2022 Bourgogne Chardonnay

As is customary, I spent a morning tasting through Seguin-Manuel’s entire portfolio. I had nothing else on that Saturday besides buying some fruit from the Beaune market. Taking a leisurely pace with a good chin-wag afterward was a change. I wish I could do that with every grower—then again, not all growers are prepared to sacrifice their weekends! “We had warm daytime temperatures, but the vines from the domaine average 50 years old, so they didn’t really suffer. We replant vines when they die, so some of those two- or three-year-old vines didn’t produce any bunches or didn’t ripen. However, that was very limited and didn’t really impact the wines. In addition to certified organic farming since 2015, we have introduced biodynamic farming step-by-step in the Côte de Beaune. In these warm vintages, comparing my vines to my neighbors, I noticed that the leaves were still green when it was 36° Celsius, whereas in theirs, you could see the vines suffering. Where does that come from? I don’t know. But I can see the difference. From 2024, we will expand biodynamics across the Côtes de Nuits. We have all the equipment to do that now. We spread all the treatment manually, using atomizers.”

“Regarding the growing season, we noticed a difference in terms of the wines. The window of picking was rather short, and we are prudent in not picking late. When we picked the grapes between August 26 and September 7, the first half of the harvested fruit, either domaine or purchased, we found that the fermentation passed very smoothly. The fruit harvested later in terms of reds was more prone to stuck fermentation, and we had to react quickly whenever that happened. Apart from this, the wines have always been expressive and full of fruit. More and more whole bunches were used in the winery as bunches were so healthy. We had confidence in them. Nowadays, we are doing more crushing by feet, and we do a soft extraction using remontage [pumping-over] and some délestage. One of the major changes has been the reduction of sulfur, the first SO2 addition after the malolactic, so that there is around 60 to 80mg/L free sulfur by the time of bottling. Also, pre-cold fermentations are now shorter. For the whites, we have introduced my concrete eggs that we use for the Mâconnais and Côte Chalonnaise cuvées.”