Vintages

The history of our wines…

2018

The 2018 growing season opened after a cool and rainy winter which filled the soil with water and slowed down the vine’s development. We only saw the tips of the delicate and fragile buds from the second half of April. Above normal seasonal temperatures followed which stimulated the vegetative growth of this courageous plant. Then the sky darkened and spread over the vineyards. Flowering was disturbed and stretched out from late May to the middle of June. The bunches were slow to form and some grapes aborted. As for mildew, it didn’t hold back from making an appearance. To our great relief, the clouds broke up and this unwelcome guest dwindled under the bright, hot sun. A few storms refreshed the earth across the summer…the grapes changed colour… ripeness progressed…then slowed down during August because of the heat and a lack of water. The grapes reached optimum maturity in early September, the date at which our pickers were deployed in the vineyards.

2018, the precocious vintage. Richness and concentration are the hallmarks.

2017

The new vintage progressed in particularly clement weather conditions. In contrast to 2016, which flirted with complexity and difficulty, 2017 rhymes with lightness and simplicity.

As winter ended with some particularly cold incidents, February came in, mild and bright. The vegetation woke up and the first buds could be seen at the start of April. A shadow fell at the end of the month with the threat of another frost episode but «phew !» our plots were spared. The vines developed rapidly in summer temperatures, without disease as there was no rain. Flowering began early and ina homogenous manner at the end of May. Throughout summer we lived through an alternation between very hot dry periods and some stormy passages. These inundations allowed the vines to nourish their fruit which had been suffering up to that point from hydric stress. The grapes took on colour in early August and fine-tuned their ripening up to the harvest in mid-September.

An inviting, tender and fruity vintage.

2016

After one of the warmest winters in more than the last 100 years, cold weather visited the vineyards from the month of March. The vine’s awakening was seen to slow down and we observed the appearance of the first tender, downy green shoots in mid-April. But a frost episode during the night of 26th to 27th April destroyed a proportion of the nascent shoots, especially those in plots at the entrance to valleys. Most of our vineyards were affected. Then the rain took over, falling on the vines almost every day, preparing the way for cryptogamic diseases such as mildew to appear. Fortunately, the clouds dissipated and the sun came out to warm and dry out the atmosphere, which favoured the flowering of the bunches. The season developed under dry conditions, which affects and holds back the ripening of the grapes.  The berries didn’t start to concentrate in sugar until the second half of August. At last salvation in the form of rainfall came, in early September, enabling the grapes to finish ripening. The first clicks of the secateurs could be heard from the end of September and lasted around 10 days.

This was an extreme and complex vintage in which the pinot noir was a marvel to behold.

Jean-Pierre Guyon

11 et 16 route nationale 74
21700 Vosne-Romanée - France

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