2015 Pommard Les Pezerolles 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.

The 2015 reds from Etienne de Montille stood out in my fall tastings this year. Low yields and astute harvest timing (between September 2 and 8) provided what winemaker Brian Sieve described as “clean, healthy fruit with good phenolic ripeness." He went on: "We could do whatever we wanted in terms of extraction; we were able to hit the accelerator. We had zero disease pressure in 2015. Our biggest concern was having too much darker stone fruit flavors; we did not want to remake our 2009s.” Sieve added that the estate “picks on acidity.”

Sugar levels in the grapes were mostly between 12.5% and 12.8% and Sieve chaptalized lightly to extend the fermentations. “When the fruit is cold and hard, we look for whole-cluster maceration,” said Sieve. “We don't punch down at that point; we’re just worried about keeping the cap wet. In fact, we don’t start with punchdowns until the middle of the fermentations, after a cold soak of five or six days and foulage by foot during the early days of fermentation. Then we go to two pigeages per day during the active part of the fermentation, then back down to one a day—maybe 15 in total for each cuvée, with four or five foulages and three pumpovers.

Yields were in the range of 15 to 25 hectoliters per hectare, reflecting the lingering effects of hail during the previous three vintages, especially in the estate’s older vines. But Sieve noted that 2016 finally brought a healthy quantity of grapes: between 35 and 40 hectoliters per hectare. The 2015s finished their malolactic fermentations late, in August and September, and the wines were still in barriques, some of them racked. “They still need more time for a second élevage in barrels,” noted Sieve.