Nadine tells me that making white wine is easy by comparison with making red. “You just press it, put it in the barrel, and wait. Waiting is the most important part.” Nevertheless, she has modified her approach during her long tenure, to address pre-mox as well as to combat climate change. “We’ve had no problems with
pre-mox for 13 years,” she remarks. “Two things have been significant. We take more bourbes (lees), then at bottling we control the oxygen and have replaced cork with Diam across all the domaine’s wines since 2013.” (The Montrachet is bottled under Diam Origine 30.) This has enabled her to decrease the sulfur dioxide added at bottling to 25mg/l. Nadine uses a medium-long press
cycle, which increases to 1 bar over the first 60 minutes, rising over the next 90 minutes to 1.6 bar. Two pneumatic presses have been supplemented with a new mechanical Coquard press from Champagne, where the Labruyère family has vineyards in Verzenay (Champagne JM Labruyère), and in the 2024 vintage the wines from each press will be kept separate to assess their impact. She has reduced the SO2
added
to the press pan by half in recent years and separates a few liters of juice at the beginning and end of the press, settling it overnight before deciding whether to return it to the cuve or discard it. Edouard recalls that, “Nadine did
a strict débourbage [when she arrived to manage the estate in 2008], so one of my first requests was that she keep more lees.” Since the 2009 vintage, the juice has just been settled overnight, for a cloudier juice with a turbidity of 350–400 NTUs, which is moved by gravity into pièces to ferment and age. The proportion of new oak—from four coopers, now with a lighter toast—was decreased in 2009, from 100%, to 50%. Here the wine remains for two winters without racking. Since 2008, what had been regular weekly bâtonnage has been abandoned. Edouard recalls, “I asked Nadine to be very careful in 2015. This vintage convinced me that stopping bâtonnage was the right thing.” When the wine is moved from barrel to tank in April or May, about 20 months after harvest, all the lees are taken and it is left to settle naturally for a couple of months before bottling during the early summer.
Above: The proud sign in the dry-stone wall below the larger of Jacques Prieur's two Montrachet parcels, which Edouard Labruyère of the owning family will vinify separately from the 2024 vintage.
Nadine has a close relationship with
Montrachet, having made it for 35 years. So, I asked her what makes it special for her. “Montrachet has the phenolic concentration to be more like a red wine. I saw this first in the 1995 vintage. The berries were very small, and the wine, tasted from a black glass, could easily have been mistaken for a red wine. The richness of the polyphenols is incredible, and very specific to Montrachet.”
Ambassadors for the terroir Edouard has been on a mission to showcase the specific identity of every wine at the domaine, but none more so than the Montrachet. “In 2009, I said I wanted to make wines ambassadors of their terroirs—not Jacques Prieur wines.” But not everything is on his side. “The main danger of climate change is that the sunny vintages overtake the terroir.”
Nadine is not quite so concerned. “The great terroirs are resilient to climate change.” Resilient, yes; but immune, no. There were clearly wines in our tasting that bear the hallmark of a hot vintage, with varying effects on quality and balance. Of course, vintage variation keeps things interesting, but any assessment of Montrachet must be rigorous, given the great potential of the terroir and the price of the wine. Our tasting was a rollercoaster of vintages, with both striking highs and plummeting lows. The vertical clearly articulated Montrachet’s propensity for power, muscularity, and longevity. The 2020 and 2015 show the tannic grip more associated with red wine, while 2017 and 2007 demonstrate Montrachet’s capacity for finesse. In the 2014, my favorite wine of the tasting, the power and energy are harnessed to produce a light and luminous expression.
THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 87 | 2025 | 83
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