Ambassade de Bourgogne Redux and Le Petite Verdot, Paris

When emerging from a week's total Burgundy immersion, it's important, I think not to come back to reality too quickly. Tasting a few Burgundies can help ...

Philippe and Lin of Ambassade de Bourgogne are great guys and will talk to you about Burgundy for as long as you want. Fortunately, their wine menu had turned over since last week, so Mark and I had ...

• 2011 Les Héritiers du Comte Lafon Mâcon-Chardonnay Clos de la Crochette

  France, Burgundy, Mâconnais, Mâcon-Chardonnay

  Comte Lafon couldn't make a bad Chardonnay if they tried. Light colour. A nose of fresh, bright lemon, orchard stonefruit, some white peach, minerals and chalk. On palate, racy acids, bright fruit, flavours of lemon and pear, wet limestone with good minerality. It put on weight considerably with the food. Straightforward but enjoyable. I imagine it would cellar in the medium term.

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• 2010 Domaine Daniel Rion et Fils Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru Les Chaumes

  France, Burgundy, Côte de Nuits, Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru

  The nose here also shows freshness and bright acids with the red fruits more raspberry or cranberry than plums, with some spice. Real matière on palate, with some acidity, but relatively soft, almost like secondary development. Good, nice savouriness I liked with a core of smaller red berries and some spice on palate. Not a typical Vosne. Drinking well now, but, obviously, this wine has the stuffing to cellar for 10 years at least.

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• 2008 Simon Bize Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru Les Fournaux

  France, Burgundy, Côte de Beaune, Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru

  Deep red colour. A bouquet of Asian spice, bramble, savoury plums and other red fruit. Fairly soft and rounded on palate. Savoury with the flavours, to my palate, more black than red fruit, with a hint of underbrush. Below medium weight, but with good power, reasonably lean. I suspect this would be a good wine to cellar for the medium term, when it may show greater complexity on palate.

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For a restaurant, Philippe recommended Jeremy's place - Le Coq de la Maison Blanche - as having the cheapest Coche-Dury in Paris but I did not want to go that far from the centre of Paris. He also recommended ...

Le Petit Verdot
There they do traditional French cooking as only Japanese chefs can. For a bistro, the food, service and atmosphere was excellent, as is the wine list ...

We had a bottle of the 2011 Comte Lafon above. We also ordered the third-to-last bottle in the restaurant of:

• 1998 Bonneau du Martray Corton

  France, Burgundy, Côte de Beaune, Corton Grand Cru

  Deep garnet colour. A lovely nose of bright, ripe dark fruits, with some spice and musk and aromas of warm earth. Secondary elements are just beginning on bouquet, with hints of liqueur and black pepper. On palate, there is real power, structure and concentration here. A lot of dry extract and weight of ripe fruit with the sleek, fine grained tannins well integrated and resolved. Hedonistic. The flavours were red and black fruits, with a chunk of earth, some tobacco and a little red berry liqueur. Perhaps not the most complex in terms of flavour, but giving a lot of pleasure now. It needs a lot of oxygen. The acids are still fairly prominent, not fully resolved, but these were gone with my steak dish. Mark was very impressed by this wine, tempted to call it his wine of the tour. Drinking beautifully now but there is no hurry to drink this.

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Here's the website: http://www.le-petit-verdot.com