2015 Pommard Vieilles Vignes

In January, I tasted the Maison Dominique Laurent wines with Jean Laurent, as well as the Domaine Laurent Père & Fils wines that Jean makes with his father. Vinification varies widely for the négociant wines, as Laurent purchases barrels of wine from numerous growers, who all have their idiosyncrasies but mostly practice gentle extraction. At the family domain, Jean and Dominique vinified their 2016s with between 50% and 70% whole clusters, which Jean says helped to slow down the fermentations. “Even the largest cuvées here just reached 30 degrees C. in 2016, a bit lower than usual," said Jean, who added that he and his father like to avoid any jammy tastes in their wines. They did not chaptalize in 2016 and they did a maximum of one pigeage per day and as few as five overall for each cuvée. Although they carry out a pre-fermentation cold soak only with their Cuvée HJ grapes (their homage to Henri Jayer), the fermentations in '16 generally started slowly due to the cool ambient conditions during the late harvest.

The Laurents picked their estate vines beginning on October 3, but a little earlier for the vineyards on the Côte de Beaune. The wines were racked for the first time last spring—and not necessarily after the malos, which typically finished in late spring and summer. The Laurents will beginning bottling their estate wines in March but will wait a bit longer for their négociant wines. Incidentally, Dominique Laurent made tiny quantities or no wine at all from Nuits-Saint-Georges premier crus due to the frost damage in 2016.

According to Jean Laurent, 2016 is “a great vintage,” the best since he started at the domain with his father in 2006. “The ‘16s have more energy than the ’15s,” he noted. In a subsequent conversation, Dominique Laurent told me that 2016 "impresses with its combination of concentration and finesse; it’s like a liqueur of Pinot." He went on: "And its deliciousness is amplified by the miserly yields from very old vines, as well as by the fact that pHs are slightly higher than those of the ‘15s."