2016 Gevrey-Chambertin Vieilles Vignes

“There was nothing much to say,” Sylvie Esmonin begins as we taste in her barrel cellar, her trusty hound sniffing around behind me. “There was nothing catastrophic during the season, not a huge amount of dryness. It was a little of everything though it was warmer than normal. We started the harvest on 17 September until 23 September. There were small yields at around 27hl/ha. There are a little more whole berries in certain cuvées this year and the cuvaison was relatively short, around 15 days. The wines were racked a month ago. The alcohol is between 13.0° and 13.9°, the highest in the Clos Saint-Jacques. The fermentation finished without any problems.” Typical of Esmonin’s style, these wines veer towards the more opulent and oaky side even though the picking date is identical to many. I would love to see her Clos Saint-Jacques in say two-thirds new wood instead of 100%. As such, they always need cellaring and even a 2016 Gevrey-Chambertin Vieilles Vignes opened earlier that day indicated that it needed another two or three years in bottle.

Although Sylvie Esmonin's estate-wide yield in 2016 was just 27 hectoliters per hectare, production ranged widely according to the vagaries of the frost, with the heaviest losses in her Bourgogne and Côte de Nuits-Villages holdings. Her Clos Saint-Jacques yielded 27 hectoliters per hectare, while her village Gevrey-Chambertin vines produced a tad more. Esmonin harvested from September 24 through 29, doing a maximum of half a degree of chaptalization. “The challenge in 2016 was to retain the leaves despite the mildew,” she told me, adding that she did 12 treatments from April through June. “Some of the grapes dried out and fell but this had no influence on the rest of the fruit, and mildew does not block maturity like oidium does.” Happily, the grapes were healthy at harvest-time, thanks to very good weather in July, August and September, and Esmonin made her normal use of whole-cluster vinification.

Esmonin compares 2016 to 2010 in texture, finesse and length. She expressed the opinion that 2016 and 2015 “are both great vintages but very different, with 2016 more a vintage of terroir." She went on "The 2016s have a bit less acidity than the ‘15s, and the ‘15s are more opulent and expressive. They’re also exuberant and already very digestible. They resist oxidation very well and they should age very well. I’m not sure they will ever close up in bottle. With the 2016s, we’ll need to wait.” The ‘16s had been moved into cuves and sulfited before the ’17s went into barrel in mid-October, as is the normal practice at this address.