2010 Corton-Charlemagne Grand Cru

Mounir Saouma noted that there are similarities between the 2011 and 2010 white Burgundies. But the 2011s, despite hot weather during the harvest, are not as ripe as the '10s, he told me, adding that most of his 2011s were chaptalized "for the only time since 1999." A problem in 2011 was that because so many wineries were warm in November, a lot of wines finished their malos before Christmas. Not so in Saouma's cellar, where he turned on the A.C., added 10 milligrams of SO2, and drastically slowed down both the alcoholic and malolactic fermentations. He kept all the wines on their lees and did not make another sulfur addition until two weeks before my visit at the beginning of June; he did not plan to rack the wines until August. I have also provided notes on a number of Saouma's 2010s, which were bottled between August and October of 2012. Saouma describes 2010 as "a concentrated vintage that made elegant wines, never heavy. The 2008s and 2005s will be more locked up in the early years than the 2010s."

The 2010s(!) had been moved to tank barely ten days before my visit, where they will remain with their lees for the next two months. At that point, winemaker Mounir Saouma planned to bottle them in two flights. Saouma describes 2010 as an exceptional year i"n terms of providing the ideal climatic conditions to make long-aging wines." Acidity levels in the post-malo wines are in the healthy 4 to 4.5 grams-per-liter range, including those with highish pHs. "The numbers don't reflect the strength of the acidity," Saouma explained. "The crop levels in 2010 were very low and we decided to make the fermentations suffer," he went on. "We put the barrels in our cellar at 7 to 10 degrees Centigrade from November through July, and even as of December of 2011 none of the malos had started yet. At the same period we still had 8 wines with between 5 and 15 grams of residual sugar. We then moved the wines to the middle level of our cellar and set the temperature at 15 degrees. Nothing happened until the middle of March, when all the wines started moving. All the fermentations finished within the next three weeks. And we didn't add any sulfur until last month. The 2010 whites came through many dangerous stages, and they will live forever," he concluded. Incidentally, Saouma told me he begins with anywhere between 7 and 10 liters of lees per barrel and ends up with 3 liters 20 months later, with the wines absorbing the rest. This is obviously one of the keys to the vibrancy and density of the Lucien Le Moine whites. The 2010s here should be extraordinary.

Proprietor Mounir Saouma thinks 2010 is a great vintage and therefore he wanted to push the boundaries as far as possible by slowing down the maturation of the wines. He kept temperatures very low in the cellar to encourage slow, long malolactic fermentations and long elevage in barrel. Among the unusual practices Saouma adopted with the 2010s is stirring the lees a full year after the harvest. At the time of my visit, in July 2012, none of the 2010 whites had been bottled, the only estate in Burgundy I know of that had still not bottled their 2010s. The wines Le Moine 2010s are big, rich and powerful. In many cases, the 2010s appear to have structures that are in the realm of reds. A number of the wines also show slight elements of botrytis that will become more pronounced over time. In addition to these wines, I also tasted the 2010 Chassagne-Montrachet Morgeot, which was too closed to properly evaluate.