2015 Nuits Saint-Georges Village

Instead of a series of Vinous Tables, over the holiday season, I wrote a single paragraph on places that I frequent during my annual three or four months in the region. It is not intended to be a comprehensive list, and for reasons of length, I reluctantly exclude Beaujolais and Mâconnais, each bejeweled with their own outstanding restaurants that often offer better value. My selection is listed in order of personal preference. Hopefully, it provides a useful guide. Feel free to add your own.

Gregory Gouges, who took over responsibility for making his family’s wines in 2007, described the 2015 season as “a bit particular” (the word he used, particulier, can also mean peculiar). “Two thousand fourteen was a classic year while 2015 was very hot and very dry,” he explained. “We’ve always had grass between the rows, and it competes with the vines for water. That’s an advantage nine years out of ten, but not in 2015.” Gouges added that the berries were very small and were ripening quickly in early August, and that the family decided to pick at the beginning of September to avoid surmaturité (the Gouges prefer fresh, elegant Pinots). The harvest took place during the first five days of the month, which was atypically early for the Côte de Nuits, and the estate-wide yield was just 24 hectoliters per hectare. Grape sugars ranged from 12.6% to 13.5%, and no chaptalization was done. The vinifications went quickly and, with little malic acidity in the grapes and the cellars not particularly cold during the winter of ‘15/’16, the malos finished by February. At the time of my November visit, Gouges planned to bottle a few of his 2015s in December, two or three months earlier than usual.

These wines indeed come off as classic early-picked ‘15s with restraint, and yet there's nothing underripe about them. Gouges destemmed all of his fruit, noting that “stems provide good tannic support for certain appellations but Nuits-Saint-Georges doesn’t need them. They would make the wines heavier and dry the tannins. Of course, the advantage to vinifying with stems is that they can absorb a bit of alcohol.” Gouges’s early assessment of the 2015s is that they show “more distinction of terroir than the 2009s and a more open structure than the 2005s.” He's not sure if they will shut down toward the bottling but believes that "they will have a certain facility to be drunk young." But he noted that "our vines always age," and he's confident about the cellaring potential of the '15s.