Jean Claude Rateau, Beaune Premier Cru, Les Bressandes Rouge 2019 - 75cl

Jean-Claude Rateau did something in 1979 that nobody else in Burgundy was doing. He tore up the chemical rulebook and farmed his family vines biodynamically, the first vigneron in the region to make that leap. Forty-odd years on, the early conviction reads less like eccentricity and more like foresight. His holdings sit on the slopes above Beaune, and Les Bressandes is one of the better-regarded premier crus here, a steep, due-east parcel that catches the morning sun and ripens Pinot Noir cleanly.

2019 was a warm, generous year across the Cote, and you feel it in the depth of fruit without any sense of overripeness. Give the wine an hour in the glass. Straight from the bottle it can show a little of that savoury, biodynamic funk, then it settles into something properly complex: black cherry and dark berries, violets, a thread of spice, and underneath it all a saline, almost stony minerality that keeps everything lifted.

The palate is lighter on its feet than the colour suggests, but there's real intensity to the red fruit, and the finish carries on well after you'd expect. This is a premier cru with structure to spare, and 2019 gave it the tannin and concentration to age. You could drink it now with plenty of air, but it will be more rewarding from 2025 through to the early 2030s.

How to Serve

Serve at around 16C in a Burgundy bowl to give the aromatics room. It's young and structured enough to benefit from a decant, ideally an hour ahead, which also helps blow off the reduction it tends to show on opening.

Where to Drink It

• Noble Rot, Lamb's Conduit Street: a Burgundy list that would treat this with the seriousness it deserves.
• Wiltons, Jermyn Street: classic British game to meet its structure head-on.
• Dandy on Maltby Street: the right room for a biodynamic, low-intervention Beaune.

Food Pairings

Roast duck breast, kept pink, with something earthy alongside, a mushroom and thyme gratin, say. Or hold it back for game season and pour it with roast partridge.