Tasted with Laurent Martray on the Côte de Brouilly, 22 February 2022.
Domaine Laurent Martray
749 Route du Mont Brouilly,
69460 Odenas
Tel: +33 6 14 42 04 74
www.domainelaurentmartray.com
More reports with Laurent Martray
Laurent is not long installed in his new home – a neighbour to Château Thivin – but unfortunately wasn’t in great shape when I visited. He had needed an operation on his arm and recovery was much slower than he hoped. I wish him the speediest road to full function again…
Laurent on 2020 & 2021:
“Of the 2020s, just one is bottled at this stage – the Brouilly – but all the rest are ready, or close to ready, for bottling. I made 38 hl/ha in 2020 – it was 30 in 2021. I’ve got a lot of old vines – it was the dryness that was principally the issue in 2020. The old vines are nice but in a year of deficit – there’s extra deficit!”
The wines…
Despite some high alcohols, these were such delicious and flamboyant wines to taste on this day. Bravo!
That’s deeply coloured but delicately aromatic – quite floral. Hmm, that’s a great wine – open but deep, lots of mouth-watering delicious flavour. That’s an incredibly delicious Brouilly despite it’s 14° – bravo!
From Baloquets – 0.60 ha – old barrel elevage.
Again a nose that’s so much more airy and perfumed than the deep colour suggests. Wow – incisive – energetic – fluid wine – great wine. There’s a structural side to this that is more latent than exerting itself. Dark fruit. And completely delicious – bravo!
Vines that look towards the hill of the Côte de Brouilly. 50% destemmed, then foudres.
Deep colour again. Here a little tighter and with a slight suggestion of reduction but the aromas relax becoming finer and more perfumed. Super concentration, yet really silky too – tannin but with invisible grain. A little extra reprise of flavour in the finish too. Faintly graphite mineral finishing. Another winner!
2020 Côte de Brouilly Les Feuillées
More high toned and open nose – again admirably perfumed and vibrantly red-fruited. Large-scaled – the structure more visible – here is a depth of flavour that you should have more patience with. I like the extra strictness of this a lot – very slowly fading in a subtle but haunting finish. 15.8°! ‘Yes the fermentations were far from easy – they weren’t all done until November.‘