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Domaine Armand Rousseau

Cyrielle Rousseau and the family’s three lively canines welcomed me to the winery in Gevrey-Chambertin. As usual, colored plastic diamonds were placed on barrels where she would dip her pipette to extract their 2022s and presumably impart magic powers. Rousseau’s vines literally lay in the eye of the storm that targeted Gevrey at the end of June. “The lower cellar was flooded,” she tells me, like Arnaud Mortet a few days earlier, confirming that the local meteorological station’s equipment could not measure the exact amount due to the sheer scale of inundation. “It could have been up to 200mm of rain that day. This caused a lot of soil erosion, especially in Clos Saint-Jacques, Clos-de-Bèze and Charmes-Chambertin. We had to hire a digger and move 200 tonnes [yes, you read that correctly] back up the slope that was then spread by hand back underneath the vines. It took three people a fortnight to complete. But the rest of the season was dry, and we picked over nine days from 31 August. All the wines are de-stemmed with just a handful to enhance flow inside the vat.”

What can I say? If you like Rousseau (and your palate is malfunctioning if you don’t), you will adore the 2022s that enabled them to execute their ethereal, transparent winemaking style. The top cuvées are surfeit with complexity. Following the trend of recent years, the Chambertin Clos-de-Bèze has a haunting complexity, a wine befitting its reputation, closely followed by the almost Zen-like Ruchottes-Chambertin Clos des Ruchottes and a sterling Mazy-Chambertin. Rousseau’s wines can be approachable young, but rather than guzzling them in Beaune restaurants with barely months in bottle, as witnessed by a few people, stash them away in your cellar. Their deceiving longevity is legendary.

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

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2022 Gevrey-Chambertin Village

Color: Red

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