2015 Gevrey-Chambertin Les Champeaux 1er Cru

The paradox of 2016 is that it’s a late-harvest vintage with very good phenolic maturity, said Jean-Marie Fourrier in January. “The vintage is a beautiful surprise,” he continued. “It reminds me of the 2010s following the 2009s. Acidity levels are slightly higher in the ‘16s than in the ‘15s, but the ‘16s are also rather big wines and fully ripe. And the ‘16s have more phenolic ripeness as well as overall extractability than the ‘15s [he reduced his punchdowns to one per day for this reason], thanks to the rain before the harvest. The skins were tougher in 2015. The 2015s are tight, long-term wines, but the ‘16s are also for the longer run.”

Fourrier started harvesting in ’16 on September 28, later than some of his neighbors, but then he has lately been in the habit of simply waiting 100 days after the flowering to pick. And, as he added, “it was critical to target the phenolic ripeness.” The frosted vineyards, he told me, produced denser wines with a higher skin-to-juice ratio owing to more ¬millerandage. The pHs in ’16 are in the 3.42 to 3.58 range, with the wines from frosted vines tending to be at the upper end of this range. Frost losses were substantial here in 2016: Fourrier made very little wine in Chambolle-Musigny and lost about 30% of his volume in his home village of Gevrey-Chambertin. He's also missing his négociant Clos Vougeot and Echézeaux in 2016.

I should note that I originally tasted Fourrier’s 2016s with his new assistant François Orise, ex-sommelier at L’Atelier de Robuchon and Taillevent in Paris and Restaurant Daniel in New York and more recently the manager of a wine bar in nearby Dijon. But the wines had been racked into tanks barely ten days before my visit and were very difficult to taste. So I stopped by again at the beginning of my January visit to retaste these wines with Fourrier.

“Two thousand fifteen is all about texture,” said Jean-Marie Fourrier in November. “The signature of the vintage is its silkiness.” Fourrier’s wines are not hugely colored. “If we had done a lot of pigeages, we would have extracted too much tannins along with more color,” he explained. “It was too easy to overextract in 2015. The tannic wines, and those that were made with stems, will probably shut down in bottle. Too much use of stems or new oak might have compromised the sucrosité of the 2015s, along with their drinkability.” Fourrier ages his wines in about 20% new oak across the board, maintaining that it’s the quality of his lees that give his wines their glyceral quality.

Fourrier did not start picking until September 10 and was happy to get a full 100-day cycle between the flowering and the harvest. “People started leaf-pulling right after the flowering, and that had consequences in the warm summer,” he told me. “We retained the foliage and thus had no rush to pick.” Potential alcohol levels ranged from 12.8% to 13.2%, and Fourrier destemmed all of his fruit “to slow down the pH and because extraction was so easy. In my style, 2015 is a child of 2010 and 2009.”

As the cellars remained much warmer than normal in November and December of 2015, the malos finished by the end of February. And almost all of the wines had been moved into tanks a week before my visit. Fourrier began taking this approach with the 2012 vintage, when he realized that the portion of his barrels that was staying empty for six months each year developed higher levels of volatile acidity. “Now we’re keeping more freshness,” he maintained.

My tasting here now includes a number of limited-production négociant wines (three to five barrels of each, except for six of Echézeaux), made from old-vines fruit purchased from domains that also bottle their own wine. Fourrier described his small négociant business as “a domain extension by a frustrated grower who is not able to buy more land.” He is able to pick the Echézeaux and the Chambolle-Musigny vineyards himself but is “at the mercy of the growers for the rest.”