Off the top-of-my-head …
I believe that the DRC, V-R, 1er Cru is derived from the DRC V-R Grand-Cru vinyeards.
I vaguely recall that Arnoux does a selection for their Suchots with the lower quality grapes going to a lesser bottling.
I am open to correction.
One more distant memory … I’ve read of winemakers “pulling-up” older rows and replanting. Each year as these new vines begin producing the winemaker decides if the grapes are at the level for their GC.
More generally one reads often of even small producers making selections on their sorting table so there seems to be a decision process by
the winemaker regarding which grapes qualify for their GC. I agree that very small producers may reject and discard where larger producers may use them somewhere else. In either case the winemaker is making a decision (likely driven by quality or economic considerations) and not all the grapes make it into their GC.
My primary point was that a decision is made and not all winemakers making wine from one vineyard use the same criteria and not all the grapes from a winemakers holdings make it into the GC.
The Duvault-Blochet cuvée is indeed young vine fruit from the Domaine’s grands crus, declassified to Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru. Another example would the the Chambolle-Musigny 1er Cru bottling from de Vogüé, which is young vine Musigny. You will find instances of people declassifying young vine fruit until it is up to standard in their eyes: thus the Mugneret sisters made a Gevrey AOC and Gevrey 1er Cru from their young vine Ruchottes-Chambertin until they decided to blend it into the rest of the cuvée. In 2018, Arnaud Ente declassified his young vines in Referts to Puligny-Montrachet AOC - whereas in 2017 he thought the wine they made merited the 1er cru AOC. And so on. But these are really exceptions to the rule: generally, if you have the right to a particular appellation in Burgundy, you put it on the label!
Declassification in the sense of demoting certain barrels down the hierarchy to improve the top blend is really more of a Bordelais mentality, and I have only heard of that happening with any frequency where the producer has a lot of volume of a given wine: e.g. Clos de Tart, Domaine des Lambrays, Jadot (who demote some premier cru barrels into the communal bottlings), etc. If there really was a problem—in the sense of a flaw—with a particular barrel, it might be discarded or sold off to one of the less quality-minded négoce. And if you think about it, the Burgundian “terroir” philosophy is opposed to making a barrel selection: you bottle the wine produced by the site, if necessary warts and all, rather than trying to optimize a blend.
As for sorting, grapes eliminated in the sorting table are not added to the next-best cuvée, they are simply discarded. And this is based on them being rotten, or under- / over-ripe, or in some other way compromised, rather than simply not being handsome enough to go into a grand cru.
I think to understand the mentality in Burgundy (not at the domaines you cite, but at many addresses), you need to step back fifteen to twenty years, to a time when all these wines were much more modestly priced on the marketplace—with a much smaller gap in price between a top domaine’s best grand cru and a mediocre producer’s rendition of the same appellation—and volume was more likely to be the decisive factor in any given domaine’s revenue. The period of Burgundy pricing that we are currently living though is highly anomalous historically, and you don’t change an entire culture over night.
This is a great point that’s almost always overlooked when people talk about Burgundy. Although I think it’s probably more than twenty years at this point. But I remember an old friend who sadly is no longer with us, commenting that when he started in the business, many of the guys in Burgundy were essentially peasants, whereas many of the guys in Bordeaux were aristocrats or people with big money. And that was also before the idea of green harvesting was widespread.
Can you expound a bit on the bolded part? I always thought terroir was all about climate, soil, and exposure, to the exclusion of what the winemaker does. Is that incorrect? Are you saying winemaking technique (for some winemakers) are driven by terroir, or that they should be in order to allow expression of terroir?
And I don’t mean that to sound glib, but it just doesn’t. You can have all the stars align but without human intervention to make it beautiful, it cannot be beautiful. And not all winemakers have the same talents too, so it just unfolds into a myriad of variables.
Others have said what I’m about to say in part, but let me put things a little differently.
Applying “resources” (e.g., more oak, stricter selection) won’t necessarily improve the quality of the wine from a lesser site. The GCs and PCs by and large yield better fruit that can be macerated longer, spend more time in barrique and stand up to more new wood, for instance. Applying the same winemaking regime to lesser grapes may just yield an overly tannic, overly oaky wine without enough depth – and very likely one that’s not as good as it would have been if it had been treated in a way more appropriate to the fruit.
If there were tricks in the cellar that improved your village wine greatly, and word got around, you might be able to retail it for, say, $75 instead of $35 (prices well within the current range for village wines). I suspect that would more than cover the cost of more new barrels and a more rigorous selection on the sorting table. In other words, even though the appellation may set an upward boundary on the possible price for a wine, that’s probably not what shapes the way the wines are made.
Philosophical… Understanding sites, clones, reading vintages… If you merely made all wines the same way, many would suffer, not show their potential. There are so many choices (and potential choices) to make along the way. You can view that as being a conduit, to get the best out of particular site in a given vintage. But, what was planted, how it was trained, tended, cropped, companion plants, picking decisions. You might think of a particular clonal expression as part of a site’s expression without knowing that’s a fundamental factor. You can choose to tear out native aromatic shrubs, you can choose to allow that low growing native sage to thrive under the vines.
One example that comes to mind is I loved the Cronin Peter Martin Ray Vineyards PNs. Rustics, but lovely and showed the site wonderfully. Downhill did a good job later. Not so rustic, but the site showed well. Even later Arnot-Roberts started sourcing it. Massive stem character. An excellent wine, sure, but it pissed me off. Young, at least, the site as I know it didn’t show. Though, there clearly was uniqueness to the wine, which was terroir poking through. Perhaps with age (like, maybe now) some of what I loved about the Cronins will show. So, maybe that’s two facets of the same terroir. Or, maybe two valid contributions to the terroir. Or, one ballsy stab-in-the-dark that showed no respect…or, was it masterfully insightful, taking a great site to a new height…?
Burgundy is a difficult place to answer this question because there are so many variables. I can think of a few examples of better winemaking (including vineyard management) making a difference. The first is Chorey les Beaune where two producers made really good wines from a lesser appellation. Perhaps dating myself, I would use the example of Tollot Beauts 71 and 72 bettering their more famous neighbors in blind tastings. Ch de Chorey has also made really good wine from this area. The other example I would use is the town of Volnay. When I first got into wine this town was hardly discussed. So the winemakers there had to work extra hard and the results from people like Pousse D’or, Lafarge, de Montille and d Angerville have made people take this commune seriously. St Aubin has been a coming thing for a long time, but now it’s a happening place. Is it the terroir or the winemaking?? A little of both maybe.
Faiveley wines seem to have gotten better since Bernard Hervet arrived. Of course, he helped turn Bouchard PF around.
We see better winemaking making a big difference all over Bordeaux. Henri Martin turned a cru bourgeois Ch Gloria into a very popular wine. I don’t think I have had the wine since he died but it was very good. Other examples would include Phelan Segur, Les Ormes Sorbet and a host of garage wines.Pontet Canet anyone??
Wes, alas poor Duane Cronin…he made some great wines. But his example shows that the same vineyard in different hands can yield remarkably different results. Au Bon Climat started with a vineyard in Los Alamos that yielded crappy wine. The pruned their way and made some great wines. Then another company bought the vineyard and ABC was SOL. The wine sucked and five years later they offered the grapes to ABC.
We see a big turnaround in Lodi California. Traditionally growers tried to get more than ten tons to the acre and sell the grapes to big companies. Now we see all kinds of folks realizing that if they prune back, put more effort into the winemaking, that they can get good results.
A lot of people have sourced it, from Peter Ray on. Many examples require sleuthing, since many didn’t declare the vineyard. It’s a parcel of the Mount Eden vineyard, planted in the '70s. Not so different than other blocks of Mount Eden that you can’t say the general terroir has yielded 7 decades of wines made by a few dozen winemakers. There’s one anomaly out of all those. I’ll restate that young, it shows a winemaker style I could guess blind. It didn’t show anything that would’ve lead me to guess that it’s from a vineyard I’m very familiar with. It’s an unknown if age will change that.
It’s amazing how a wine evolves from pressing to bottling. At pressing it tastes one way. 2 days after completely different. Two weeks later, another way. 3 months down the line, they might taste like shit. Then the taste great again, only to turn horrible again to hopefully finally get better again. Add oak, malolactic, stemming, maceration time, whole cluster, amphoras, micro-oxy, native yeast or inoculated, temperature, the time of day you picked, off the lees, runaway ferments, acetic acid, cold stabilization, brett, mouse, acid corrections, brix, French, Slovenian or Acacia, etc, etc. Bottom line is the wine you tasted at crush is so completely different from the one a year down the line, it might as well be made from a different grape at the other side of the world. To then say that, magically, the terroir will be the dominant character, cutting like a red thread through all these huge changes in taste they go through - well, that’s not something I’ve observed. But then again, I might have a palate that isn’t refined enough. In my personal opinion, everything else during elevage will have far huger impact on the flavors than the subsoil the grapes were planted in.
I tend to agree with Sean Thackrey at 1:32 in:
I agree w. him that there are vineyard characteristics, of course. Who wouldn’t? But are they dominant, singular thing after secondary and tertiary evolutions and elevage?
I have to disagree - I think terroir must have some aspect of the vigneron’s intervention. To give a recent thought on this topic, check out Roumier’s interview in the latest IDTT… even if a vigneron makes the same decisions and interventions in the winery for each appellation, the decisions in the vineyard will vary! Each site is different and each vintage has a different impact on each site… without the intervention of the vigneron how can each site truly be optimized before going into the winery? I used to be of the opinion that it’s truly the site that gives everything but I can’t believe that to be true… it’s the intersection of man (ideally in a organic, biodynamic program) and land / soil / yeast that gives us a platform from which to understand terroir. Just my perspective in the early days of my wine journey. In any case, check out that interview!
Hey, guys, I don’t see anyone claiming that winemaking is irrelevant and that terroir completely determines a wine.
The original question was, if a winemaker in Burgundy treated all his parcels, at different levels, the same way, would the range of quality be less than it would be if he invests less in the lesser appellations? The question assumes that winemaking choices DO make a difference. And even those of us here who think that terroir generally sets the outer boundaries of quality are stressing that it makes sense to treat a Bourgogne differently than a GC. So no one is trying to cut winemakers out of the picture.
