For the 2012 vintage we will be moving into a new cuverie in Savigny-lès-Beaune which is being built as we speak. We will be sharing the space with fellow nano-négociants Chanterîves founded by two of my best friends in the world, Guillaume Bott and Tomoko Kuriyama. If you haven’t checked out their wines yet, please do. Jancis Robinson selected their 2010 Bourgogne Rouge her “Wine of the Week” recently. Not bad for a first vintage, huh?
We are currently set to move into the new winery in late July. The main space, where the crane is in this photo, will be the “crush pad” for grape processing, tanks, wooden fermenters etc. The barrel room will be temperature controlled and will be where the metal supports in the bottom left of the photo currently are and in the top right is a small office. It will be great to actually have some space and not have to squeeze into our current tiny garage set-up.
The larger space will allow us to add a bit more wine for 2012 and I am currently hunting for some old Premier Cru vines in the Côte de Beaune to add a white and red Premier Cru in addition to my Savigny-lès-Beaune villages white and red.
Very exciting times for Le Grappin indeed!
I just returned from a freezing trip to Savigny-lès-Beaune. One of the days I was there the thermometer in my cuverie had a maximum of -6ºC! Uttering the very Burgundian expression ça caille (literal meaning – it curdles) was well and truly appropriate!
Luckily in February it is too early for budbreak and late enough that all of the sap will be in the roots of the vines thus the vines are pretty safe from these tough conditions. In December of 2009 Burgundy got a big cold spell like this but since all the sap had not descended many vines died; some vineyards saw 25-40% mortality rates and one in Beaune died off in it’s entirety.
In the cuverie, the cold made the wines very difficult to taste so I had to revert to using a hair dryer to warm up samples for some visiting importers! The benefit of all the cold weather is that any unstable tartaric acid will have precipitated out of the wine. In Australia or the USA, one would have to use refrigeration to hold the wine below 3ºC for a couple of weeks to achieve the same result to avoid the risk of “wine diamonds” appearing later in bottle.
Both the red and whites have not finished malolactic fermentation (where lactic acid bacteria turn the hard malic acid into the softer lactic acid) and as such they are still works-in-progress. I am particularly excited however by the Savigny-lès-Beaune blanc which is taut and mineral but since November it has put on some body and weight to balance the wine’s acidic backbone. I still think 2011 is going to be a stunning year for Savigny-lès-Beaune blanc. Lucky I have 9 barrels!
So all the wine has finished ferment and is safely in barrel for winter. As I prepare to head back to London, here are some of my thoughts on 2011.
With regards to the weather, what a crazy year we had! Moderate temperatures over winter and a warm spring meant we saw one of the earliest bud breaks on record coupled with a very dry spring putting the vines in stress mode from the get-go. A hot June, a wet July and an indifferent August saw some very confused vines deciding to shut down for the year with the grapes not gaining any sugar accumulation from the last week of August onwards. From then it was just a case of hoping that all of the years hard work in the vineyard meant that the grapes got to phenolic and flavour ripeness before the leaves had completely turned colour.
Flowering was over very quickly and evenly, and without any wind like last year, we saw a very good fruit set and even ripening. Pinot clusters in Savigny-lès-Beaune were super tight like little hand grenades and thus pourriture was a constant threat all season and started to rear it’s ugly head in mid August. Those who did the necessary work opening canopies, dropping rotten clusters and doing a severe triage in the vineyard and/or winery will be the ones who got the most out of this vintage for reds. In my vineyard of Aux Fourneaux I saw some neighbours with up to 40% rot come harvest time! The hard work my mates did two weeks before vintage in cutting out the pourriture and doing a complete leaf picking in the fruit zone of the northern side of the vines saw us with less than 5% rot at harvest. Berries were definitely on the big side compared to 2010 due to the July rains but we saw great phenolic maturity (tannins were ripe and fine). Vintage was over very quickly as everyone tried to get ahead of the rot and the vines shutting down. There was a lot of “panic picking” by some vignerons – by the time I picked the Aux Fourneaux there was basically only myself, Benjamin Leroux and Chandon de Brailles still left out there amongst my neighbours in the villages section. I hope this is another year where patience pays off but it is still early days, being pre-malolactic fermentation and élevage.
I firmly believe that 2011 will be a stellar year for whites in the Côte de Beaune. Clusters were super open, allowing every grape to get to flavour and phenolic ripeness with no rot pressure at all. Some oidium started to set in on the top of the shoots from mid-August which probably slowed ripening a bit but luckily never spread to the fruit, again perhaps because of the open clusters. Flavours are super concentrated without losing the verve or minerality of great Burgundian Chardonnay. Tartaric and Malic acid levels were in perfect balance (compared to 2010 when they were in a 1:1 ratio, this year we saw the magic 2:1). Again, early days but could easily be on par with the cracking 2007s.
So definitely a challenging year for the first year of Le Grappin wines. I think my five years spent working in New Zealand, USA, Australia and Burgundy after quitting my career over a bottle of Dujac paid off as one really needed to think hard about how to vinify and best express the vintage and the terroir this year. I am very excited to see how the wine develops in barrel but I feel I captured the sexiness of Savigny Reds and the nervousness of the whites that 2011 brought. One can hope!
After pressing the Savigny-lès-Beaune “Aux Fourneaux” Pinot Noir on Wednesday, I settled the wine in tank for a few days to ensure only the tastiest (and lightest) lies made it into barrel. Barreling straight from the press doesn’t allow you to select how much or what type of lies makes it into the wine for ageing. In a year like this where I want to emphasise the freshness I only want the finest lies; one to ensure that any remaining sugar gets gobbled up in barrel (as lies are dead yeast cells) and two, I am not looking for broadness that more lies contact can give in a year like 2011, which for me, is all about freshness and verve.
Once the fine lies were selected, I then sent the wine to barrel which filled just (and I mean just, only litres to spare!) six pièces (Burgundian term for a 228L barrel). I was very lucky to be able to buy some second hand barrels from a famous domaine in the Côte de Nuits to complement my one new barrel from Stephané Chassin which you can see me filling above. After seeing the wine from berry through ferment I decided on a program of one new barrel, one barrel that had wine in it for one vintage, three that had been used twice and one that had been used three times. Hopefully this is the right decision but I am erring on the side of less-is-more with regards to oak in the 2011 vintage.
After 20 days on skins, it was time to get the wine out of the wooden fermenting tank and into a press. I decided to press earlier than I may have done in a perfect world but I wanted to preserve the fine tannins that I had extracted during fermentation without having the wine being distracted by firmer tannins that come from leaving the wine on skins for a longer period of time. In another year, but that is not what Bacchus brought this year, and one must endeavour to highlight the best qualities of the vintage which for me this year is fresh flavours and fine tannins.
The most delicate pressing is one done vertically as it doesn’t rip the skins or crush the seeds. The downside is that you don’t get as much wine as you may do with a pneumatic press which you can rotate and thus get rid of any hidden pockets of wine.
Thanks to my great mate, Ray Walker of Maison Ilan, I was able to borrow his ancient wooden basket press made by the house of E. Cherreau — from what the local winemakers in Savigny-lès-Beaune tell me was the best producer of pressoirs and foudres at the time. It took a lot of effort — at one stage there were five of us pushing the handle around — but the results were well worth it as you can see below: —
The mouthfeel of the press wine from the lies (dead yeast cells, mainly) and the greater tannin extraction was spectacular and will make a great foil to the delicacy of the wine that ran free from the tank.
Running the free run wine off (the wine that comes easily off the skins without need for pressing—about 80% of the total amount) was drained in 15 minutes. Putting together the press, digging all of the skins out of the tank, pressing the skins and then cleaning up took us another 8 hours for only a barrel of wine. What love went into this cuvée!
Using a hundred year old press sure was a lot of fun and definitely reinforced my growing reputation in Savigny-lès-Beaune as l’êtranger con (crazy foreigner or idiot foreigner depending on how kind you are being to yourself that day) as we had a steady stream of wine makers visiting all day as the word got out around the village.
Check out the slideshow for more of the fun we got up to: —
Yep, that’s me in the wooden tank doing a traditional pigeage with my feet. Traditionally one would get in naked, but modesty and since I had a good friend spotting me, I decided not to embarrass myself. Pigeage is very dangerous so NEVER do it alone! Too many people have died over the years from asphyxiation from the CO2 released including a father and son a few years back in Burgundy.
With this year being a lighter year in Savigny-lès-Beaune I really wanted to emphasise the fresh red-fruit sexiness that make Savigny so special to me so I relied mainly on remontage (taking a portion of the fermenting juice and pouring it back over the top) which is a less extractive form of fermentation management. I only did the one hard pigeage during ferment, right at the end, to release any sugars that were still inside any whole berries.
I am very happy with the results so far — the tannins are very fine and the structure is from the terroir — my vineyard borders on Aloxe-Corton and as such has a firmer body than many Savigny vineyards — rather than from being aggressive with the cap.
Décuvage is a few days away, Tuesday or Wednesday perhaps, to give the wine a few days to recover and tannins to meld before pressing. Exciting to see the wine come together!
Tomorrow we commence by picking my Pinot Noir in Aux Fourneaux. Fruit tastes great and the vines are shutting down as you can see from the leaves turning orange. Lovely phenolic ripeness so it’s time to go. I have some incredible friends from Australia, South Africa, USA and the UK who will be helping me tomorrow.
Our work earlier this week picking out any pourriture (rot) definitely paid off. Acids have turned from green to balanced and flavours are still fresh.
I hope I get a chance to post tomorrow as I am so excited to get going. So much so that we will be in the vines from 6am to start!
With the cooler weather we have been having we have a great opportunity to let the grapes hang and really develop some killer complexity. The problem? Grapes with mounting sugars are more at risk day by day from pourriture (rot). So we went into Pinot vineyard where a small amount of rot has developed to cut it out, open up the canopy and create the best conditions possible. The time spent in the vineyard is always paid back ten fold in the winery. A winemaker can only make a wine as good as the grapes!
As we are approaching ripeness, I am now also taking pH and Titratable Acidity readings. The progress of pH and Titratable Acidity, for me, is a much better sign of grape maturity than sugars.
Today’s numbers: -
Aux Fourneaux (Rouge) – 11.0 º Potential Alcohol, pH 3.00, TA 5.6
Dessus Les Vermots (Blanc) – 11.5 º Potential Alcohol, pH 2.99, TA 5.3
Les Gollardes (Blanc) – 11.4 º Potential Alcohol, pH 3.00, TA 5.5
Les Saucours (Blanc) – 11.2 º Potential Alcohol, pH 3.01, TA 5.2
Looking good! Maybe Monday (5th) for the whites, mid to late next (7-10th) for the red? If this great weather continues, sure!
Savigny-lès-Beaune Weather
Today Monday Tuesday 
Thunderstorm22°/12°
Rain18°/10°
Chance of Rain20°/14°
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