2013 Côte-Rôtie Fontgeant

Stephan Ogier plowed almost all of his single-site Côte-Rôtie fruit into his two “classic” bottlings in 2014 because, like many of his neighbors, he felt that the yields were simply too low to justify making a minuscule number of bottles from those vineyards. Better, he thinks, “to try to make one or two really good wines and enough of them so that they can actually be found and people will drink them.” With the introduction of an entry-level wine, whose name is, for now, “Mon Village” but was “Le Village” before some bureaucratic hassles arose, Ogier is now positioning his classic Côte-Rôtie as a “semi-reserve” in the sense that there is now a stricter selection of fruit than before, and, most significantly, all of the young-vines fruit will now go into the Mon Village. Stephan told me that while his normal practice is to bottle after 18 months of aging in barrel, he opted for only 12 months for his ‘14s “to preserve freshness” and because he was wary of the wine’s relatively delicate (“like 2012”) structure and thus their ability to handle his normal oak-aging regimen. His 2013s are another story, with firm backbone and sharp focus if not great weight. Ogier called them “wines that will live a long time on their architecture and balance, not their richness, so completely classic.”