Bourgogne Côte d'Or Vieilles Vignes AOC 2023

Rémi Jobard's Bourgogne Côte d'Or Vieilles Vignes 2023 is a dry Chardonnay from old vines at the heart of the Côte d'Or. It puts cool fruit and minerality centre stage rather than oak: pale yellow with green highlights and a rim fading to silver, precisely drawn, with a fine, velvety finish and 13.5% ABV.

The Bourgogne Côte d'Or appellation is young and confines the production zone to the heart of the Côte d'Or. All the parcels for this wine lie in sites bordering Meursault, two of them directly below the 1er cru Charmes. Meursault's limestone soils are the guiding theme of the estate.

Single-varietal Chardonnay. The vine rows are worked by hand and cover-cropped, cordon pruning limits yields, and fertilisation is exclusively organic. Grapes picked in the morning are pressed for at least six hours, those picked in the afternoon for up to twelve: this way, only the finest must reaches the cellar, free of bitter compounds. About 15 months of ageing follow in 600-litre foudres from Stockinger, of which roughly a fifth are renewed each year. The large volume serves slow oxygen exchange rather than oak aromatics. The wine is bottled unfiltered.

A multifaceted nose: cool orchard fruit such as apple and nashi pear, lemon blossom, oyster shell and wet chalk, alongside spicy, bitter herbs between sorrel and chervil. The palate entry is powerful and vibrant, rich extract mirrors the fruit on the nose, underpinned by ethereal aniseed and tarragon. Profound minerality supports ripe acidity and delicate tannin, and the drive on the palate never lets up.

Synthetic fertilisers and pesticides disappeared in 1994, herbicides in 1998. In the historic vaulted cellars, the wines mature for two winters, drawing their stability from this process rather than from technical intervention.