The 2014 Viré-Clessé offers up a classic bouquet of yellow orchard fruit, honeycomb and white flowers, followed by a medium to full-bodied, textural and expansive palate with excellent concentration and cut. Decanting Valette's wines is always strongly recommended, and as it unfurls with aeration the wine becomes purer, more complex and simply more and more exciting. After 12 hours in a decanter, the wine was fresher than when I opened it.

Smoky oak and ripe pears can be discerned in the aromatic profile of the broad, expansive 2004 Vire-Clesse. Jam-packed with pears and apples that are spiced with dried honey as well as anise, this concentrated effort is oily-textured and long in the finish. Projected maturity: 2007-2012. Visiting the Valette family, whose home/estate is perched on Chaintre’s hillside affording views of the Saone valley (all the way to the Alps), is always a fascinating adventure. Ever since the family patriarch, Gerard Valette, left the local coop, he and his family have been fiercely independent, bucking both viticultural and winemaking traditions. For example, when all their neighbors had finished harvesting the 2003s, the Valettes were waiting for the fruit to be ripe, and when all their neighbors had bottled and shipped their 2004s, the Valettes’ were still undergoing elevage. Sadly, this outstanding, iconoclastic estate, whose offerings grace the finest restaurant wine lists in France, is no longer imported into the United States.No American importer.