2015 Montrachet Grand Cru

Mounir Saouma disagrees with what he calls “the standard vintage talk” about 2015, which is hardly the first time this iconoclast has taken a contrarian view of a new crop of wines. His describes 2015 as “a fragile jewel: it’s too easy to lose the aromatic complexity of the wines.” Too many of his colleagues, he told me at the beginning of June, racked their wines six months to a year after the harvest. But his '15s were still on their lees, most of them unracked, at the beginning of June [and not a single wine was in bottle as of September 12]; the malolactic fermentations mostly took place between July and September of 2016. (Several wines had recently been moved and thus their colors were quite cloudy and they showed some aggressive CO2.) Saouma believes that his 2015 whites “are becoming less and less the idea we had about these wines at the beginning. They are gaining in freshness and tension, becoming less fat and stupid.” He reported that he had moved the lees softly in December of 2016 before going away on his winter family vacation, and again in mid-January and in mid-February. “By the end of February the wines were much fresher; they had passed through the tunnel of warm-vintage character. Now we’re getting everything that we normally don’t expect from a warm vintage.” He has managed to retain the treble tones of this very ripe vintage—not just spices and flowers but some noble green notes as well.

Saouma noted that the 2015 vintage “was not built to be fresh" and that he virtually committed violence against the wines in leaving them on their lees for up to two years. He’s convinced that they will shut down after two or three years and then sleep for another ten. “They have spent 21 months in barrels with no sulfur,” he told me. “If they wanted to die, they’d be dead today.”