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Ballot-Millot & Fils

Although I have been tasting Charles Ballot’s wines for a number of years, not least at the annual Burgfest blind tasting, I had never set foot in the Domaine. Time to put that right! Greeting me at the Domaine in Meursault, once I had navigated the roadworks determined to thwart my visit by any means possible, we entered his barrel cellar for the tasting. Ballot is an amiable, chatty man; his English honed working in New Zealand, where he learned much about making wine without sulfur and premature oxidation. “We are not organic or lutte raisonée,” he tells me. “We apply only copper and sulfur in the vineyard with no chemicals or herbicides. We want to keep the grass [as a cover crop] most of the year, so we stop working the soil in the middle of July and start working it when the soil is warmer. We don’t want to activate the vines too early. We’ve done that for 30 years now, keeping the soil aerated, which is very important for me. You can see the enhanced complexity of vegetal matter in terms of the vivacity of the vines. I am interested in biodynamics, but I want to maintain flexibility. I started the picking on August 25 and finished on August 31, the first time that we finished that month. Usually, I don’t start particularly early as I wait for phenolic maturity. We’re a big team, so we try to pick within six days. We press whole bunch as much as possible and transfer into tank for a light settling, then transfer directly into barrel for fermentation using natural yeasts with no enzyme addition and without lees-stirring. After 12 months, the whites are racked into tank for another five months, always with the fine lees. We de-stemmed all the reds, except for the Pommard, and there is only one pump-over per day to a maximum of 27° Celsius.”

Ballot’s wines performed strongly in a recent Burgfest blind tasting, so I expected good things. I was not disappointed. From his outstanding Meursault Genevrières that had the audacity to outsmart his Les Perrières to an impressive Meursault Narvaux, there is much on offer here. The reds don’t quite match the caliber of the whites; however, the Pommard Les Pezerolles is worth hunting down.

From Now, For My Latest Trick: Burgundy 2022 (Jan 2024) by Neal Martin

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