2017 Bienvenue-Bâtard-Montrachet Grand Cru

This is another domaine that I have followed for a few years. The winery is in the misleadingly titled village of Gamay, not far from Domaine Marc Colin. Jean-Claude Bachelet passed the domaine to his sons Benoît and Jean-Baptiste, who I met early one foggy October morning, Benoît busy in the cellar and Jean-Baptiste, having picked the short straw, escorting me through their wines. Most of their holdings centre on Saint-Aubin, although there are several other crus in Chassagne-Montrachet and Puligny-Montrachet covering around 10 hectares in total. The Bachelets apply organic viticulture, though without formal certification. They practice natural vinification and usually the wines are matured for around 18 months on the fine lees.

“After the 2016 vintage, 2017 was very hard, but we avoided damage,” Jean-Baptiste told me. “We burned candles to ward off the frost for two weeks. I did not sleep a lot. We had to check the vines at two o’clock in the morning and decide whether to light the candles. You cannot afford to light them the entire night, so the timing is very important. If you burn them all on the first night then you no longer have protection. Les Frionnes is very sensitive and there we burned [the candles] for two or three nights. There was one night when we went into Blanchot-Dessus at three o’clock in the morning and we could see that the ground was already white. We thought it would be worse than in 2016. But by the morning it was 1° Celsius and there was no damage. It is difficult to predict. Then there was pressure of mildew after the rain, which was complicated as we only use organic sprays to protect the vines. We have to be sure to use the treatments carefully, though now we have experience about when to use them. The flowering was fine, though the reds were a bit later than usual, so the yields are smaller. We started the harvest on August 30 just for the parcels in Saint-Aubin En Remilly, Blanchots-Dessus and Bienvenue and then started again on September 2. The sanitary conditions were very good and the vinification was normal. We let the juice oxidize under the press and added SO2 at the end in order to eliminate the components sensitive to oxidation during the settling. We do this each year. The quality is homogenous, alcohol levels between 12.6° and 13.3°, so we just chaptalised a little. The pH is about 3.2-3.25 and the malic acid level a little higher than 2018, tartaric around 6gm/L. In the end we were 80% to 85% of a normal crop for the whites. The wines are all in barrel and they will be blended mid-February and bottled at the end of July. The wines are bottled under natural cork, though we are doing some tests with DIAM. All the corks are analyzed by the manufacturer for TCA.”

This was generally a strong set of wines from the domaine, one of the most reliable that I have come across in Saint-Aubin. In that appellation, the Les Champlots and En Remilly shine the most, whilst the Chassagne-Montrachet Blanchot-Dessus is probably the pick if you cannot find any of the 600 bottles of Bienvenue-Bâtard-Montrachet. Bachelet wines are usually fuller in style than some of their peers, always with good weight and presence, but their use of wood is always respectful to the fruit and therefore the terroir is nearly always translated in the glass. Moreover, they often represent good value compared to others.