Open a Burgundy list and the same village name will appear six or seven times, at six or seven different prices, with a different producer in front of each one. Chassagne-Montrachet at HK$450 and Chassagne-Montrachet at HK$4,500. Nothing on the label explains the gap, and the reasonable conclusion is that one of them is a rip-off. Usually neither is. The two bottles are not really the same product with different markups. They are wine from different fields.
Burgundy is sold by plot, not by estate. In Bordeaux, a chateau is a property with a boundary fence, and the wine inside the bottle comes from land that one owner controls. In Burgundy, the named thing is the ground itself. A vineyard called Les Vergers is a piece of hillside with an official boundary drawn around it, and anybody who owns rows inside that boundary may put the name on a label. The estate is a tenant of the name, not the owner of it.
How the map got shredded
This happened by inheritance law. After the Revolution, French succession rules required land to be split among all children rather than handed whole to the eldest. Do that for six generations and a vineyard one family farmed in 1790 becomes eighty separate holdings, some of them a few rows wide. Clos de Vougeot, fifty hectares, has around eighty owners. Some make wine that will be argued about for thirty years. Some sell their grapes and never bottle at all.
Two consequences follow, and they matter more than any tasting note. First, quality in Burgundy is decided at the level of the family, not the village, so learning village names gets you less far than learning producer names. Second, the famous villages carry a premium that has nothing to do with the wine in front of you. The name Puligny-Montrachet is worth money on its own. The name Santenay is not.
Which brings us to Santenay
Santenay sits at the far southern end of the Cote de Beaune, where the slope runs out and the tourists turn around. Domaine Rene Lequin-Colin is based there. The family has farmed the area for generations, and like most Burgundy families their holdings are scattered rather than consolidated: rows in Santenay, rows across the boundary in Chassagne-Montrachet, a plot in Pommard, and a small piece of Corton-Charlemagne at the top.
The useful thing about that shape is that the same hands, the same press and the same barrels are behind all of it. The cheap bottle and the expensive bottle from this address differ in where the grapes grew, not in how much attention they received. That is not true everywhere, and it is the single strongest argument for buying a whole range from one family rather than one bottle each from ten.
What we have
The Domaine Rene Lequin-Colin range works as a ladder with four rungs, and it is worth climbing rather than jumping.
The bottom rung is regional Bourgogne. The Bourgogne Aligote at around HK$200 is not Chardonnay at all but Burgundy's second white grape, sharper and more citric, historically the thing locals drank. The Bourgogne Chardonnay sits at a similar price and is the clearest look at the house style you can buy.
The second rung is the reds. Santenay 1er Cru La Comme at around HK$370 is premier cru land in the home village. Pommard Les Noizons at around HK$400 is a different animal, broader and more solid, because Pommard is.
The third rung is the Chassagne-Montrachet premier cru whites, around HK$680 to HK$790, each one a named slope. The Morgeot is the broadest of them. At the top sits Corton-Charlemagne, grand cru, around HK$1,780, and there is very little of it anywhere.
What we would pick, and why
The Bourgogne Chardonnay, first, and not as a consolation prize. At around HK$200 it is the same grower's Chardonnay grown on flatter land, and it does the thing that makes white Burgundy worth the fuss: weight without sweetness, and a finish that keeps going after the fruit stops. If you are trying to work out whether you like this producer, buy two of these before you buy one of anything else.
Santenay 1er Cru La Comme, second. Red Burgundy under HK$400 that is genuinely premier cru is a narrow category, and it exists here only because the village name does not command a premium. Pinot Noir grown on this part of the slope has a firmer, more earthbound character than the perfumed style people expect, which suits a table with roast meat on it rather than a tasting flight.
Morgeot, third, if the occasion justifies it. It is the Chassagne that gives the most immediately, which makes it the sensible one to open within the next two or three years rather than store.
Where the money stops buying flavour
Above the Chassagne premiers crus, the price is buying scarcity and the capacity to age, and neither of those is a flavour you can taste on Tuesday. Corton-Charlemagne opened young is a real waste: tight, closed, and considerably less enjoyable than the HK$200 bottle sitting next to it. It needs five years minimum, and in Hong Kong that means five years in a temperature-controlled cabinet, not on top of a wardrobe in Tai Koo. A flat that reaches 30 degrees in August will finish a grand cru in two summers.
Nor is this range the right answer if the bottle has a social job to do. Burgundy that a banquet table recognises means Puligny, Meursault, Gevrey, and preferably a name from a magazine. Santenay recognises nobody. If you are buying to be seen buying, this is the wrong producer, and there is nothing wrong with admitting that is sometimes the requirement.
What this range is for is drinking. On that measure the bottom two rungs are the best value the domaine makes, and the top rung is a bet on your own patience.