2023 Gevrey-Chambertin Aux Combottes 1er Cru

Cyprien Arlaud welcomed me at his estate. As usual, I always have trouble with the electronic gate that does not want me to enter. Eventually, I broke through and could admire his new tasting room with its splendid arched window and chapel-like wooden beams on the ceiling. Arlaud is fastidious at every stage of the winemaking process. He is arching the canes (tressage) in the Bonnes-Mares and expanded that across all his Grand and Premier Crus in 2024. He told me that the higher trellising provides more shade.

“I consider it to be a regular vintage if you made good choices, if you are ‘awake’ in the vineyard,” Arlaud tells me. “You had to manage the yield. Every step from flowering made the vine ‘generous.’ The last green harvest that we conducted was in 2014 because biodynamic farming regulates the yield. However, one of the consequences of global warming is that it pushes yields higher, so we did one green harvest in July and the other after véraison in August, from Grand Cru to Village Cru. We did not drop bunches onto the floor but removed them in buckets.”

He continued, “There was no surprise [in terms of volume] at harvest, which started on September 7 in the Côte de Beaune and the following day in the Côte de Nuits. We only picked in the mornings and used equipment to cool the bunches. For some wines, like the Bonnes-Mares and Clos de la Roche, we did two different pickings and vinifications according to the size of the crop and the speed of ripeness, then blended them together. We sorted both in the vineyard and at reception this year, so we had to train the pickers to do that. This meant I did not have to reduce the percentage of stems, a minimum of 30% whole bunch up to 100%. There is no chaptalization, around 13.2% for the Grand Cru and 13.8% for the Premier Crus. In 2023, you get the ripeness of the tannins with the delicacy of a cool vintage. It is difficult to compare with other vintages.”

Readers will be aware of that in my 2020 Burgfest report. Arlaud’s 2020s did not show well. This prompted him to analyze all the wines. He also told me how all cuvées are checked for volatility, active Brettanomyces levels and so forth. Kudos to him for being so rigorous and not simply ignoring the comments from that blind tasting. He informed me that there is below 30mg total of SO2 at bottling and around 15-17 mg of free SO2.