2015 Chorey-lès-Beaune Village

The estate’s production in Chorey-lès-Beaune, Savigny-lès-Beaune and Beaune was crushed by the frost in 2016, and Tollot-Beaut lost 75% of their crop overall. Their vines on the east side of the Corton hill (Bressandes, Les Fournières and their holding of Corton-Charlemagne) produced normal crop levels but quantities in their other sites in Aloxe-Corton were down between one-third and three-quarters. All of the fruit from Chorey and Savigny went into village cuvées, and their tiny quantities of Beaune Grèves and Clos du Toi fruit were combined to make a Beaune 1er Cru.

But there were no problems with underripeness in 2016, according to Nathalie Tollot, who manages the domain along with her cousins Olivier and Jean-Paul Tollot, the latter responsible for making the wines. The estate harvested between September 20 and 26, with grape sugars around 13%, and chaptalized lightly in order to prolong the fermentations. Three of the wines had been bottled the week of my tasting, and the rest were slated to be bottled the following week. But those latter wines were still in barrels at the time of my visit, as the estate simply pumps the wines into tanks and bottles them with a kieselguhr filtration two days later.

Tollot-Beaut updated its system for receiving the grapes in time for the 2014 harvest. They can now destem without crushing the grapes and fill the cuves by gravity, which Tollot says is resulting in suppler wines. And total destemming has always been the practice here, even if the Tollots vinified their Beaune Grèves and Corton Bressandes in 2015 with one-third whole clusters, as an experiment. “The differences weren’t obvious to us,” said Tollot. She added that the estate is now equipped to cool off their fruit at harvest-time, noting that her parents invested in equipment to heat it.

After a difficult 2014 growing season, in which the estate lost one-quarter to one-third of its crop owing to the late-June hailstorm, 2015 was “a very good year with a lack of water,” said Nathalie Tollot. The estate’s vines in Savigny-lès-Beaune Lavières suffered the most in 2015 and the family pulled up the one-third of the vines that were planted during World War II, which were in especially bad shape due to frost and hail. The estate has a replanting program aimed at maintaining an average vine age of 35 to 40 years, noted Tollot.

The 2015 harvest took place between September 3 and 9 with grape sugars at 13.5% or higher—14.5% for the Bressandes! Tollot-Beaut does not normally vinify with whole clusters but as of 2014, the estate can transfer their sorted grapes into the fermenter without crushing them, which Tollot says allows for better preservation of fruit. No cold soak is done here, and total time on the skins is only about 12 days, with two pigeages carried out daily for five or six days during the active part of the fermentation.

Tollot told me that she can't compare 2015 with any past vintage due to the high alcohol of the wines, but emphasized that the estate could not have harvested earlier due to a lack of phenolic maturity. She now describes the vintage as “very good,” adding that she is “afraid to be more optimistic for a vintage with hydric stress.” She’s still concerned about the tannins and the high alcohol levels. “Certainly the wines will take a long time to be drinkable,” she concluded.