2016 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.