2016 Mazy-Chambertin Grand Cru

I tasted this year with Eric Rousseau’s daughter Cyrielle, who has degrees in geology, viticulture and enology as well as work experience in Oregon, Australia and New Zealand. She joined her father at the family domain in 2012.

As has been widely reported, this estate lost two-thirds of their Chambertin production to frost in 2016, a rarity for this great grand cru vineyard (their adjacent Clos de Bèze was barely touched). Damage was most severe in the upper portion of the vineyard. The Rousseaus also lost a good bit of their Clos Saint-Jacques fruit as the lower half of this vineyard suffered from the frost, but the rest of their vineyards basically escaped this severe weather event.

The estate started harvesting on September 23, bringing in their fruit with potential alcohol between 12.8% and 13% and chaptalizing by just a few tenths of a degree. The fermentations were very easy, according to Cyrielle Rousseau, but because they took a while to begin, the maximum temperatures in the tanks were only about 30 degrees C., which she feels helped to preserve the vintage’s fruit. Rousseau noted that pHs in 2016 are in the 3.6 to 3.65 range, similar to those in 2015. But the wines are quite different, she added: “The 2016s talk but the 2015s yell, so the earlier vintage is harder to understand.” The ‘15s also appeared to be in the process of shutting down in bottle in January, but this is clearly a great vintage chez Rousseau, and the ‘16s may well be in the same quality league.

Incidentally, Cyrielle told me that Eric Rousseau essentially pays no attention to the phases of the moon when deciding when to rack and to bottle his wines. As a skeptic rather than a true believer, I found this now-minority view refreshing. “It’s more a question of when he can’t work in the vineyards,” she explained, adding that the parcel of vines they manage for the new owner of the Château de Gevrey-Chambertin, from which they make a separate village wine, the Gevrey-Chambertin Clos du Chateau, is farmed biodynamically.