2021 Bourgogne Chardonnay

Damien Marc Colin is my first port of call during my Burgundy “marathon” on a beautiful sunny autumn morning down in the village of Gamay. “It was a vintage where we had a lot of frost damage – we lost 55%. With the small cuvées, we were obliged to blend these to create a Premier Cru in Saint-Aubin and Chassagne-Montrachet. There were sometimes just one or two barrels in the most affected vineyards. For Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru, we blended Champ-Gain and Caillerets, and there are five or six in the one for Saint-Aubin. It is a vintage where the maturity was 12.5% natural with a higher acidity than in recent years. I think the vintage has lots of fruit and will be easy to drink; overall, it may be better than I expected. The acidity is around 3.15 to 3.20, but the pH has changed significantly. In the case we have a canicule [drought], we have low malic but high tartaric, the acidity staying high after the malo, however with 2021, there was a lot of malic (4g/L), so this total acidity fell after malo, and the wines are more flattering. For 2022, for example, we have 2g/L with more tartaric. In 2021, the temperatures were lower in the summer with more rain, though it was not difficult to reach maturity as we had a much smaller volume. We started the picking around 18 September compared to 25 August in 2022. There were no problems with the vinification, the alcoholic and malolactic fermentation both in barrel, the former taking longer because we use no SO2. This means there is a higher population of different yeasts than a dominant one, which prolongs the fermentation. We add SO2 after the malo and just prior to bottling. We will mature the 2021s for 12 months in barrel (four cooperages nowadays, whereas there were a dozen used a few years ago) and then six months in tank before bottling. The wines are much clearer today, so we do not do any filtration or fining, which can detract from some detail. I wanted to make a vintage like 2006 and 2014, but it’s a very different vintage, as the 2021 gives much more pleasure. There are Grand Crus this year: 180 liters for Bâtard-Montrachet and 200 liters of Montrachet - though they were more difficult to vinify due to the tiny quantities. For the reds, the volumes were normal as the later-ripening Pinot Noir was less touched by the frost.”