Mark Colin, Hubert Lamy

St-Aubin isn't quite as grand a village as either Puligny or Chassagne. They haven't had the builders in yet and anyway the houses aren't as big. We had a convivial dinner in a village house here last November. You might even go so far as to call the village a little run down. But, they have great community spirit - St Vincent this year promises to be a major knees up and if you don't appear rich the taxman doesn't look so hard. That's the theory.

We don't get a visual idea of Damien's crop this year as we meet him in the Marc Colin cellar/tasting room under the house. But it's certainly small and a rueful Damien tells us of the frost in May, the outbreaks of hail, and the final harvest, 40% down on normal. One wonders if the authorities will permit the erection of hail netting à la Mendoza in Argentina.

Pull up at Domaine Lamy and if he's in you'll find Olivier doing something strenuous in the yard or detailed in the cellar and if he's out, he'll be in a vineyard, equally hands-on. This is the opposite of the Goldman Sachs vineyard owning dream, where the owner is only there when the sun shines and invisible workers do all the work. This is the first vintage in which we've had the opportunity to work with this much lauded domaine and have an allocation of just one wine.

You'll have to check back to yesterday or look to tomorrow if you fancy Puligny. What little we had didn't make it to this offer. As is normal, most of our Puligny comes from producers outside the village. Puligny is a funny place with most of the production controlled by large outside negociants. /CW