2015 Côte de Nuits Village Clos du Chapeau

Winemaker Geraldine Godot had a tough act to follow when she took over for Jacques Devauges at the end of 2014 (Devauges vinified the ‘14s) and, not surprisingly, she told me that she has introduced minimal changes here in the two vintages she has made. “If there’s any difference, it’s that Jacques had a certain protocol that he usually followed,” she told me,“ while I conduct the little steps based more on my feeling for the wines, which I taste nearly every day.” She did a total of only about three punchdowns per cuvée for the 2015s (and ‘16s) “to conserve color and structure,” noting that Devauges typically did more frequent pigeages.

The harvest at Domaine de l’Arlot started on September 3 in 2015 and, following a cold soak lasting five or six days, Godot used “just a bit” of chaptalization to prolong the fermentations. She told me that she finds a light struck-match reductive quality in some of the wines today that is protecting them against oxidation. In an explanation I also heard from several of her colleagues this fall, she suggested that that quality may be the result of the sulfur treatments that were necessary to battle oidium during late spring and early summer. The pHs in 2015 are in the range of 3.35 to 3.5.