2017 harvest – 11 september

Update 13.9.2017(11.9.2017)billn


An overused descriptor, but really, practically caviar…

Our penultimate harvesting day – and today was a grand cru day.

We started with Corton-Charlemagne – and we had quite a lot too. There was a little rot to remove, but as all our whites go over the triage table that was no problem – many white producers trie in the vines and don’t do a separate triage back at the domaine – the grapes going direct into the press. One surprise was how much pinot gris we had in these vines – less than 2% (I would guess) but it still looks a lot when in the bins – I also thought that only pinot blanc was allowed as a ‘cépage accessoire’ – but hey-ho… Of-course we had our pregnant pause again today – our press was too small to accommodate all the Charlemagne grapes, so we had to wait for that to finish its cycle before we could finish-off that parcel’s grapes.

I spoke with a consulting oenologist this morning about how the harvest was shaping-up. We mainly discussed reds today “The acidities of reds this year are on a good level – most reds are showing pH 3.2-3.3 and unlike the 2015s, there’s plenty of malic acid this year. The degrees are pretty good with early pronounced florals in tank and specific gravities are falling easily so far.

Lunch was par for the course – very tasty! As it was a Corton-Charlemagne day it seemed natural that it was also for the table. This 2011 was a beautiful, linear, but expressive and mouth-watering wine – great lines! Like the food, yum! The RSV was very nice – luckily as the first bottle (2 years ago) from this 6-pack was a little tired. This had wide and attractive aromas. The mouth was freshness and like the CC was quite linear and fresh before opening out beautifully from the mid-palate onwards. The best comment about these two wines, was that not a drop remained in the bottles!

After lunch we started with Beaune Montée Rouge – villages, not 1er cru – very good ripeness but starting to show some rot – I wouldn’t have wanted to see how bad this would have been if the grapes had waited another couple of days in the vines – but that’s why we triage 🙂 Last year the Montée Rouge was frosted, so from roughly 1 hectare they produced only 1 barrel – we have more this year! Easily the best was for last today – Beaune 1er Les Reversées – directly the smallest berries of our 7 days of triage so far, and easily the cleanest too – 99% of our work was removing the leaves. Great stuff!
 

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There is one response to “2017 harvest – 11 september”

  1. R.K. Stockton11th September 2017 at 9:31 pmPermalinkReply

    Seems you are served up a pretty snazzy lunch for you arduous work in the fields of Burgundy, or do you pack your own wines for the mid-day fare?

    • billn11th September 2017 at 9:32 pmPermalinkReply

      A bit of both RK – I brought the rsv…

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