The 2001 Gaunoux Pommard Les Perrières magnum is the oldest and most mature example in this producer’s series of Premier Cru magnums offered across this catalogue, providing collectors with a unique opportunity to assess what the combination of the estate’s traditional winemaking philosophy and the Les Perrières terroir achieves with over two decades of magnum development. The 2001 Burgundy vintage produced red wines of a pleasant, early-maturing character across the Côte de Beaune; less powerful than the celebrated 1999 and 2002 flanking it, but endowed with the charm and accessibility of a warmer year that has consistently proved to drink well with moderate cellaring. In the magnum format from a producer of Gaunoux’s traditional approach, the 2001 will have spent more than twenty years in the larger bottle, accumulating a level of tertiary complexity and integration that is exceptionally rare outside a fine private cellar.

A Pommard Premier Cru Les Perrières from a small traditional estate in the magnum format with twenty-four years of bottle age represents a genuinely unusual proposition: the kind of mature, evolved red Burgundy that most collectors can only access through auction at substantial premiums from well-known estates. Gaunoux’s 2001 provides this experience of fully matured Premier Cru Pommard from the estate’s best vineyard in a format whose ideal conditions have ensured the wine’s structural integrity alongside its extended tertiary development. The Les Perrières site’s mineral character and natural acidity, even in a warm year like 2001, should have preserved the wine’s freshness well into its third decade in magnum.

For collectors seeking the specific experience of fully mature, long-aged red Burgundy from a traditional small estate with documented provenance and the structural insurance of the magnum format, the 2001 Gaunoux Les Perrières provides an unusually accessible route to this category of wine experience. It is not the structured, cellarworthy proposition of the 2014 or 2018 magnums; it is a wine for drinking now, with pleasure and curiosity about how this site and producer have evolved over two decades.

Mature garnet with a fully evolved nose of dried cherry, iron, leather, dried herbs, autumn forest floor, mushroom and a fine mineral thread from the Les Perrières limestone. Medium-bodied with fully resolved tannins, excellent residual acidity from the limestone terroir and a long, savoury, complex finish of genuine old Burgundy character. Drink now; best through 2028.