2017 Saint-Aubin Le Banc

Pierre-Yves Colin had originally planned to start picking on September 5 in 2017 but moved up the harvest to August 29, bringing in his Meursaults, Chassagnes and grand crus before substantial rain fell on September 2. He harvested his Saint-Aubin grapes at the end, finishing on September 8. The challenge in 2017 was to hold down the yields, Colin told me at the beginning of June. He trimmed a lot of shoots at the beginning to keep a maximum of 10 or 12 clusters per vine, but still made almost the maximum permitted quantities in some vineyards. Yields in most of his Chassagne-Montrachet parcels were in the range of 45 to 50 hectoliters per hectare, which Colin described as quite high. He did not chaptalize his ’17s, even his Bourgogne, which was picked with 12% potential alcohol. The Saint-Aubins ranged from 12% to 13.2% and the Meursaults and Chassagnes from 12.5% to 13.2%. Colin noted that “the ripeness went up during late August because it wasn’t overly dry.” And he pointed out that there were only about 95 days between the flowering and the harvest in 2017 due to the fact that the flowering was so early and the period just before the harvest was in late August, when days were still long.

Colin, who has been among the region’s superstar producers of white wine virtually since he started his négociant operation in 2001 and whose wines have established a track record for avoiding premature oxidation, ferments all of his wines in barrels with indigenous yeasts and without temperature control. He never fines the juice and he does not believe in stirring the lees. And he’s a late bottler, typically waiting until the second March and April after the harvest. He emphasized that “2017 is not a vintage for early bottling,” but noted that some growers “are going to do exactly that.” The malos here finished between January and mid-May; some of the wines were sulfited after the secondary fermentations but none of the wines had been racked at the time of my visit.

Colin informed me that the wines were low in SO2 but they showed spectacularly nonetheless, offering uncommon texture and thickness with harmonious acidity and plenty of verve. Best of all, they are all remarkably different from one another. For his part, Colin compares them to the 2011s, another early harvest whose wines were approachable from the beginning. He noted that the ‘11s have good body and are drinking well but are still very young. And he’s not worried about the ageability of his ‘17s, which “are more precise and deep than the ‘11s when the yields were under control.”