2016 Beaune Grèves 1er Cru

Domaine de Montille normally harvests for fresh acidity, said winemaker Brian Sieve, and he and owner Etienne de Montille started bringing in their red grapes on September 21 in ’16, with potential alcohol levels between 12.3% and 12.7%. But they declassified any vineyards that carried only secondary buds and actually chaptalized less than they had in 2015. Sieve reduced the percentage of whole-cluster fermentation from recent vintages and did what he described as very little extraction. “The wines have gotten fresher and brighter than we would have thought at the beginning,” he told me in November, adding that the team made 13 separate treatments against mildew and oidium from May through the end of July.

Sieve has backed off on total maceration time in recent vintages (it’s now around 17 days, vs. 20 previously) and does not believe in post-maceration fermentation. Beginning with the 2015 crop, he has also reduced the number of pigeages. He describes himself as “more pragmatic about the use of whole clusters than Etienne," adding that Etienne’s father Hubert “always had a recipe of 50% vendange entier, except for some 100% experiments in the late ‘90s.”

Incidentally, the 2015s here were filtered because the high percentage of whole clusters used to ferment the wines resulted in a bit more turbidity than winemaker Sieve was comfortable with. But he noted that the estate's lenticular filtration system gives extra flexibility, allowing them to preserve texture and structure in the finished wines by not having to force the wines through a membrane filter.