2015 Gevrey-Chambertin Les Cazetiers 1er Cru

Olivier Bernstein originally thought the 2015 growing season was too hot to make great, ageworthy wines. “But after the July malos, I was surprised to see an ideal combination of beautiful ripeness and exceptional balance," he told me in November.” After harvesting between September 6 and 10, Bernstein vinified with 80% whole clusters, higher than his normal 50%. He has cut back on his extraction since 2013 vinification—“and that’s why 2015 was an ideal year for me, although I didn’t know it at the time” [i.e., extraction was almost too easy in 2015]. He harvested with potential alcohol around 13%, carried out a cold soak lasting five to seven days, then chaptalized a bit in order to prolong the fermentations (his wines digested their last five or six grams of sugar in barrel), doing no pigeages and just a bit of remontage.

Bernstein ages all of his wines in 100% new oak except for his Gevrey-Chambertin, which gets 70%. He maintains that the new oak "brings structure and bones, and a positive austerity" to his wines. His barrel supplier since the outset has been Stéphane Chassin, but Bernstein now buys and dries his own wood. The 2015s were racked in July, following the malolactic fermentations, but Bernstein retained the lees. At the time of my mid-November visit, he planned to rack the wines again in two or three months and bottle at the end of March.