1995 Nuits-Saint-Georges Clos Des Argillieres

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.