2015 Gevrey-Chambertin Les Goulots 1er Cru

“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.”