2016 Richebourg Grand Cru

Thibault Liger-Belair, ever on the prowl for new techniques to improve his wines, and to make them more naturally without making "natural" wines, has been producing his own sulfites since 2014, beginning with sulfur from a mine in Poland and then using a combustion chamber to combine the sulfur with oxygen in order to make SO2. This enables him to make a much more natural sulfite that the wine can integrate more easily than standard SO2, which typically involves the use of a petrol product. His new sulfite doesn’t shut down the wines as much as standard sulfites do, and he believes that it also contributes energy. He now also has a new arrangement with his suppliers of Corton Clos du Roi and Chambolle-Musigny (actually, five parcels) under which he does the vineyard work and invoices for his team’s time, with the owner then buying a portion of the grapes.

Liger-Belair told me that he vinified with a higher percentage of whole clusters in 2016 than ever before. But for his grand crus and his superb Nuits-Saint-Georges Les Saint-Georges, he removed the main trunk of the stems in order to vinify with a higher proportion of whole grapes and to achieve the energizing effect of whole clusters while avoiding green tastes. He began harvesting on September 22, with grape sugars ranging from 12.5% to 13%. He chaptalized lightly “to maintain the fermentation temperatures and finish the fermentation, not to increase the alcohol levels.” At the time of my January visit, Liger-Belair was expecting to rack his ‘16s in early April and bottle during May, compared to late August and early September for his ‘15s. He noted that he “wanted to stretch the ‘15s with longer élevage" and that they gained in freshness as a result. Still, he told me that he now finds more energy in the ‘16s than in the ‘15s, nothing that “it’s hard to explain why.” One possibility: “The stems add potassium, magnesium and phosphorus. They may raise the wines’ pHs but they also bring more freshness.”

Incidentally, Liger-Belair now bottles with a higher level of CO2 than previously, but he noted that the bubbles are smaller as the CO2 is introduced to the stainless steel vats via a small hose the day before the bottling and does not give the wines a fizzy taste. As the added CO2 has not yet had a chance to integrate completely with the wine, it offers some protection against the introduction of oxygen during the bottling process. The use of more CO2 allows Liger-Belair to work with lower levels of SO2: his wines finish with barely 20 ppm of total sulfur, which is extremely low.