2015 Puligny-Montrachet Village

Pierre Vincent, who served as manager/winemaker at Domaine de la Vougeraie since 2006, took over winemaking duties at Domaine Leflaive at the beginning of 2017. Chief among his aims will be to bottle stable wines that do not oxidize prematurely, and Vincent was already willing to discuss changes he expects to make, including reducing yields, pressing more slowly and moving the wines less frequently. He will also be rethinking Leflaive's former strategy of racking their wines into tanks prior to the next harvest and keeping them there for another eight or nine months of aging. (He mentioned that the 2008 and 2004 vintages here were the most affected by premature oxidation and he attributed this to "less stem ripeness" in those years.)

Vincent described the young 2016s as "concentrated due to the mostly small yields, with intense fruit and sound acidity," even if there was very little malic acid in the grapes. Potential alcohol levels ranged from 12% to 13%. The malolactic fermentations were finished by the time of my visit but not all of the wines had been sulfured. Even the grand crus here get no more than 25% new oak.

Leflaive's 2015s, which were bottled in April and May, the grand crus just two weeks prior to my visit, finished with low pHs and around five grams per liter of total acidity, noted Vincent, who said that the hydric stress in '15 blocked the loss of tartaric acid. The finished wines have between 12.8% and 13.5% alcohol, without chaptalization. Vincent did not filter the wines prior to bottling and he fined them lightly, using colle de poisson, a fish-based agent, for the first time at Leflaive. Vincent, who used this fining agent at Domaine de la Vougeraie, finds it "less brutal" than casein, which is made from milk protein. Incidentally, beginning with its 2014s, Domaine Leflaive is bottling its wines with Diam 30 corks.

Before he showed me his 2015s, Eric Rémy fleshed out the growing season in some detail. From late March until the end of July, there were just 15 days with precipitation, while in May of '16 alone there were 20. A key weather event in 2015 was the 50 millimeters of rain that fell in mid-June, after the flowering, which helped the vines survive the hot summer that began later that month. “Between June and the harvest there were 35 days with temperatures of 30 degree C (86 F) or higher, including 12 at 35 degrees C or more,” he told me. “But well-timed showers in August de-blocked the maturing process, and the sugars climbed quickly." By the time Domaine Leflaive started harvesting on August 28, potential alcohol levels were closing in on 13%. The grand crus were mostly picked on Monday, August 31, because heavy rain and hail were forecasted for that night. But while Chablis suffered mightily from hail, Puligny-Montrachet had just three millimeters of rain, said Rémy.

“We had great-looking grapes and didn’t have to use our sorting tables,” he told me. He did not chaptalize or acidify, and because the grapes were picked with sound levels of tartaric acidity, the wines didn’t change much during their secondary fermentations. In fact, most of the Leflaive 2015s have total acidity levels between 4.1 and 4.5. “In terms of technical analysis, the 2015s are close to the 2014s and there’s no reason to believe that they won’t age well," he said. "Two thousand fifteen is a great vintage and it’s not atypical.” Rémy ages his premier crus in about 20% new oak and uses about 25% for his grand crus, with the tiny quantity of Montrachet done in a single new barrel. Beginning with the 2014 vintage, the estate is bottling its wine entirely with DIAM 30s.