2018 Nuits Saint-Georges La Gerbotte

It is true that my appearance has altered in the last few months. Yes, I was wearing sunglasses when I arrived at Domaine de l'Arlot and greeted winemaker Géraldine with a jovial "Bonjour" and two "bissous" on each cheek. But I didn't expect her to not recognize me at all. Maybe I shall wear a name-tag. Given the traumatic growing season she experienced and that she was about to go on maternity leave, I can understand her mind might have been on other things. "The harvest began on 1 September in Suchots and Romanée-Saint-Vivant, finishing on 7 September. The whites take just a morning to pick. The season was special as we had big storms, two with hail in July that caused mudslides in the Clos des Fôrets. We had to take the mud back up the vineyard. It came up to your thighs if you stood in it. It all happened in 20 minutes whilst we were working at the Domaine. We saw the mud just coming down [the slope]. At first we thought we had lost 30% of production after these storms, but finally at the beginning of the harvest, some growers asked if we had some spare barrels and found that we needed them ourselves. So it was not so bad and finally we had the same volume as in 2017. We now look back at this episode as a kind of green harvest. That is because the grapes were more generous in the end. We had a good maturation so that the final alcohol was between 13% and 13.5%, the maximum in Clos des Fôrets and Romanée-Saint-Vivant." I tasted the 2018s in the Domaine's new tasting room from pre-blended sample bottles.