2023 Chambolle-Musigny Derrière La Grange 1er Cru

Fabien Amiot-Servelle greeted me at the Domaine’s new winery on the outskirts of Chambolle-Musigny. As is customary, we had a natter, during which I discovered that he, like yours truly, had spent time living in Japan. In fact, it was there that he realized that he wanted to join his family in making wine. As I have written previously, when I first began visiting this address, they were working in cramped conditions and were overdue for modernization. Now ensconced in their new capacious facility, they can start really realizing the potential of their enviable array of holdings.

“We are happy with the 2023s,” he tells me. “Pruning and de-budding were the key. In 2022, we lost 50% due to the hailstorm in June, but we resisted temptation to compensate for that shortfall and kept eight buds per vine. When the season started, you could already see that there were a lot of bunches, so we were a bit stronger on the de-budding, which is always a risk. You never know what might happen. In 2023, we did all the treatments during the night that made us more efficient with sulfur usage, as the high daytime temperature can mean that it burns the leaves. Our tractor looked like the car from Knight Rider! There was no disease, which would have been a risk given the volume of fruit.”

Amiot-Servelle continues, “We were supposed to start the harvest on September 5 or 6, but when we did the analyses, the potential alcohol was 11.5%, so we decided to postpone a week. We gained 1.6 to 1.8 degrees in that time which is a lot. Usually, it would be a degree. We started with the Bourgogne Rouge on September 14 when it was hot and sunny, but we had to find a new team of pickers as the team had gone away. We used 15 rather than 25 pickers, so it was a bit stressful. Also, other growers had started picking while we were waiting. We are usually one of the first. However, we know that we can pick in six days as we have just under eight hectares. People were telling me to be careful about rot. You just have to trust your instincts. We did not have so much [fruit] to sort, and our vibrating table eradicated any dried berries, leaves etc. The yields are around 95% of the maximum, around 46 hl/ha. The risk in 2023 was to overproduce. Some vineyards I saw had 20 to 25 bunches on the vine. We used partial whole bunch, though the size of vats limited the amount we could use for some cuvées.”