2022 Vosne-Romanée Village

“There was no big challenge,” Louis Michel Liger-Belair tells me with typical sangfroid as he arranges a multitude of pre-prepared half-bottles on the table. Of course, there are more than there were last year: entering a long-term métayage agreement with Nathalie Pacareau of Domaine Lamarche adds notable cuvées such as Vosne-Romanée Clos Rameau and Grands-Echézeaux to what was already one of the Côte d’Or’s most stellar portfolios in. Plus, unlike in 2021, his hand was not forced by the frost-afflicted growing season to blend his lieux-dits together into a generic Vosne Premier Cru.

“We had a pretty generous vintage,” he continues. “You can have a good vintage with quantity. I enjoyed the harvest. We picked from August 30, when the holidays are finished, but you still have summer weather, which means you could have a good time with the pickers [e.g., enjoying a nice cool beer after a hard day’s work]. In 2023, we picked five days later and it was too cool at night to have a drink. We had our three kids here with their friends, and that changed the ambiance. It’s the first year with all the cooling system in the winery that gives the wines a bit more roundness. It’s an easier way of working, instead of using the big machines we had in the past. The major change was the increase of 40% of the production with the additional new vineyards as well as an increase in the size of existing vineyards. We use a different team for the Bourgogne wines and use my dedicated team for the 10 hectares. The wines came in at 12.8% to 13.8%, a little higher for the younger vines. The malo went pretty quickly because the malic levels were pretty low. Some of the 2022s have already been racked. I’m not sure if we need a too-long aging in barrel to keep the freshness.” Let’s not beat about the bush; these are not inexpensive wines. On the other hand, they can be astonishingly good and in my opinion, there has been some fine-tuning, especially in terms of the élevage, that has taken the wines to a higher level than a decade ago.