2021 Morey-Saint-Denis La Forge de Tart 1er Cru

After tasting through the 2021 and 2022s with winemaker Alessandro Noli, I wasn’t a happy puppy. Why? The stemware. Not fit for purpose. The glass rim was too thick, blurring the aromatics, heightening the tannins and dulling the wines. “Do you have any other glassware?” I ask impertinently, though judging by his expression, Noli has similar concerns. Repouring the Clos de Tart into superior stemware (Sydonios), the difference is unequivocal. It’s a different wine. I’m not surprised. I think Noli is taken aback. I would not be surprised if he took all their glasses and chucked them away. Suffice it to say; quality stemware is crucial if examining the anatomy of nascent wines, amateur or professional.

With that out the way, Noli talked about the 2022 vintage. “It was an easy, dry growing season, but not like 2020,” he tells me in one of the smartest tasting rooms in the Côte d’Or. “We started the harvest on August 26 and picked over the following five and a half days. We cropped at 28hL/ha because of the small size of grapes and lack of juice. To put that into figures, in 2022, we needed 395kg of grapes to fill barrels instead of an average of around 350kg. We did a four-day cold pre-fermentation soak, and we did one foulage [crushing the berries] quite early in the vinification in order to gain finer tannins and low alcohol. At a density of 1,020, I try not to do anything anymore, and I prefer to play with the vin de presse.”

With the refitting now complete, this is the first time I tasted in Clos de Tart’s swish new upper floor tasting room that affords a wonderful panorama across the monopole. I meet with winemaker Alessandro Noli and Frédéric Engerer, who survived the previous day’s La Paulée in Meursault. “The growing season was really tough with the three nights of frost,” Noli explains. “We could manage the problem using double that number of candles normally used across the entire vineyard as we knew there would be three consecutive nights of frost. We did 14 treatments in the vineyard using artisan teas and copper. You had to keep going back into the vines after 48 hours – you could never stop. In the end, we cropped at 26hL/ha compared to 33hL/ha in 2022, which is reputed to be a generous crop. We started picking on 20 September and picked over the next five and a half days.”