2016 Corton Grand Cru

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.