2013 Volnay Les Fremiets 1er Cru

Guillaume Boillot has crafted a wonderfully pure set of 2013s from this very difficult vintage, in part by carrying out an extremely careful triage to eliminate hailed-on, rotten and green grapes. He and his father Henri also harvested early and quickly, between September 29 and October 3, bringing in the last of their fruit before the rainy weekend of October 5 and 6. Grape sugars were generally in the 12% to 12.2% range and the wines were mostly chaptalized to about 13%. Guillaume Boillot destemmed all of the Pinot Noirs with the exception of the Clos Vougeot, then did very little pigeage. "I look for roundness of tannins and elegance, not extraction," he told me in November. The wines were racked from barrel to barrel in May, during the malolactic fermentations, and were subsequently racked into cuves in September. Boillot noted that he found the '13s ungiving at the beginning but that they were getting suppler in cuve. Bottling was slated for mid-December. Yields here were again tiny in 2013, ranging from 12 to 16 hectoliters per hectare.