2017 Fixin La Place

Winemaker Guillaume Tardy always offers a candid perspective on the previous growing season. “The good point of the 2018 growing season was a lot of rain end of May and beginning of June that helped to keep feeding the vines until the harvest, since we had little rain in August, just a couple of showers. One week before the harvest we thought the berries were drying. There was some filitré [shriveled skins] and we thought there would be little juice. But it was the opposite. We started picking on 5 September, the same as in 2015, but the grapes were riper, around half a degree more alcohol. We picked the grapes between 13.2% and 13.5% and kept good freshness and average acidity. After malo the pH is between 3.4 and 3.6, total acidity between 3.4 and 3.8gm/L. It’s enough acidity to keep the balance and make sure the wines can age. The 2018 is more a "keeping" year than some 2015 and 2017s. These wines have good body. As there was more juice than usual I extracted a little less than 2017s, but to fill the middle palate we had to work a little as well, with a longer extraction period at 32°C and one pigeage less than last year. The tannins are more present on the 2018s so we have to be more patient. In a way I don’t recognise the 2018s as my style of wine whereas the 2017s are. At the beginning of the élevage we thought the 2018 would be like 2015 but the tannins are much stronger."

Situated on the main RN74 artery, nestled amongst the row of similar-looking houses, is Domaine Jean Tardy. Though I have visited over many years, I never fail to forget exactly which belongs to winemaker Guillaume Tardy and habitually resort to inspecting mailboxes until I find the correct one. It is a bijou operation, just half a dozen or so crus in small but fortunately not microscopic quantities. Tardy is always welcoming and affable. He creates relatively fruit-driven, concentrated wines that lean towards the black side of the fruit spectrum rather than red. “We were scared because it was an early vintage and we thought that we might lose acidity,” Tardy informed me. “But actually, after the malolactic, we were between 3.55gm/l and 3.90gm/l in terms of total acidity, between 3.3 and 3.4 in terms of pH. The final alcohol is around 12.7° after around half a degree of chaptalisation. I prefer to pick a little earlier to keep the natural acidity and freshness, so I started on September 7. We cropped around 43hl/ha, whereas we’re usually below 40hl/ha, and that was after we did some green harvesting. We fermented at around 31° to 32° Celsius for six days with one daily pigeage, tasting all the time. In the end, for 2017 we did five pigeages. We also conduct a longer cold maceration, starting from a very low temperature and raising it slowly to soften the tannins. In 2017, everything is de-stemmed, and at the moment nothing has been racked.” You might categorize Tardy’s wines as leaning to the more modern, intense side of Vosne-Romanée winemaking, not unlike, say, Maxime Cheurlin at Domaine Georges Noëllat. There is always density and grip to these wines, which benefit from bottle age. This year, I would single out the Nuits Saint-Georges Aux Argillats and Gevrey-Chambertin Champs Perrières as potentially Tardy’s best cuvées. I wanted to the Echézeaux Les Treux to really state its superiority over the Premier Crus, but perhaps in 2017 the growing season denies that.