A year of hope, promise and fruition

It takes a lot of work to produce very little fruit, most importantly the right kind of fruit, because ultimately we grow for wine and not the fruit itself.

It’s been fascinating to take lessons from last year’s growing season, the vinification and the experience of seeing our wines transform through elevage, in our approach to this year.

With all the wines now in barrel and fully dry, it seemed a good time to reflect on the 2024 growing season. 

First, two moments of small celebration: 

1. 2024 is the first vintage that bore fruit from our haute densité plantings. All of which we co-fermented with our traditional density plantings.

2. With new vines coming into production, we harvested almost 40% more this year than in 2023, totaling 6 barrels of red, 5 of white.

   
   

In our planning for the season, we made many choices that we hoped would come together to produce smaller berries, thicker skins and looser morphology - from later pruning (nothing touched until March), to introducing mixed cover crops through the entire vineyard, reduced and more precise timing of tilling, with continued tressage, high density planting and our vine genetic material continuing to morph and evolve.

Why? 

With smaller berries and thicker skins comes an altered relationship between skin and juice. Much of the flavor in wine grapes comes from the skin; a higher skin to juice ratio makes for greater intensity of flavor without additional weight in reds, more structuring dry extract in white wines, and increased length and detail in both. All qualities shared by the wines I admire most.

In now our eighth season of farming, I’m particularly proud of how we as a team always remained vigilant, anticipating and preparing for the obstacles that arose. Spring brought extended periods of gusting wind and water stress, stunting growth in small sections of the vineyard, while summer rains dotted through what was otherwise a dry and sunny season.

The progression and refinements we made in our farming to push the quality of our fruit were also put in place to strengthen the ability of our vines and soil to withstand and mitigate weather related challenges.

Being at such high altitude, water, and how it interacts with the soil, is a big part of our terroir, especially as the rate of evapotranspiration is doubled compared to that of sea level. Introducing mid row cover crops through the entire vineyard this year helped reduce soil temperature and surface evaporation through our dry and windy spring, but also amplified the drainage of our sandy soils during summer rain. 

This expanded ecosystem of roots was essential in absorbing topsoil water, while also expanding channels for water to percolate and drain as we approached veraison. Without any tilling after the completion of flowering, we also ensured no additional nitrogen was made available to the fruit during this formative period. With water and nitrogen limited, berry growth was kept to a minimum.

With our intense high altitude sun, sunburn is the biggest vector for disease in our clusters. Split berries can introduce moisture and sugar, and if trapped within the cluster, will feed mildew and rot. 

As harvest time approached, we saw both higher sugar and lower pH than at the same point last year before picking, a mark of a warm and dry August. Crucially, this was accompanied by the looser clusters, thicker skins and smaller berries across both Pinot and Chardonnay that we had hoped for, validating the changes we had been pushing in our farming. 

This looser morphology was critical to greater resilience against botrytis during ripening, limiting the spread of split berries from sunburn, increasing air exchange within the cluster and drying out moisture. This made for conditions in which we harvested the most pristine and vibrant fruit we’ve had to date.

With all these refinements, my hope is for the wines to speak more clearly of what makes our vineyard unique, that they might become more of what they already are.

And this was validated during the vinifications. 

As with last year, we left all our pinot whole cluster. I foot crushed the bottom 30% of each red fermenter to release juice for fermentation, then loaded the remaining fruit on top uncrushed. 

While we also started pigeage from the day after picking in 2023, I chose to do more foot pigeage from an earlier point this year, further minimizing the impact of intracellular fermentation in our red ferments. To this end, I increased our daily pigeage from once to twice, breaking a greater proportion of our skins earlier during the fermentation.

Even though all the red berries had been broken by the end of fermentation last year, I felt the impact of intracellular fermentation still occasionally marking the wines halfway through elevage (though now it's been entirely subsumed for many months). I wanted the character and personality of the vineyard to shine more clearly, and I find carbonic driven wines can often taste similarly.

While many assume that the perfume and silken texture of whole cluster comes from high levels of intracellular/carbonic, I had already learned from mentors that the wines of Jacques Seysses and Gerard Potel would all press fully dry, with no residual sugar emerging from whole berries/clusters at the press. 

Moreover, having seen how the Reynauds run all their whole cluster Grenache through roller-crushers as they load their fermenters at Rayas, further confirmed that intracellular fermentation is not a prerequisite to amplifying the perfume, the sense of alpine lift and refining the tannin texture in our wines, the reasons I choose not to destem our fruit.

After tasting our reds this year for the first time after barreling down, they are even more aromatic and fine than at the same point last year, the perfume is even more abundantly filled with the fragrance of our local Yunnan crimson glory 墨红玫瑰, and there is no mark of intracellular character in the wine.

There’s a greater sense of density from the smaller berries and thicker skins, yet without having gained any sense of weight, everything feels quietly amplified from our previous year’s wine.

As for our whites, the only change in our approach this year came in how we did foulage before pressing, doing it all in the press cage directly, rather than in picking bins, allowing me to foot crush more thoroughly as the juice drained, without fear of too much potassium uptake from the stems, preserving our naturally low pHs. This extra time spent with foulage captured notably more solids and dry extract in the must.

At the end of fermentation, our whites all came in with more than 26 grams per liter of dry extract, a figure higher than in most red wines. The resulting wine feels thick, muscular and three dimensional, but not fat. The immense quantity of dry extract also speaks to the high level of phenolic ripeness we’ve achieved in the skins, all of which validates the work we’ve done in the vineyard to build intensity and structure that comes from the fruit itself and not the winemaking.

Of the many great moments through vintage, my favorite is undoubtedly the Paulée, our end of picking harvest party, where we celebrate with the culmination of our year’s work in the vineyard with pickers, seasonal workers and my core team. 

This year’s party was particularly joyous as we had more than a dozen friends and family members fly from the world over to join for a few days of picking and celebration.

Amidst the physical work of vintage, I always think back to my experiences working abroad. I’ve been the beneficiary of so much generosity while working in Burgundy, Australia and New Zealand, and try to follow the example of those I learned from, trying to share wines of inspiration with my team, friends and family. 

I open these wines with the goal of continuing to refine my own sense of quality, but also to share and provoke these same questions in my team, to push their palates and give them greater context for what we are working towards, wines of singular beauty.

After tallying all our numbers from sampling and weighing during picking and post pressing some interesting numbers on our established red vines:

Average clusters per vine: 4.4

Average weight per cluster 67.04 g

Average yield per vine: 294.98g

This totaled 20.5 hl/ha from our established vines. This is the balance of fruit I would like going forward based on our soil vigor, our farming and what I want for our wine.

Combined with new vines on their third leaf, producing their first crop, we totaled 12.6 hl/ ha from 1.32 ha planted. (1.8 ton/ha)

Our corresponding chardonnay numbers:

Average clusters per vine: 2.78

Average weight per cluster: 83.7 grams

Average yield per vine: 232 grams

Post press pH after blending two picks: 3.03

Total of 21hl/ha in established vines, 13.1 hl/ ha. 

(2.1 tons/ha)

This is less than 50% of the legal yield for Grand Cru White Burgundy, requiring more than 5 vines to produce one bottle of our white, and it showed in the intensity of structure and mouthfeel as we pressed.

With each passing season, it becomes more and more evident how great wine demands clarity and commitment.

All of this is to say, the direction of our work takes conviction, and this year's work, the results of that work have deepened that conviction.