pinot noir, partly in chardonnay. Those chardonnays were put in the ground at the start of the last century: they are now nearing ninety years old, from an era when people still spoke of mass selection — a practice Agnès Paquet has taken up again herself, after years of clones, replanting from these old vines.

Patience: twenty-seven months of ageing

The Patience cuvée was born in 2006, from a simple intuition: to give this chardonnay the time to grow. It comes from just a few ares, planted on a slope in a cool combe, right by a stream — a microclimate that preserves acidity where the due-south exposure pushes towards ripeness.

Ageing is the heart of the matter. Twenty-seven months in all: twenty-four in 350-litre barrels, with a small proportion of new oak, then three months in stainless steel before bottling. That is long, very long for a white Burgundy. Long enough, in any case, for the wine to pass the test of controlled ageing and emerge with something more than fruit: texture, depth, a register of yellow fruits, white flowers and gentle spices that was not there at the start. Each edition carries its number — the n°15 corresponds to the 2022 vintage, available in bottle and magnum.

The rest of the range

Patience is the tip of the iceberg, not the whole of it. I also offer the Auxey-Duresses "Les Hoz" in both colours: the white, from the same old chardonnays but aged only twelve months, without bâtonnage, more direct and more vivid; the red, from pinots planted in the 1950s, vinified in concrete vats and punched down by foot.

The Bourgogne Hautes-Côtes de Beaune, red and white, are the estate's entry point — and one of its finest surprises. Lastly the Aliboitboit, a sparkling wine made by the ancestral method, bottled before fermentation is complete, ten degrees and full of mischief.