2013 Bonnes-Mares Grand Cru

“The 2013s are still very young wines,” noted Frédéric Magnien. “They’re about skin character, and they’re not yet transparent, very much like the 1993s were at the beginning. There was a lot of millerandage in 2013 and fewer seeds in the grapes,” he went on. “The skins were thick and the wines are dark.” Magnien did the same extraction during vinification as he did in 2014: a total of seven punchdowns per wine. The pre-fermentation cold soak actually lasted a bit longer than usual due to the colder ambient conditions and the fermentations went well. Magnien told me he picked all of his premier and grand crus before the damaging weekend of rain in early October.

The 2013s are fresh wines with good structure, like the 2001s and the 1993s, and need more élevage, said Frédéric Magnien, who plans to bottle his '13s in April and May. He started harvesting his négociant parcels on October 1 and finished all the crus except for Clos de Bèze by October 4. Still, he told me he should have started three days earlier, as he would not have lost as much crop to botrytis. In order to preserve differences of terroir, Magnien has sharply cut back on his use of new oak in recent ears and he vinified all of his 2013s with around 25% whole clusters (he does not crush his grapes). Grape sugars were in the 12% range in 2013, and Magnien chaptalized about 1%. "My goal is to make wines only by using my nose," said Magnien, explaining that the aromas of his wines during élevage tell him when it's time to rack and to bottle. In recent years he has been taking a smaller quantities of lees into the barrels, as he would like to do minimal racking while at the same time avoiding bottling with noticeable reduction, as was the case here in the early and mid-2000s.