2017 Corton-Charlemagne Grand Cru

Good things come to those who wait. And I waited a long time to visit Faiveley, where Erwan Faiveley received me at the winery in Nuits Saint-Georges. The timing could not have been better, since I had time to tour the new “38” vat room that Erwan suggests looks a bit like a railway station. Personally, I thought it was more a cross between St. Pancras and Canterbury Cathedral, but hey, that’s not a bad combination. Of course, Faiveley remains faithful to wooden vats, each tailored to the different size of their holdings. I asked if they estimated for two consecutive abundant vintages like 2017 and 2018, but Erwan assure me that they have capacity left over even after the vines’ generosity. After a quick tour of the huge barrel cellars housing both domaine and négociant wines, we repaired to the upper floor tasting room, where my tasting focused almost exclusively on their domaine -bottlings.

Jérôme Flous, who has headed up the winemaking team since 2007, joined us at the beginning of the tasting. He has changed the winemaking style, introducing more elegance and finesse to the previously austere, dense and occasionally unyielding wines. “I want to be reactive to Nature,” he told me, “and I want to adapt with the vintage. I don’t have any recipe. In the vineyard, our approach is lutte raisonée and organic, so, for example, we were organic in 2015 but not the two subsequent years. Our objective is to gain EVH certification next year, which means we do not use herbicides and insecticides, but we will protect against mildew. We have two hectares in Nuits Saint-Georges and in Les Damodes that are completely organic.” I enquired about the 2017 growing season. “There was a bit more rain in spring than usual, but the summer was drier than usual. Gevrey-Chambertin, Clos Vougeot and Chambolle-Musigny were the driest in 2017 but they performed very well. The 25mm of rain on August 30 and 31 was needed. We started picking the Chardonnay on September 1 and finished on September 5, commencing in the Côte de Nuits on September 6 and finishing on September 16. Then we picked quickly, because we were concerned that the acidity might fall too much. We used some whole bunches in 2017, except for Gevrey-Chambertin. Sometimes there is a problem with reduction because of the amount of SO2 used, so I want to be adaptable and use everything.”

I asked Erwan Faiveley for his opinion on the wines. Is it a bona fide great vintage? “The 2017 is a classic vintage,” he replied. “The wines are well balanced. I think it will be considered very good, maybe a little modern in style, like 2007 or 2011, but the wines are deeper and fresher than those. It’s a good vintage to drink. It is too heterogeneous to be classed as a great vintage. The Côte de Nuits is much stronger than the Côte de Beaune because the 2016 frost meant that some vineyards overproduced.”

I confess that though I have been drinking Faiveley’s wines for two decades, this was my first visit to the winery and so I am denied the broad context of other growers. That said, I was impressed by many of the domaine bottlings. I might be controversial in stating that I had a slight preference for the regular bottling of the Chambertin Clos de Bèze over the elusive Les Ouvrées Rodin, the former being just a little more elegant and poised. I adore the backbone and precision of the Latricières-Chambertin, and both the Echézeaux and the Clos de Vougeot are some of the best that I encountered during my visits. Of course, there is plenty to be found at the lower rungs of the hierarchy, especially their white and red Mercurey, which had just been bottled; it is perfect for drinking over the next three or four years.

Technical director Jérôme Flous, who has been working at Faiveley since 2007, thinks 2017 is the white wine vintage highest in dry extract since then; he compared these wines to the estate’s 2006s. “The trick was not to pick before the skins and seeds were ripe,” he told me in early June. “The grapes were better just after the rain at the end of August, but we had to pick soon, before sugars skyrocketed in the early September sunshine.” In fact, Faiveley brought in virtually all of their Chardonnay during the first five days of September, with potential alcohol levels between 13% and 14%, and Flous did not chaptalize. Levels of tartaric acidity were high owing to the dry August and were not really affected during the rains at the end of the month and beginning of September, he told me. In fact, noted Flous, the 2017 whites are “paradoxical in their concentration of fruit balanced by lively acidity. It’s a vintage that showed us that you can pick very early and make a minerally, strong-acid vintage.”

Flous emphasized that yields in the estate’s Chardonnay vineyards were lower than in their Pinot Noir parcels and much more homogeneous (“some Pinots may taste like syrup and water”), noting that the period of cold weather in late April had less of an effect on ultimate Pinot Noir production because these vines were less advanced at the time. He believes that the Chardonnays will need longer élevage than the Pinots, even though 2017 was a vintage with higher aromatic maturity in Chardonnay than either 2016 or 2015, due in part to less stress in the vines. He summarized: “We had perfect phenolic maturity and the 2017s are strong, robust and balanced—and not likely to oxidize prematurely.” At the time of my visit, Flous was not expecting to rack the '17s until late winter. The malolactic fermentations were mostly done by the time of my visit, and I tasted only from finished barrels.