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Domaine Hubert & Olivier Lamy

Like previous years, Olivier Lamy hosted a group tasting, thankfully a little smaller than one or two others. Prior to tasting, Lamy offered us a chance to snoop around his impressive, if half-built, tasting room that will provide visitors with a splendid vista across Saint-Aubin village and over the vineyards beyond. A huge expansion down in the barrel cellar, too, gives Lamy much more room to work. He assiduously left one of the walls exposed so that you can see and touch the complex stratified geology of the area.

Lamy is one of a few vignerons, along with Leflaive and Roulot, that no longer show their vintage in barrel, opting to pour the most recently bottled vintage. I detailed the stürm und drang of 2021 in last year’s report. Therefore, I shall not repeat it here. Suffice it to say that Lamy’s holdings were impacted to widely varying degrees, the hard limestone soils taking the brunt. Yet he still eked out his complete range of cuvées, albeit occasionally in drastically reduced quantities. “Some parcels on the mid-slope were cropped at just 10hL/ha,” he explains. “We de-bud the vines hard earlier in the season, during which we often had to work at weekends, including Sundays.” Lamy produces graphical data from the BIVB that suggests that the season could be seen as “normal” using some metrics. Certainly, he feels that 2021 separated those who spend time in the vines and those who do not, Lamy obviously in the former camp. He picked from September 17 to September 28 using a smaller team than usual. He conducted a 12-day cuvaison for the reds and a shorter élevage, using fewer whole bunches. Most of the wines come in between 12.5% and 13.0% alcohol, and they were bottled in July 2023, the second winter crucial in meliorating the wines.

This set of wines mocks the ill-informed traducing the 2021 vintage. That does not imply that everything came up smelling of roses. Some wines are patently better in other vintages and simply did the best that they could. Yet many are replete with tension and mineralité, at times as complex as their counterparts fortuitously born in more benevolent seasons. The core of Saint-Aubin Premier Crus vary in quality. At their best, you might call them serious, uncompromising wines that will appeal to hardcore Burgundy lovers - cerebral wines to light a dinner table demanding fermented grape juice of the highest order. One interesting aspect of the 2021s, a “perversion,” you might say, is that the frost impacted the Haut-Densité cuvées more than the regular ones since he increased planting density with younger vines that are more susceptible to the frost.

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

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2021 Bourgogne Les Chataigners

Color: White

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Domaine Hubert & Olivier Lamy

2021 Bourgogne Les Chataigners

2021 Santenay Blanc Clos des Gravières Vieilles Vignes

2021 Santenay Les Gravières 1er Cru

2021 Santenay Clos des Hâtes

2021 Santenay Clos des Gravières Vieilles Vignes

2021 Saint-Aubin La Princée

2021 Saint-Aubin Clos de la Chatenière 1er Cru

2021 Saint-Aubin Clos de Meix 1er Cru

2021 Saint-Aubin Derrière Chez Edouard 1er Cru

2021 Saint-Aubin Derrière Chez Edouard Haut Densité 1er Cru

2021 Saint-Aubin En Remilly 1er Cru

2021 Saint-Aubin Les Murgers des Dents de Chien 1er Cru

2021 Saint-Aubin Les Frionnes 1er Cru

2021 Saint-Aubin Rouge Derrière Chez Edouard 1er Cru

2021 Puligny-Montrachet Les Tremblots

2021 Puligny-Montrachet Les Tremblots Haut Densité

2021 Chassagne-Montrachet La Concis de Champs

2021 Chassagne-Montrachet Les Macherelles 1er Cru

2021 Chassagne-Montrachet Les Chaumées 1er Cru

2021 Chassagne-Montrachet Rouge La Goujonne

2021 Criots-Bâtard-Montrachet Grand Cru

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