You are looking at a wine list in Central and there are three white Burgundies from Chassagne-Montrachet on it. All three carry the same surname. The prices are eight hundred, twelve hundred and two thousand dollars. A reasonable person concludes these are three tiers from one producer, and orders accordingly.
They are three different producers, unconnected in any commercial sense, who happen to be relatives. This is not an edge case in Burgundy. It is how the region works, and it catches out people who have been buying wine for years.
Why the same name appears on unrelated labels
French inheritance law does not permit a parent to leave the whole estate to one child. Vineyards get divided between heirs. Do that for four or five generations and a holding that was once forty hectares becomes a patchwork of two-hectare estates, each run separately, each entitled to use the family name.
The fragmentation goes further than most people realise. A single named vineyard in the Cote d'Or can have dozens of owners, each with a few rows. Two bottles can carry an identical vineyard name, an identical village and an identical vintage, and be entirely different wines made by different people from vines that happen to sit side by side.
Then a second thing happens. Each new generation makes its own choices, and those choices matter more than the shared surname. When to pick, which is really a decision about how much acidity to keep. How much new oak, and how heavily toasted. Whether to stir the lees, which builds texture and weight. How long before bottling. Two cousins working adjacent rows can produce wines that taste nothing alike, and both are being honest.
So the surname on a Burgundy label tells you about family history. It tells you almost nothing about what is in the bottle. The full name matters, and so does the year the domaine was founded.
The producer
Joseph Colin is among the most recent of the Chassagne Colins to set up on his own, having founded his domaine in the late 2010s with a share of family vines and added parcels since. He is not Marc Colin. He is not Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey. He is not Bruno Colin or Philippe Colin. The families are related; the wines are not. Same village, same surname, different addresses, different cellars, different bottles.
The style, across the range, leans towards tension rather than richness: picking early enough to hold acidity, restrained use of new oak, whites that arrive taut and open with a year or two in bottle.
What we have
Nearly all of it is white, and the range climbs by appellation rather than by ambition. The Joseph Colin collection lists everything, sorted by price with the lowest first.
The base is Bourgogne Aligote Les Jardins de la Cote 2021, around three hundred. Aligote is Burgundy's other white grape, sharper and more citric than Chardonnay, and it has spent decades being treated as an afterthought. From a serious producer it is one of the best-value whites in France.
The working middle of the range is Saint-Aubin, and this is the part worth understanding. Saint-Aubin sits in a fold in the hills directly behind Chassagne and Puligny. The vineyards are steeper and cooler, the wines are leaner and more mineral, and because the village never became famous the premier crus cost what village wines cost next door. Sous Roche Dumay 2022 sits around seven hundred and forty, and La Chateniere 2022 around eight hundred and forty.
Then the famous villages. Chassagne Montrachet Hereditas 2022, near eight hundred and forty, is the home village: broader, rounder, more obviously generous. Puligny Montrachet Le Trezin 2022, around nine hundred and seventy, is the tighter, more linear neighbour. At the top, Puligny Montrachet 1er Cru La Garenne 2022 sits near nineteen hundred.
What we would pick, and why
Sous Roche Dumay is our pick of the range, and it is deliberately not the expensive one. A premier cru from a real slope, made by a producer who is farming it rather than buying it, for less than a village wine in the next commune. In 2022, a warm and generous year, it has enough flesh to drink now without losing the cut that makes Saint-Aubin worth buying.
If you want the fuller wine for a table with roast chicken or steamed fish in a rich sauce, Hereditas is the one. Chassagne carries more weight than Puligny and copes better with food that has some fat in it.
The La Garenne is a very good wine and we would still tell most people to leave it alone for three or four years. La Garenne is one of the higher, cooler premier crus in Puligny and it does not give much away young.
Where the extra money stops buying flavour
Between the Aligote and the Saint-Aubin premier crus, every dollar buys something you can taste. Between Saint-Aubin and Puligny premier cru, the picture changes. You are buying length, precision and the ability to age for a decade. Those are real, but they are not more flavour, and on a Tuesday evening with a table of friends they may not register at all.
There is also the gifting question, which in Hong Kong is not trivial. Puligny-Montrachet reads instantly to anyone who knows wine. Saint-Aubin does not. If the bottle is a gift and the recipient will look at the label, the premium buys recognition and that is a legitimate thing to buy. If the bottle is for your own table, the recognition is worth nothing and the Saint-Aubin is the smarter purchase.
One last piece of practical advice. When you next see a Colin on a list, read the whole name before you order. It is the difference between two very different bottles at the same price.