2016 Volnay 1er Cru

The harvest of 2016 put a bit of wine back in what was a virtually empty cellar, but it will take a few more healthy crops for this estate to catch up with demand for its bottles. Guillaume d’Angerville told me that the average yield for his domain in 2016 was 27 hectoliters per hectare, but that his flagship Clos des Ducs holding produced a “normal” yield while there was virtually no Aligoté, Volnay villages or Volnay Clos des Angles. “So while we lost 35% of our volume, we didn’t lose 35% of the value of our wines,” he summarized.

The estate started harvesting on September 22 with grape sugars around 13% and régisseur François Duvivier did not chaptalize. Despite the full levels of alcohol and the fact that pHs were higher in '16 than in '15, ranging from 3.3 to 3.5, d’Angerville pointed out that energy is a key trait of the 2016 vintage. The malolactic fermentations finished between July and September, after which the wines were racked. This estate, by the way, has never vinified with whole clusters. “We don’t even do experiments,” said d’Angerville. “We’re minimalists who want the fruit and only the fruit.” He added that his father and grandfather also destemmed their fruit “but really only about 85% of it due to the lower quality of their destemmer.”

The couple of finished 2015s I tasted were of transcendent quality, but d’Angerville was not quite ready to deem the vintage extraordinary—or even superior to 2016. “There may be a snobbism to say that 2016 is better than ‘15 but I find it hard to compare two vintages that are so recent.” Needless to say, the ‘15s are already sold out here, as this estate’s wines have become highly popular international collectibles and available quantities have been microscopic in recent years.