2011 Volnay Les Fremiets 1er Cru

Henri Boillot is quite proud of his 2011s, the last vintage of red wines he made before handing over the reigns to his son, Guillaume. For now, Henri is still making the whites, but Guillaume is clearly the future. Henri Boillot believes the 2011s will age longer than the 2010s, then adds that the saving grace for the vintage was a very poor July that slowed down the maturation of the grapes, which at one point earlier in the year suggested a mid-August harvest was very much in the cards. Although the big guns in this range deliver the goods, the real joy is in discovering the extent to which the Bourgogne and village-level wines outperform their appellations, often because of the significant presence of declassified fruit.

Following the very irregular veraison, Henri Boillot removed the pink grapes in mid-July of 2011 in order to ripen the rest--and to achieve a narrower range of ripeness by harvest time. He started with chardonnay on August 29, then picked his pinots beginning on September 1, but noted that he was not an early harvester. In fact, he explained, he harvested grapes on the Cote de Beaune during the first four days of the month, finishing his Savigny-les-Beaune Les Lavieres just before rain fell on the night of the 4th, then stopped for four days before bringing in his Cote de Nuits fruit. Potential alcohols were in the very high 13% to 13.2% range, little sorting was necessary, and no chaptalization was carried out. Crop levels were in the tiny 18 to 22 hectoliters-per-hectare range. Boillot did more remontage than pigeage: "With the thick-skinned grapes, I did not want to overextract." Boillot described his young 2011s as "riper and more structured than the 2007s," noting that the new vintage also has slightly higher acidity than his 2010s. Incidentally, he believes that the 2010s will remain open in bottle, noting that the hot years like 2009, 2005 and 2003 are more likely to shut down, and in fact are tough going today. Thanks to a recent expansion of his spotless new cellar on the plain east of Meursault, his red wines are now here along with the whites. The 2011 reds had been moved into cuves a couple weeks prior to my visit.