2014 Saint-Aubin En Remilly 1er Cru

“Two thousand fourteen is a classic vintage in the positive sense of the word,” said Marc Bachelet. “The wines have great texture and balance and plenty of dry extract, and they finish very dry. They're better balanced than the 2012s, which were from a tiny crop and were harder to vinify. Two thousand fourteen is our best vintage yet, along with 2010.” Marc and his brother Alexandre never crush their grapes but carry out a long pressurage.

The Bachelet brothers are happy with the 2014 vintage, which they said brought grapes with little juice and a lot of dry extract but fairly low potential alcohol levels in the 12% to 12.3% range (they chaptalized their wines to about 13%). But Alexandre noted that "today we can get surmaturité at 12.5% potential alcohol." According to Alexandre, he and his brother Marc stopped doing batonnage in 2009; as a result, he added, their wines are more precise nowadays but less accessible early. They have also steadily increased their use of 350-liter barrels, now utilizing this larger format for about two-thirds of their wines. As of 2013, they are now using wax to seal the their crus and have accordingly reduced the level of free sulfur at bottling to 35 parts per million.

Marc Bachelet described the 2013s as "elegant wines but less dense than the 2014s," asking rhetorically, "are the 2014s better? I don't know. Certainly the 2013s will taste good early."