2021 Vosne-Romanée Village

I enter Louis-Michel Liger-Belair’s La Cuverie for the first time. There’s no vat in sight, no hose to trip over. Why? Well, this is the opening day of the brand-new café, shop and wine bar, designed to give the village a much-needed centre-point, a pulse, a chance to drink the wines of the appellation (and not just Liger-Belair’s) in Vosne-Romanée and not afar. “Apart from this being the original name of the house, I called it La Cuverie, so if a winemaker’s spouse asks where he is, they can claim to be at ‘la cuverie’” he tells me with a smile. I have to say, it’s a fantastic venue, tasteful and long-overdue, and it was nice to see the Mugneret-Gibourg sisters enjoying lunch with their team in the other corner. Back to the 2021s…

“We only lost 40% in the Clos des Grande Vignes because we placed a fan in the middle to send the air around the vineyard instead of going up into the air,” he explains, which sounds completely logical. “It mixes up the air flows. It is also less time-consuming – the team cannot work three days in a row. We usually have one candle for 16 vines, but we used one every four. We picked from 24 September, which is different from picking in August. Workers don’t go out and have a drink. It changed the spirit of the harvest. There are no kids; the guys want to go back and see their families. Making wine becomes an obligation rather than pure pleasure. So I think it makes the wines a bit stricter. Frost and snow are crystal, and I feel the wines are crystalline, not voluptuous, like in 2019 and 2020. We are back to the great vintages of the 1970s to 1990s. Maybe it is close to 2001? It took me a long time to like the 2021 – tasting the wines in spring, I asked myself: Where is the wine? Even during the next harvest, I wasn’t sure…but now I can see their potential. The wines will be bottled after Christmas and later for the top cuvées. I’m not in a rush.”