2015 Fixin La Place

Guillaume Tardy told me he picked during “the first half” of the harvest, beginning on September 5, noting that some of his neighbors waited until the 12th to start, which was a more traditional 100 days after the flowering. “But my style of wine is for freshness and I was afraid of overripeness,” he told me. “It’s better to pick later if you want to eat the fruit, but earlier if you plan to make wine.” Grape sugars ranged from 12.6% to 13.2% and Tardy chaptalized about half of his wines by a modest 0.2 or 0.3. “When you're young, you want 13% or 13.5% and very ripe grapes, but now I understand that it's better to pick earlier in order to make better balanced wines."

Tardy had healthy yields in 2015—generally around 38 to 40 hectoliters per hectare—but pointed out that his vineyards are mostly situated at lower altitude, where there was less impact from the late-April frost than on the slopes. He destemmed all of his fruit and did only two or three pigeages for each wine. Following the late malos, which mostly finished in the summer, pHs are between 3.3 and 3.4 and acidity levels are quite healthy, said Tardy, who told me that “the aromas felt a little warmer than usual at the beginning but now they’re ripe and fresh and not warm, with the vintage showing a lot of black fruits and violet.” The wines were still high in CO2, which he believes is helping to preserve the freshness of the fruit. However, Tardy had degassed his samples—all taken from one-year-old barrels--and brought them out of his very cold cellar in advance of my tasting.

Tardy uses 35% new oak to age his village wines, 50% for his premier crus and 80% for his grand crus. He noted that he has actually raised his percentage of new oak in recent years but that he has reduced the level of toast in his desire to make a cleaner, more precise style of wine.