The Year Nobody Trusted

The label carries the usual DRC bookkeeping: 2.871 Bouteilles Récoltées, Bouteille N° 01709. Two thousand eight hundred and seventy-one bottles, fewer than the 3,330 of 2006 that came before it. The domaine’s Montrachet is always a few thousand bottles; this was one of the smaller years. The reason is on the same label, in the vintage.

The Summer of 2003

Anyone who lived through that August in Europe remembers it. The heat sat on the continent for weeks, and in Burgundy the harvest began earlier than at any point in the previous two decades. For the reds there was at least a debate. For the whites there was something closer to a verdict: the sugars had run ahead of the flavours, the acidity had burned off, and the wines would be heavy, alcoholic and short-lived. Drink them young, the advice went, before they turn.

The early reviews of this bottle sat inside that verdict rather than against it. Critics found an extravagantly ripe nose, white flowers and mango and peach and poached pear, with a muscular, forward palate to match. The concession, when it came, was carefully phrased: ripe, but not baked. It was praise with a question mark attached. Nobody was prepared to say how long it would last.

What has happened since is one of the quieter reversals in modern white Burgundy. As the wine passed twenty, the reports that came back from those who opened it described something the vintage was not supposed to be able to produce: a Montrachet that was still fresh, still moving, still holding its shape. The heatwave whites that survived are rare. This is one of the ones that did.

Twenty-Three Years On

Deep gold in the glass, the colour of its age but with none of the amber that would signal decline. The nose was broad rather than sharp: yellow plum, poached pear, melon, buttered toast, a spice-box warmth, and over the top of it a faint tropical note, mango and passion fruit, like a fingerprint the summer left behind.

The palate was where the argument settled. The density was considerable, layered and velvet-textured, the kind of weight that in a lesser wine from this year would have simply sat there. Instead the acidity came up through the middle of it, cleanly, and carried the whole thing forward. The wine everyone said had no acidity had acidity to spare. It was not heavy. The finish ran long and seamless, tapering towards nuts and spice.

At twenty-three this is fully mature and, against every prediction made about it in 2004, still fresh. There is no reason to wait if you have one, and no reason to hurry either. The vineyard and the house were both stronger than the weather.

There is a line I keep coming back to with Montrachet, and this bottle earned it more than most: the worrying is done by us, and the enduring is done by the wine.