tasting / laying down / 2021 Burgundy


For many whites, the malolactic ticked through slowly until late summer, more like a traditional vintage, keeping the wines protected and allowing for later sulfur additions.


As Ben Leroux remarked, the wines were very stable and didn’t “eat” much sulfur, enabling him, and all those who follow a low-sulfur regime, to pursue this in 2021. A low-sulfur approach is quite widespread now. It’s to be commended, though some wines, white and red, were becoming slightly oxidative in late November and in need of a small dose of sulfur. So, while it was largely a vintage of reduction, a minority were oxidative. I have mentioned that more oak was used in this vintage for practical considerations, but many also adapted oak aging for stylistic reasons. At Seguin- Manuel in Beaune, Thibault Manuel prefers a higher toast in colder vintages “to bring some sucrosity to the wine.” 2021 shows the leaner, fresh profile of Aligoté , which is happy complemented by oak, even taken to an extreme. It certainly adds a touch of glamour to Hautes-Côtes Aligoté at Boris Champy. I saw some half-barrels in white


cellars, but far fewer than ten years ago. These days, producers are more likely to use a larger, 350-liter barrel rather than one and a half pièces; or where the wine is sufficiently high value, a tailor-made barrel made to fit the volume. There is also the option of terra-cotta for red and ceramic for white. In 2021, glass globes were used for minuscule quantities of grand cru white. In 2016, around six producers of Montrachet pooled their resources to make one shared cuvée. A few years later, glass and ceramic have extended the options for aging a small cuvée of 150 liters or less. Since there is no oxygen ingress through glass, fewer lees can be put into the globe for the maturation, and unsurprisingly, the wines were rather reductive on the nose. But they gave a very pure expression of the terroir. I tasted a 121-liter cuvée of Montrachet at Domaine Lamy-Pillot, and a 114-liter cuvée of Chevalier at Domaine Bruno Colin. I admire producers who push the boundaries in a challenging vintage— particularly when the results are interesting. At Domaine Lamy-Caillat in Chassagne, Sebastian Caillat presses with a horizontal mechanical press gauged by eye and taste. In 2021, he told me, he was


172 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023


concerned that mildew might be scratched from the skin, but he pressed ahead. The old mechanical presses have a screw and plates of iron. As they are prone to rust, Caillat has furnished his old machine with stainless-steel parts and, for 2021, commissioned an incy-wincy version with plates sufficiently close to press small batches. This makes wine that is worlds apart from the pure-fruit wines of the pneumatic press. Caillat takes all the solids. There is no débourgage. His method gives plenty of phenolics, more so in a colder, less ripe vintage. The result is savory and textured whites, raw and intriguing when I tasted, with appetizing bitterness. Wines to age and pair with food. As for fining, most producers use bentonite, just a little in 2021, as protein is low. Casein is useful to polish whites to a silky edge, particularly helpful in a warm vintage or where oak impression needs smoothing. Jeremy Seysses said his whites “can seem a bit rustic and may need a little fining,” but generally I found 2021 whites already silky and precise.


Red In the colder vintages of the ’80s and ’90s, winemakers had to “search” for their wine. By contrast, over the past decade many vintages have almost made themselves. Not so in 2021, when color, tannin, and fruit did not come easily and often not until the second week of fermentation. It was a tricky task to extract enough, but not so much as to give astringency, requiring winemakers to adapt their approach. On the Côte de Nuits, many producers who have reduced or even stopped using pigeage (punch-down) climbed in the tank or got out their plunger to work the fruit by foot or hand. Many in the Côte de Beaune went for a lighter extraction. In the Côte de Nuits, many producers


extracted when the density was low, almost dry, at around 1020–1010, which is a significant departure from recent years, when they barely touched the vat in the presence of this level of alcohol. But in 2021 they harnessed its role as a solvent. Most winemakers added sugar at the


end of fermentation, incrementally, to maintain a higher temperature, around 86°F (30°C), and yeast activity. They looked to the end of fermentation to achieve color and tannin, for which it was useful to crush whole berries or bunches at this point. The vatting period tended to be a day or two shorter than in richer vintages.


Few wanted a post-ferment maceration, particularly with whole bunches in the vat. Wines need substance, but as Mark


Haisma remarked, “It’s no good searching for something that isn’t there. I was searching for the aromatics.” His wine is perfumed, delicate, and wafting, but still with sufficient tannin and structure. In some wines, the aromas and structure are coming from whole-bunch fermentation. He used 60 percent on his Clos Vougeot— to good effect. It was a skillful task to find the right balance in 2021. Some producers used short vatting with low extraction and made very light wine as a result—which sits uneasily with the profile of Gevrey or Nuits-St-Georges. There is a fashion for light Pinot Noir, and in a warmer vintage this style can work well; however, it was necessary to have the courage to take sufficient matter from this vintage—but only when the fruit was healthy and ripe. For those purchasing fruit, a cautious approach was required. With slightly underripe fruit, it was easy to extract too much, with astringent results. Some vineyards produced bunches of large grapes with a high juice-to-skin ratio. It was a year in which growers selling their fruit were unlikely to be persuaded to crop thin, with the outcome of thin and dilute wine. And there was botrytis—a much more serious problem for reds than whites—which required diligent sorting. It’s very difficult to extract tannin from botrytized grapes, so some found tannin from other sources, including oak. Boris Champy found a neat solution by removing the stalks of his Hautes-Côtes reds, which had botrytis, washing them in water and SO2 overnight and adding them to the vat. It seems like a lot of trouble, but he was keen to use them as a natural antioxidant, as well as for a touch of tannin. Some producers, Champy among them, are transparent about their methods, but in difficult years, many producers are less than candid about their organic practices, and few readily admit the run on sugar in 2021 and on tartaric acid in 2022. There was a change in the popularity of whole-bunch fermentation in 2021, when even the most die-hard practitioners —including Dujac, Chandon de Briailles, and Chanson—dialed back. At Chanson, MD Vincent Avenel explains, “We carefully checked stems and finally decided to destem 70 percent, which is quite a change for Chanson. We thought


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