2021 Volnay Les Fremiets 1er Cru

Volnay producer, Domaine Joseph Voillot has witnessed a gradual changing of hands as Etienne Chaix has taken over from Jean-Pierre Charlot, whom Chaix assures me is enjoying a trip to the Douro during the week of my visit. “It was a complicated season for everyone in Europe,” Chaix tells me. “The frost in April saw temperatures of -7° Celsius for five hours with some snow, so we lost 60-90% of volume because of that. I hope it’s once in a lifetime, but it’s Nature that decides. There was then a lot of mildew because of the rain, but we didn’t lose too much more. We were lucky to have three beautiful weeks at the end of August and the beginning of September, the harvest from the 18 September. We had a little botrytis thanks to the dry conditions, so we could wait for ripeness. It was the opposite of 2020, when the three last weeks reduced the volume. We produced less than 75 barrels compared to 130 barrels in a normal year, the Premier Crus particularly impacted: Meursault, Volnay Champans, Fremiets and Beaune. In Beaune, we had just eight cases of grapes [equal to one barrel] compared to 42 this year [2022]. It was complicated to manage the fermentation with small quantities, so we just do pigeage rather than remontage, and we tried to do a strict triage to keep just the best grapes. We had a longer cuvaison to find more structure and fruit concentration. Everything is de-stemmed in 2021, and we will bottle most cuvées at the end of this year or early 2023.”