2019 Pommard 1er Cru

As usual, I tasted in Bouchard Pères & Fils subterranean tasting room, focusing on both whites and reds with head winemaker Frédéric Weber. “Personally, I love this vintage,” he told me. “The winter was dry, not so cold, with difficult periods during the spring with frost at the beginning of April. The flowering was difficult with cold weather and rain. We had a lot of coulure. The summer was very hot with a lot of hydric stress, so we did not de-leaf. We never had rain, unfortunately. We reached high maturity, but with the millerandage we kept the acidity with high levels of malic and tartaric acidity. We started picking on 11 September and finished 26 September. It was very long, as we had to adapt the harvest according to plots that needed to be picked quickly and others where we had to wait. Vinification was not so difficult. I just increased the percentage of whole clusters to enhance the freshness and elegance. There were a lot of tannins because of the thick skins, so I just wet the cap. The fermentation went well with no problem with the sugar. I used SO2 just after malolactic and just after racking, which is why I sometimes roll the barrels. For the whites, it was trickier because choosing the date of the harvest was difficult. I waited longer to obtain true maturity, but others picked sooner, which is frightening for me. Wines had a lot of density, quite 2015 in style. The millerandage and tartaric levels allowed me to keep the acidity. The whites are more closed and need more time, which is why the wine have not been racked. The whites remind me of the 1990 vintage and the reds...I really think it is like 1947 [I don’t think Weber oversaw that vintage, but I know what he means.] The alcohol levels are all over 14.0° with Chapelle-Chambertin and Clos-de-Bèze closer to 15°. The whites were cropped at 20-30hl/ha and for the reds it is 20-25hl/ha. That was a bad surprise as we saw the good number of grapes on the vine. The north wind just before the harvest reduced the amount of juice, which happened again in 2020. I didn’t do any acidification - I prefer to adjust the harvest date. The whites and reds will be bottled next year between February and May. I am not sure yet.”

This wide array of whites and reds vary in quality, though there are many excellent cuvées, among them a poised and complex Meursault Genevrières that ranks alongside Bouchard’s Les Perrières, a superb Beaune from the ever-reliable Les Grèves Vigne de L'Enfant Jesus 1er Cru, an exquisite Clos Vougeot and very impressive performances from Chapelle-Chambertin and Chambertin, the former from purchased fruit and the latter Bouchard’s own. Some inconsistencies creep in among the Village and Premier Crus where, maybe the acceleration of sugar on the eve of harvest posed unforeseen challenges in terms of logistics and timing, resulting in some cuvées unable to disguise some over-ripeness. In the case of the Beaune Les Teurons, there was a nagging greenness that implies that the phenolic ripeness was not quite synched with the analytical ripeness at time of picking. But overall, there are sufficient high quality wines to merit thorough investigation, plus they tend to be well priced compared to others.