2002 Gevrey-Chambertin Les Champeaux 1er Cru

Jean-Marie Fourrier started harvesting on September 6, by which time most of his colleagues in Gevrey-Chambertin had finished."Pinot noir needs to remain on the vines for 100 days after the flowering," Fourrier insisted."That would have meant a harvest start on September 11.Back on August 18, when some growers started to pick, the phenolic maturity simply wasn't there."Fourrier was convinced that the acid levels in the grapes could not drop further in the last week or so before he started harvesting, and he believes he benefited by picking with lower ambient temperatures.He bought a 15-ton refrigerated truck for the harvest so that he could do his normal 4-to-5-day cold soak.Traditional cooling systems are really designed to cool the liquid, said Fourrier, but are less effective for cooling unbroken grapes.And the carboglace used by numerous estates, which reduces the temperature of the fruit very sharply to 8oC or less, was far too extreme an approach to take, according to Fourrier."The temperature shock would have been like burning the skins a second time, and it also would have increased extraction from the skins."Fourrier did two punchdowns per day, rather than his normal four.He told me he did not want to make tannic, 1976-style wines, but rather aimed to retain elegance and freshness.All the 2003s were on their lees and not yet racked as of my early November visit.

Two thousand two was not a really sunny summer but it was dry,' said Jean-Marie Fourrier. We had perfect phenolic ripeness, and the maturing of the fruit was never blocked by heat.The wines were also easy to vinify.'Average yields in 2002, according to Fourrier, were in the 32 to 33 hectoliters-per-hectare range, or about 10% higher than those of 2001.Fourrier uses SO2 only during the vinification and for the bottling, preferring instead to make use of higher levels of CO2 CO2 is a natural antioxidant, while SO2 is a chemical antioxidant,' he explains. (Rosenthal Wine Merchant, Shekomeko NY