2021 Nuits Saint-Georges Les Saint-Georges 1er Cru

A miscommunication (it happens) meant that Antoine Gouges was not expecting me to call when I did. Whilst he hastily gathered samples, it gave me time to appreciate their new reception.

“I am quite happy with the 2023 vintage. It was difficult at the beginning—very rainy in March and April. Then June and July were quite dry and warm, August was like November, then there were two very dry and sunny weeks that arrived just before harvest, which helped ripen the fruit. We started picking on September 5 in Les Perrières. We picked over six days. The yield is quite generous, between 40 and 45 hl/ha, the maximum we are able to do with our old vines. We had to do a bit of sorting, but after good de-budding, we did not have to do a lot of green harvesting—just a few bunches when the vines were very full. All the malos were finished by December, and we did not have a problem finishing the sugar. We had good maturity, around 13%. We bottled the whites early in July along with some of the reds. A good point about this vintage is that we had volume with good concentration.”

“It was complicated due to the April frost, though we did not have too much damage,” Antoine Gouges tells me. “We lost 15-20% as we prune very late, the second [pruning] at the beginning of March. I think this had an impact. It was a cooler season than normal. We de-leafed to improve aeration as there was a big oïdium pressure at the end of the season on the leaves, which is uncommon. We started picking on 17 September with the whites and finished on 23 September, with the average yield around 25hl/ha - not so bad and better than in 2020. The grapes were good quality with just a bit of sorting. I think it’s a more classical vintage with nice concentration and energy. I knew the vintage was more delicate, so we were soft with the punch-downs and pumping over, working by infusion in order not to extract big tannins, focusing more on the finesse and the silkiness. We used a low amount of SO2, less than half what we once used. We decided to keep the freshness, so we bottled many of the wines in August.”