2015 Chambolle-Musigny Les Borniques 1er Cru

Frédéric Magnien, who farms his family’s vines (Domaine Michel Magnien) as well as a growing number of his négociant vineyards biodynamically, is constantly reinventing himself. Beginning in 2015, he has made both his estate and merchant wines without any new oak barrels; in 2016, virtually all of them were aged in a combination of used barrels and egg-shaped 160-liter terracotta jarres. Magnien harvested beginning on September 24, finishing in 9 days, vs. a normal 11 or 12. Yields varied widely according to frost influence, ranging from just 8 hectoliters per hectare in his négociant Chambolle-Musigny Les Charmes to a full 42 in the estate Morey-Saint-Denis Les Chaffots. As a general rule, he vinifies with about 50% whole clusters, but in fact this percentage can vary widely by cuvée, as can the percentage of jarres.

Magnien credits biodynamic farming for the fact that none of his négociant wines exceeded 13.5% alcohol, noting that most of them are around 13%. Similarly, the pHs of the wines farmed according to biodynamic precepts have pHs around 3.5, while the rest are more like 3.8. His use of jarres also follows logically from biodynamic farming and lower yields, said Magnien, as the wines “need a certain amount of concentration to benefit from oxygen exchange. If you want to have minerality, you need to get it from the soil.” (Please see my brief profile of Maison Frédéric Magnien published last winter for more detail about these earthenware containers, which Magnien uses to limit reduction in his wines, as well as to get more complexity, fruit and transparency to site, without straying from what he considers to be traditional Burgundian methods.) In fact, he considers the 2015s “a big step up for me” due to his widespread use of jarres for the first time. “The wines all sing in a different key; they show clear terroir differences. In my range, 2015 is not a heavy vintage.” He added that his wines are lighter than they used to be.

At the time of my January visit, all of Magnien’s wines were in tanks; he planned to bottle them between March and May. He says the ‘16s are “very clean and clear, and the wines look more stable than the 2015s, which tasted a bit wild and animal prior to filtration but are now very pure.” Magnien uses a special cellulose filter, through which the wines flow easily, rather than kieselguhr (diatomaceous earth), which he believes risks changing the chemical balance of the wines. He explained that nowadays he’d rather filter his wines and use less SO2, noting that some of his wines in the past didn’t last well because they weren't clean enough. “Look at Chevillon’s old wines,” he said. “They’re great because they were filtered.”

Frédéric Magnien, who initially began vinifying with whole clusters several vintages ago in an attempt to mitigate the reductive qualities that his wines had previously shown, began experimenting with egg-shaped 160-liter terracotta "jars" (jarres in French; shaped like stockier amphoras) in 2015, not only to limit reduction but to get more complexity, fruit and transparency to site. (He's also using them extensively at the family estate, Domaine Michel Magnien.) “They breathe more than oak barrels do, and they offer a different way to show and preserve the fruit and the terroir within a vintage,” he told me in November. “The silicic acid in the terracotta kills bacteria, so even though the wines display more fruit early on, they show lower levels of volatile acidity and I’m sure that they won’t evolve more quickly than those aged in barrels.”

Magnien further believes that the egg-like shape of the jarres, which are hand-made by a company in the south of France, is constructive for the circulation of the wine and suspension of the lees. There’s constant slight movement due to the fact that there are no angles in these vessels, which Magnien believes contributes fleshiness and more complex aromas to the wines. And in addition to the very good “thermal inertia” of thejarres, their microporosity (they don’t have a lining) allows for a slow and controlled oxidation of the wine during the aging process.

Magnien vinified his fruit from organically farmed vineyards with an average of 55% whole clusters in 2015--a higher percentage than that for older vines but only 30% for younger. Magnien bottles his négociant wines with very low levels of sulfur: 20 ppm free and just 40 to 45 total.