2015 Bonnes-Mares Grand Cru

I’m still not completely clear on Nicolas Groffier’s new strategy for holding back some of his wines for later release but he believes that his work, which he describes as “more retrograde” than his father Serge’s, “is only revealed with time in bottle.” In fact, he’s holding back 15,000 bottles of his 2015s but it remains to be seen whether he takes the same approach with his 2016s. The new vintage, he told me in May, is quite classic and was easy to vinify. "The wines were really constructed during élevage: they got better and better. Today one can really see the terroirs." Groffier made an average of 45 hectoliters per hectare, a generous crop by 2016 standards (and much higher than the 25 h/h produced in 2015 owing to drought and a lack of juice in the grapes). He told me that he had virtually no frost damage in 2016 because he uses cordon de royat trellising for his vines and that they had not yet budded when the frost hit.

Groffier picked late, beginning on September 29, with the first fruit coming in at 12% potential alcohol but the later grapes reaching 12.5%. As is usually the case at this address, the wines had been racked into cuves a couple weeks before my November visit (and sulfured) and Groffier planned to bottle them by the end of the year. The ‘16s are slightly lower in acidity than the ‘15s. Groffier, who told me that he “doesn’t normally like the great vintages,” loved the '15s during their élevage and believes they are constructed for long aging. But he finds them “less Pinot, more like the 2013s,” and prefers the young ‘16s for their classicism. “But now I’m becoming content with the ‘15s and beginning to find pleasure,” he added.

Nicolas Groffier has apparently changed his commercial strategy this year, canceling the orders he had from his U.S. importers with the intention of aging his wines in his own cellar for as much as five to eight years before selling them. He invited me to taste his finished 2014s from bottle in December, and when I arrived he also had a few ‘15s ready—his just-bottled Bourgogne Pinot Noir and Chambolle-Musigny Les Sentiers—and, as a bonus, the Bonnes-Mares, which he may have presented by accident.

I’m still a little unclear about his ultimate plans for releasing his wines, but the ‘15s I tasted were superb. “The 2015s are very young,” Groffier explained. “The terroir will come in about 12 years; today three-quarters of what we taste is the weather and one-quarter the terroir. But there’s already a lot of minerality. Two thousand fourteen was made with water while 2015 was made by drought.” Yields in the family’s crus were a healthy 35 to 40 hectoliters per hectare in 2014 but only around 25 in 2015. For his part, Nicolas’s father Serge prefers drinking the family’s wines on the young side, after five or six years. But he agrees that the 2015s are for longer aging than the ‘14s.