2021 Montrachet Grand Cru

Winemaker Damien Colin had recently received South African winemaker/deity Eben Sadie at his winery. This shows that Sadie has good taste in Burgundy, which you can observe by the dozens of bottles decorating his tasting room in Swartland. I hope Colin enjoys the Columella that he left as a gift. This was back to the full complement after frost depleted and extinguished some cuvées last year. “It is a vintage that saw just a little frost in Saint-Aubin in Montceau, where we lost just 15% or so,” he tells me. “It was a vintage when it was easy to work in the vines without much mildew but always with a risk of oïdium, so you had to be quite vigilant. Saint-Aubin is prone to oïdium. We started picking on August 25, the earliest ever. We picked quite quickly over six days because ripeness was already there across all our vineyards, commencing with the Les Vides Bourses, which is always the most precocious. Compare this with 2021, that took two weeks to pick. There is a lot of discussion about when to harvest. For us, we pick a little earlier to maintain the freshness and maintain alcohol around 12.5% and 13.0%. The yield was around 45hL/ha across all the appellation, so we went back to 12 months in barrel (a maximum 25% new oak for the Premier Crus from four cooperages) and then six months in vat. None of the wines are bottled yet. The reds will be bottled in November or December, the whites in January or February. We use the second winter to clarify the wines. I like this vintage because you can see the differences between the terroirs, I think more so than in 2020 as the maturity was a little richer.”

This is a seriously impressive portfolio from Colin, a winemaker with that magic touch. Highlights include a thrilling Chassagne Les Vides-Bourses and En Cailleret, plus wonderful wines from Saint-Aubin En Montceau, La Chatenière and Les Combes—also his Puligny Les Enseignières, just in case Coche-Dury’s is outside your budget.

Damien Marc Colin is my first port of call during my Burgundy “marathon” on a beautiful sunny autumn morning down in the village of Gamay. “It was a vintage where we had a lot of frost damage – we lost 55%. With the small cuvées, we were obliged to blend these to create a Premier Cru in Saint-Aubin and Chassagne-Montrachet. There were sometimes just one or two barrels in the most affected vineyards. For Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru, we blended Champ-Gain and Caillerets, and there are five or six in the one for Saint-Aubin. It is a vintage where the maturity was 12.5% natural with a higher acidity than in recent years. I think the vintage has lots of fruit and will be easy to drink; overall, it may be better than I expected. The acidity is around 3.15 to 3.20, but the pH has changed significantly. In the case we have a canicule [drought], we have low malic but high tartaric, the acidity staying high after the malo, however with 2021, there was a lot of malic (4g/L), so this total acidity fell after malo, and the wines are more flattering. For 2022, for example, we have 2g/L with more tartaric. In 2021, the temperatures were lower in the summer with more rain, though it was not difficult to reach maturity as we had a much smaller volume. We started the picking around 18 September compared to 25 August in 2022. There were no problems with the vinification, the alcoholic and malolactic fermentation both in barrel, the former taking longer because we use no SO2. This means there is a higher population of different yeasts than a dominant one, which prolongs the fermentation. We add SO2 after the malo and just prior to bottling. We will mature the 2021s for 12 months in barrel (four cooperages nowadays, whereas there were a dozen used a few years ago) and then six months in tank before bottling. The wines are much clearer today, so we do not do any filtration or fining, which can detract from some detail. I wanted to make a vintage like 2006 and 2014, but it’s a very different vintage, as the 2021 gives much more pleasure. There are Grand Crus this year: 180 liters for Bâtard-Montrachet and 200 liters of Montrachet - though they were more difficult to vinify due to the tiny quantities. For the reds, the volumes were normal as the later-ripening Pinot Noir was less touched by the frost.”