Tasted in Vosne-Romanée with Guillaume Boigey, pictured with his brother Olivier (left) 19 July 2023.

Domaine Boigey Freres
8 Rue de la Grand Velle
21700 Vosne-Romanée
Tel: +33 6 63 60 68 47
www.domaineboigey.fr

A vine of chardonnay – 150 years old and on its own roots – stands in the courtyard behind what was once the Post Office of Vosne-Romanée – which is where you will find Domaine Boigey. This courtyard, was once for the delivery horses of the Post-Office. It’s fun to think that the probably the oldest vine in the whole village of Vosne-Romanée is a chardonnay!

Guillaume Boigey – and his brother Olivier – got their hands on this domaine’s vines in 2017 – hardly 3.2 hectares. In 2018 they sold their crop of grapes but in 2019 they made their first wines. For 50 years the wines had been rented out to a cousin in Vosne-Romanée. The brother’s great, great-grandfather, their grandfather and their mother were all from Vosne-Romanée, though their father was actually born in Algeria and made wine there too.

Initially called Domaine Manière, Albert Noirot, the brother’s great-grandfather, gave his name to the domaine before it was rented out.

The brothers decided in 2017 that it was now or never for their generation and so took on the domaine. Guillaume explains, “All vigneron(ne)s think that their mode of work is the best and we certainly didn’t want to try to be revolutionary – but we have 5 appellations – so we decided to start small and just make 3 wines in our first year and slowly increase our volume. This year already we have almost nothing extra to sell despite vinifying everything. The modest size of our cuvérie limits us but we like the history of making our wine in the cuvérie of our grandparents so we’re not looking to build some modern new cuvérie complex.”

“Word of mouth worked very well – for our size, we can’t make more than 15k bottles and 90% of those are already exported – already in 30 different countries – and that’s despite the small volumes that are available. We could probably sell just about everything in Hong Kong but we like to share the wines around.”

Apart from a few seasonal workers – and for the harvest, of course – though that’s largely friends and their friends – it’s just the 2 brothers that do the work here. “But we can be very selective with the grapes that we actually bring back to the domaine. We harvest in small cases and put the grapes into chilled wagons – they arrive for triage but most has already been done in the vines – we destem and the grapes/juice are not much more than 6-7°C – so you can say it’s a pre-fermentation maceration which can take 6-9 days to start fermenting. We don’t reject the idea of eventually testing some whole-clusters in our vines – but for now, it’s not our approach.

“After fermentation, we have a small press – but we press very lightly as we prefer the free-run juice – all the wine goes in the barrels by gravity. We don’t like filtration very much but we test each appellation and compare the filtered wine with not filtered and also different porosity of filters – we choose the best by blind tasting. For instance, in 2021 there was no filtration, in 2020 a little.”

Guillaume is from a pharma background and is rather detail conscious – “If I say I’m going to do remontage for 10 minutes, I set the timer on my phone for 10 minutes!”

The brothers are currently ‘raisonnée’ in the vines – they use no contact products and are ‘very close to organic’ in their approach with the soil worked mechanically – “We make rather few treatments – this year it was only about 6. We also have a project with 2 ha on the hill above Beaune – it’s Côteaux Bourguignon here and we’ve planted some chardonnay – we plant a little extra each year as it’s a big project for us. The vines are surrounded by forest – so we have some four-legged competition for the grapes – maybe we will plant some pinot too as we like Champagne! Let’s see – we’ve lots of projects.”

Their Bourgogne gets about 30% new oak – and it’s closer to 50% for the others – but all with a very light toast. “We’re very lucky to have such extraordinary appellations so we want to keep as much of the tension and minerality of our terroirs as we can. 2020 was hard because it was hot and the grapes were very concentrated but the freshness that was missing at the start is slowly starting to show itself in the bottles.”

Guillaume on 2022:
“With 2022 we are very happy. The pHs were quite high but they are wines that are very easy to taste, very early. I currently pitch the wines as intermediate between 2020 and 2019 – the latter showing more pinot character.”

The domaine can produce up to ~14,000 bottles – potentially 50 barrels of their 2023s await – “We had a few hail impacts in Echézeaux and Suchots and a bit more in our Bourgogne Croix blanches but otherwise we are okay.“…

The wines…

The headline ‘Producer makes Great Vosne-Romanée’ is hardly going to surprise anybody. But you have to be able, also, to walk the walk. Guillaume and Olivier have achieved that – these 2022s are more than competent, they are wines of panache – and they bring some additional diversity to the village too.

The Bourgogne is normally bottled before the harvest but the others see over a year of elevage, based on tasting, but the range is 10-16 months:

2022 Bourgogne
A wine of modest colour but fine aromatics, it’s quite perfumed. Open, fresh, very faintly tannic – a delicious, easy wine – yum! – and juicy finishing too…

2022 Vosne-Romanée aux Jachées
Extra width of perfume – that’s super attractive. There’s more depth, and a more mobile complexity of flavour – bright and exciting finishing – broad finishing too. Long, long – simply excellent villages.

2022 Vosne-Romanée 1er Suchots
From the high part next to Pascal Mugneret and Charles Lachaux – next to Beaumonts
A more vertical nose – very faintly creamy. Breadth and an extra vibration of complexity with another step in finishing intensity and persistence.

2022 Nuits St.Georges 1er Damodes
High on the hill near Vosne Damaudes on the steep!
A silky perfume here, seemingly a little more concentrated. More direct and intense acidity makes for more forward flavours and a tiny grain of tannin is visible before they broaden over the the palate for the finish.

2022 Nuits St.Georges 1er Boudots
A wall and 5 metres separate this from the last, touching on Malconsorts.
This shows a bit of a reduction but is also fine and airy. Fuller – more density versus the airier Damodes but still juicy and delicious – the reduction hardly visible in the flavours. That’s a beauty!