2013 Nuits Saint-Georges Village

The use of cover crop made a big difference in 2013, said Pascal Lachaux, as the grass absorbed a good bit of the excess moisture in the soils during this late, rain-plagued growing season. "Ripeness took a long time to come," noted Lachaux, "and it did not come from sunshine." The wines, he added, are very precise. No doubt this is partly due to the fact that most of them were vinified with 30% or more whole clusters. Pascal's son Charles, who was behind the adoption of whole-cluster vinification beginning with the 2012 vintage, noted that extraction is now softer here ("we don't want to work the wines every day"), although the pre-fermentation cold maceration in 2013 lasted a day or two longer than usual. As a number of their colleagues on the Côte de Nuits reported, Arnoux père et fils told me they did little or no triage at harvest-time as they had already made a pass through the vines at the beginning of September to remove the unhealthy and underripe grapes. The malolactic fermentations finished late, mostly during the summer and into September, but the Vosne-Romanée Les Chaumes and the Clos Vougeot were just finishing up at the time of my early November visit.