2021 Corton-Rognet Grand Cru

“We prune late, and so we were not so much touched by the frost,” Romain Taupenot tells me. “The weather conditions were quite awful, with a lot of rain during June and July. There was a difference between the Côte de Beaune and Côte de Nuits, the latter escaping the spring frosts. I have decided to buy a new tractor and spray system for us. The tractor was supposed to be delivered in April but didn’t come until July and then didn’t work, so until then, we had to manually cope with the threat of disease in Saint-Romain and Auxey-Duresses. As a consequence, I only made two barrels from 1.5-hectares of vine in Auxey-Duresses and decided not to harvest two hectares. I hadn’t seen anything like that before. Nevertheless, in 2021, we have around 20% higher yields in the Côte de Nuits. We had a little issue with brown rot, but otherwise, the bunches were quite healthy and sprayed 30% less. We picked from 23 September. We had to work a little more on the extraction compared to 2018 and 2019, when the juice was coloured after an hour. In 2021, it was important to do a daily punch-down until the middle of the cuvaison with pigeage, then afterwards, just pigeage. It’s a surprising vintage. It is more classical with quite a high level of acidity since the malic was not destroyed by the heat. Alcohol levels are around 13.0% to 13.6%, even one at 13.9%, so you can feel the purity of the fruit that is more red than black and fine salinity.”