Connection and Cumulative Learning
- Alex
- Aug 1
- 4 min read
As veraison approaches, I’ve been looking through our records from last vintage, tasting the wines in barrel, reflecting on the choices and decisions we made, what worked well, what can we refine and improve on. I’m quite proud of the wines we made in 2024, how we built upon what we learned in 2023 in both vineyard and cellar, and I’m very excited to apply another new layer of learning to this year’s wine.
The season has been a warm (but not hot) and dry one by our standards, so much that we saw some hydric stress in sections of the vineyard in late spring. The accelerated root growth and increased root mass of our haute densité plantings stood out in stark contrast during this period of challenge, with darker leaves and longer internodes, while some neighboring sections at our classic density saw slowed growth and yellowing leaves.
Earlier this spring, we had begun planting a new adjacent vineyard at a higher base density (1x0.7, 14,000 vines/hectare), with narrower rows for more three dimensional density and fruiting zone shade, seeing this resilience against drought in our haute densité plantings further validated our choice to push for a higher base density.
With quick decisions to move our summer till early, changing our cover crop mix, introducing small but frequent doses of fish hydrolysate and seaweed extract, we were able to help relieve and increase resistance to abiotic stress, and now after two months, our vineyard looks the healthiest its ever been. The dryness of the season has given us a new set of conditions to adapt and refine our farming further, arming the vines with greater resilience to thrive through a broader set of climate possibilities.
With another season of farming and elevage, our familiarity with the vineyard, its personality, and how to translate that in our wines, continues to grow. Facing new challenges, building cumulatively upon the lessons, experiments and experience of each season, trying to make better wine each year, has been the most satisfying part of my work thus far.
We delayed pruning again this year, and are now seeing the changes we were hoping for. While our soils and vines have already shown a propensity to millerandage and loose clusters, with each delay of pruning we’ve introduced in the past seasons, we’re seeing a greater and more consistent manifestation of this tendency throughout the vineyard, especially in the small pockets of genetics that naturally produce tighter bunches.
The sunnier season has led to an earlier appearance of split grapes from sunburn, but the increasing looseness in morphology has helped augment airflow within the cluster, suppressing botrytis pressure that we’ve seen from sunburn damage in the past two seasons.
I’m excited to build upon the progress we made in 2024. Having pruned later again on top of a dry season, I’m expecting an even higher skin to juice ratio in both white and red, creating an even greater potential for intensity without weight that defines our wines.
Reflecting upon that cumulative learning, I find myself growing further from ‘minimal interventionism’ as an idea. I’ve always believed that knowing what not to do is just as, if not more important than knowing what to do, but I’ve come to see the concept a deeply eurocentric notion, rooted in a belief that humans are separate from nature.
With passing year, my connection to our land deepens, and I feel that our purpose is to work with and within nature. To grow our understanding of how to fortify our vineyard’s resilience, how to capture and amplify the personality of our place, requires us to honor our relationship to our place, rather than to remove ourselves from it.
In parallel to our work in the vineyard, I’ve been opening special bottles over the past month to share with team and friends, revisiting benchmarks both young and mature, reinforcing and refining my definition of quality and the things I value most in wine.
Of these many bottles, two stood out. The 90 Ramonet Batard was in perfect condition, vibrant and fresh while bordering unctuous, nutty, sweet umami, with a beautiful mouth coating waxy viscosity.
As with most white Burgundies from this era, the Ramonet was underpinned by a pillar of intertwining chewy, structuring dry extract with driving, chalky acidity, a solid mass from entry to back palate, mirroring the experiences I’ve had with great bottles from the 70s and 80s.
The greatest mature white wines I’ve experienced often feel as that I’m tasting in high definition, that there are more pixels per inch, more depth and density of flavor to match the searing intensity of structure, without needing to fake it through weight or alcohol.
The Ramonet was magical in this exact way with incredible magnitude of fruit, nutty and salty, aged comte umami and textural depth, reverberating and lingering in my nasal cavity long after the wine was finished.
The 04 DRC Richebourg was hauntingly pure and perfumed, sweet fruited and caressingly silky, with strawberries muddled and macerated with brown sugar, damask rose, rose oil, nutmeg, orange zest and bergamot, a wonderfully elegant, weightless and incredibly detailed rendition of Richebourg.
Caressing is not always a term I’d use to describe Richebourg, but this really felt gentle, its flesh softened and edges sanded by bottle age. The texture and flavor have been transformed with time, but its substance and depth have not. This had a sense of detail, quiet intensity, haunting length and kaleidoscopic complexity that the Ramonet seemed to lack. We couldn’t put our glasses down.
Most of the time I’m happy if an 04 has been touched minimally by the vintage greenness, but this wasn’t just an 04 that outperformed the vintage, this was a fabulous wine in its own right, much like the 04s of Rene Engel. I had my four year old smell the empty bottle the next morning and he said, it smells like everything I like, it makes me feel calm inside. Free from the associations that the label carries, I’m not sure wine can reach a higher plane.
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