2021 Corton-Charlemagne Grand Cru

“There cannot be anything you don’t know after six weeks,” Christophe Roumier quips when I drop in at his winery. True, but then again, you always find something new with each visit, and this is no different, even if I have reached visit number 121. “We were not as affected by the April frost, never at the same level as Côte de Beaune. Altogether, the volume is down, but it’s difficult to say exactly how much, maybe around 25%? Some parcels were cropped at around 15-16hL/ha while others were not frozen, resulting in an average yield of around 24hL/ha. Rainfall was also challenging, and my team was very efficient at spraying (organic), including two Sundays, to protect against mildew. We started the harvest on 24 September. Ripeness was good in the end, with just a little botrytis in the final days of harvest, but that was negligible. I did the same cuvaison, 20 to 22 days including pre-fermentation soak, with the normal levels of whole bunches. I decided we needed a little more punch down for extraction with a little less new oak. The wines will be bottled a bit earlier in January, so they are all in vat at the moment. They have high pH with a lot of malic, so the barrel change has been like it was 25 to 30 years ago. The malo finished at the end of June, and reduction never really showed. I like the style of wine, the lightness but with flavour, the delicacy of tannins and transparency. It breaks the run of black fruit vintages.”

What I have learned to appreciate about Roumier is that putting aside the clamour for his wines and secondary market prices, there is an honesty about his wines that means they reflect strengths and weaknesses. They are not faultless. They are not infallible. Tasting through his 2021s, some left me breathless with praise and others just missed a bit of substance. Yet the common thread throughout these wines, and indeed several mature vintages encountered during my Burgundy marathon, is they are wines you want to drink, as banal as that reads. These are always reds with freshness and vibrancy that urge you back for one more sip.