1996 Nuits-Saint-Georges Grandes Vignes

Patrice Rion made just half as much wine in '97 as in the copious '96 vintage, and had bottled his '97s in the weeks prior to my late-January visit. This is a good vintage with good sugars, says Rion: like a blend of '85 and '89. While the pHs are high, the wines have enough tannins to age. Rion kept the wines longer on their lees to enrich them and maintain freshness, and didn't rack until November. I did not taste the full range of '96s, but those that I did sample prove that this is a superb vintage for Rion. He compares them to his '90s, but doesn't believe they will close down in the same way. Rion habit of doing a batonnage prior to the start of the malolactic fermentation may have helped to enrich the '96s; the early stirring of the lees also seems to prevent later problems of reduction, adds Rion.

Patrice Rion, always experimenting, always seeking to improve his wines, has taken a series of steps in recent vintages to get more texture into his bottles. He now does two or three dodinages(stirring of the lees) prior to the malolactic fermentation, then leaves the wines on their lees longer following the end of malo (previously he racked right after the secondary fermentation ended). Following the '96 harvest, which featured a larger crop than usual, Rion did a relatively long cold maceration (seven or eight days). The wines benefitted from very slow malos, and had been racked for the first time just a couple weeks before my mid-November visit. Rion stopped pumping the must with the '96 vintage, instead racking by gravity using compressed air. Rion says that grape sugars and pHs were similar in '96 and '95, but that the vintages differ in style. 1995, he says, is classic, spicy, and in need of aging, while '96 produced more pleasant wines that will be easier to drink young but also have good aging potential. Rion, by the way, lost his old-vines Clos Vougeot following the '95 vintage, when the owner took back his land; but Rion had just purchased some Echezeaux the week before my visit.