2022 Musigny Grand Cru

“There was a tiny bit of frost in April, very localized in Givry, a couple of plots on Puligny,” head winemaker Jérôme Flous tells me in their tasting room on the fringe of Nuits Saint-Georges. Faiveley owns several buildings in the locality that sit over their capacious barrel cellars housing their numerous cuvées. “The most important factor was in the middle of June. It changed the vintage. We had a lot of rain, but the amount was not the same across the region. In Côte Chalonnaise, it was around average, more in Côte de Beaune and then the most in the Côte de Nuits. In some places, there was three or four times as much as usual. Usually, it is 60mm, but in Nuits Saint-Georges, there was 250mm that was absorbed by the clay soils. We were lucky because there was no rain after that, and therefore, there was more stress in the south of the Côte d’Or and in the Côte Chalonnaise, where the fruit is blacker. We had some hail in Gevrey-Chambertin, but there was not a large amount of damage since there was a lot of water. Summer was like 2020, warm and dry. We started the harvest on August 29 in Puligny and Corton, and we finished September 10. It was a normal fermentation after just a little sorting by hand. Vinification was quite fast, between 12 and 15 days. The pH is over 3.6 for all the cuvées, so I prefer to age the wines with good levels of sulfur to protect them against brettanomyces or spoilage. Most of the wines will be bottled in March.” I felt that Flous imbued his 2022s with more refinement compared to prior vintage, exemplified by his Mazis-Chambertin that surpasses the Clos-de-Bèze, albeit by a whisker, and Flous is convinced that it is the long-term runner. Some feel they don’t quite reach their full potential, such as the Chambolle Charmes, which felt a bit under-nourished, though others, like the Nuits Saint-Georges La Damode, display great potential.