2020 Corton-Charlemagne Grand Cru

Bonneau du Martray now prefers to show finished wines rather than wines in barrel, so I did not taste the 2023s on my most recent visit. The bottled 2022s are excellent, but they are also a bit more reserved post-bottling than they were last year. Technical Director Emmanuel Hautus continues to give these wines greater precision through a focus on parcel-by-parcel vinification, experimentation with larger-format oak and the selection of coopers based on the style of individual vintages. I’ve included a handful of notes for older vintages that I tasted in two recent visits that aren’t quite enough for a stand-alone report.

Four years have passed since I last visited the most famous estate in Pernand-Vergelesses with the largest slice of Corton-Charlemagne: Domaine Bonneau du Martray. I meet with cellar-master Emmanuel Hautus and commercial director Thibault Jacquet, and they give me a short tour of the winery. With their billionaire owner, there is no shortage of gadgetry for Hautus and his team to experiment with, clay jars, stainless-steel barrels, concrete eggs, various-sized oak barrels and so forth. The mantra here is one of quality, though that did not spare them in 2021. However, on this occasion, we skip back a vintage to examine 2020 in bottle.

“I have good memories of this vintage,” Thibault tells me. “The flowering went very well. We picked from 26 August with the Pinots in the morning at the bottom of the hill until 30 August. We stopped and then restarted on 4 September with a large crew, picking 1.5 hectares per day for the Corton-Charlemagne. We learned after the 2018 vintage and are now more precise with picking dates. Today, we have the means to taste all the blocks during the harvest. That is vital in the future with global warming. We had to do the fermentation quickly. We work with less sulfur; ideally, we want the malo to start in the spring after the harvest, though sometimes it starts during the alcoholic fermentation which can be disruptive. We are looking for wines with texture. For the red, we are harvesting a little later than we used to. We are using terracotta amphorae, 3-5%. We are using a new de-stemmer positioned at the beginning of the sorting table instead of the end.”

I find much to praise with what comes across as a taut and surprisingly tensile 2020 Corton-Charlemagne, befitting such a noble terroir. I must say. However, I can’t make head nor tail of the 2020 Le Corton, which comes with a pungent nose instantly identifiable as Thai fish oil, vegetal notes hot on its tail on the palate that might be understandable in 2021, yet vexing in a warm season like 2020. I get the sense that they are still working out an approach to their vines, a modus operandi that will see through thick and thin for the red. But the white, the banner cru at the end of the day, appears to be heading in the right direction.