2015 Pommard La Levrière Vieilles Vignes

Thanks to their perennially low yields, Bernard and his son Loïc Dugat harvested in 2015 between September 5 and 10, bringing in their fruit with potential alcohol between 13% and 13.3% and doing no chaptalization. The estate-wide yield was just 22 hectoliters per hectare, less than that of the previous year owing to widespread coulure at flowering. Loïc, who has been working with his father for the past 20 years, officially assumed responsibility for vinification in 2015—not a bad vintage in which to start. He told me he’s looking to make “a less brutal style, with more minerality and roundness,” working with a high percentage of whole clusters, like his father did. But he noted that there has already been a lot of evolution here since 2010.

Dugat described 2015 as “almost exceptional,” noting that it's too early to make definitive judgments. “The wines lack nothing,” he went on. “They have concentration and balance, freshness and minerality. They’re ripe but not roasted, and the vines were not blocked by drought.” Dugat told me that the estate carries out its pigeages “by feeling: there’s no rule here.” The wines had been racked once, in late summer following the long malolactic fermentations, and they were still in barrels on their fine lees when I tasted them in early December.

Incidentally, although the Dugat wines are always deeply colored, my descriptions of their appearance are only approximate. Their gorgeous little vaulted cellar, built in the 11th and 12th centuries as part of a small abbey, is among the darkest in Burgundy (with Domaine Jean-Jacques Confuron’s barrel cellar probably the dimmest of all the estates I visit).