2021 Bourgogne Chardonnay

“I was not impacted by the frost as much as other growers. I changed the pruning after 2016. I do it later, in two phases, not for everything but for the earlier ripening parcels. At the end, we tie the spur at the same time as the pruning. In fact, for the whites, we did half a crop, and for the reds, one-third. Meursault was very impacted; our vineyards at the top of the incline were most affected. The contracted cuvées where we buy fruit was stopped, though they come back in 2022. It was chaotic the rest of the season with rain, especially in August, but September was fine and really saved the crop. If we’d had rain, it would have been a 1965 or 1968. I can’t see how the fruit would have ripened. The harvest began on 18 September for the early-ripening plots but really began on 20 September for one week, commencing with the reds and finishing with the whites. We don’t have the kind of ripeness as in 2020 or 2022, more like the vintages we had in the past. General balance was fine, and the acidity not too low; the malic acid burned away in September. There were no problems with the alcoholic fermentation, but the major change for us was lowering the SO2. For the whites, we stopped using it in 2017 until the malo is finished; for the reds, we added some at the beginning, though we have lowered it 50% compared to five years earlier. We thought it would be more interesting to get the aromatic power of the grapes instead of the structure, so we extracted very gently, only pigeage.”