2020 Beaune Coucherias 1er Cru

“Twenty-twenty was an unexpected vintage," Edouard Labet told me in his impeccable English in the tasting room at Château de la Tour. "The key was the picking date. We expected to pick around August 22 but we postponed and started on August 27 in Clos Vougeot. We really work according to the maturity and ripeness [of the grapes]. Working with whole clusters, the berry and the stem have to be ripe. We knew the grapes could start to shrivel and dry, but rains were forecast at the end of the week and we had 20mm [of rain] on August 28, which made a big difference. We ended up with 12.7° to 13.5°, which was great. We didn’t have to chaptalize at all. The grapes were very healthy, especially the whites. We did long, four- to five-hour presses, and for the whites, micro-oxygenation in the vats under the pressed wine for up to 20 minutes. It just gives the wines more protection in aging and in bottle. We work with large barrels – up to 450 liters. We’d like to work with larger barrels, but they won’t fit into the elevator! We don’t feel the need for so much new oak to maintain salinity and balance, so we use around 25%, with just the Meursault at 35%. In any case, you don’t get the oakiness with the larger barrels. For the reds, we de-stemmed a little more because of the hydric stress." This was another fine set of wines from the father-and-son team of François and Edouard Labet. There a discussion to be had with regard to the use of stems, and I felt that in a couple of cuvées, particularly the Beaune Marconnets, I would have used less. For the Gevrey-Chambertin, where they did use much more de-stemmed fruit, I feel that the reduction in vendange entière yielded better results where vines suffered some stress in this vintage. For the wines of Château de la Tour, they got the whole bunch spot-on, insofar as the stems are present but do not dominate the wine or impede terroir expression. These are well worth seeking out.