2018 Nuits Saint-Georges Au Bas de Combe Vieilles Vignes

Week one. Day one. Visit one. I turned up 30 minutes early, catching Guillaume Tardy by surprise, but his 2018s and 2019s were waiting for me. He had only just finished picking his 2020s, pleased that it had yielded the same quantity as 2019. “For the 2019s we picked the grapes from 16 September. The harvest conditions were great, not too hot, around 28°C. It was very enjoyable. We had to wait longer to get the phenolic maturity so the sugar is a little higher than in 2018. But everything is fresher because the ripeness took longer to come than the previous year. In 2019, there were just a couple of spikes in temperature whereas in 2018 there was a longer period of warmth. The sugar levels were 13.8° to 14.2°, which is better than some other growers that picked of 15°. The pH is around 3.4 with fine tannins, total acidity around 3.5 to 3.8g/l. The fermentation was a bit crazy, the yeast had a lot of nutrients, so when the fermentation began, the density of the must-meter dropped from 1.070 of sugar to 1.010 in one night. I used temperature management to calm down the yeasts but you could see, it was like a volcano in the vats after pumping!”

I tasted the 2019s from one-year old barrels that had not been racked, as Tardy prefers to let wines rest on their lees. He commented that he appreciates the light bitterness in his wines when they are young, engendering a more classical style. The wines stay true to Tardy’s style, darker fruit and denser in structure than some of his peers. They appeal to those who appreciate their Pinot with more body, although they are not excessive. I was particularly taken with the 2019 Nuits Saint-Georges Au Bas de Combe this year, full of opulence and purity. The 2018s had been bottled in February and Tardy opined that they had lost some of their muscularity that had put him off last year. “They have calmed down,” he remarked. It was another Nuits Saint-Georges that caught my attention, but this time Tardy’s Aux Argillats. Finally, readers should note that next year there will be a new addition to the range after Tardy has a joint fermage with a friend on 1.3 hectares of Côtes de Nuits-Villages in Comblanchien.

Winemaker Guillaume Tardy always offers a candid perspective on the previous growing season. “The good point of the 2018 growing season was a lot of rain end of May and beginning of June that helped to keep feeding the vines until the harvest, since we had little rain in August, just a couple of showers. One week before the harvest we thought the berries were drying. There was some filitré [shriveled skins] and we thought there would be little juice. But it was the opposite. We started picking on 5 September, the same as in 2015, but the grapes were riper, around half a degree more alcohol. We picked the grapes between 13.2% and 13.5% and kept good freshness and average acidity. After malo the pH is between 3.4 and 3.6, total acidity between 3.4 and 3.8gm/L. It’s enough acidity to keep the balance and make sure the wines can age. The 2018 is more a "keeping" year than some 2015 and 2017s. These wines have good body. As there was more juice than usual I extracted a little less than 2017s, but to fill the middle palate we had to work a little as well, with a longer extraction period at 32°C and one pigeage less than last year. The tannins are more present on the 2018s so we have to be more patient. In a way I don’t recognise the 2018s as my style of wine whereas the 2017s are. At the beginning of the élevage we thought the 2018 would be like 2015 but the tannins are much stronger."