Hello Robert, unfortunately and to my shame, I’m not really aware of where our wines can be found in Florida. I believe you can ask your local retailer to source some from our national importer (Kysela, VA), or if they ship to FL, you can ask Chambers street wines in NY or Timeless (VA, they don’t seem to be well rated on this board).
A little update for Otto!
So we got the forecasted 10mm but the soil was dry enough that it got absorbed overnight and the following spraying was a bliss. However we had quite a dry weather from this point on with North winds that got us a little worried about our younglings.
Weather has been a little upside down this year again with huge amounts of rain in the South (if you like Languedoc-Roussillon wines 2020 doesn’t start out well) and a dry weather here so they’ve got our mildew and we’ve got their downy (eventhough we haven’t seen it yet, it tend to hit late and hard so careful…).
We are on the verge of a wet week which isn’t all that bad given that it might compensate a little for the north wind weather we had (loosing up to 8mm of rain a day!!). It won’t be that rainy (1-3mm/day for 7-10days) but continuously wet so the water will probably not reach the roots but the leafs will be able to take some. It could be a problem if we had mildew but it’s not the case and the timing isn’t too bad as flowers are finishing so we’re past the most critical point (in 2016, a really though year for an exemple, at this point the mildew was already munching at the grapes). Now we’ll see if everything goes as forecasted.
FYI if everything goes in a more or less normal way we should start harvesting around septembre 1st which is in line with recent vintages (15, 17, 18, 19).
We’re done cutting the courants and we’ve done a first round of trellising (hurried by the wind that could break some shoots). Tommorow morning I’ll do a little topping on the parts that grew the most. We always do it by hand here, first round is easy, depending on the season we have to do it twice or three times. The third topping can be really hard as the shoots are already harden. First year my wrist looked like a chicken egg had grown under the skin and I couldn’t hold cutlery for over a week. 
We also started to see grapes worms, they make their little nest by agregating a dozen of small flowers/grapes together. It’s not a big problem if it’s just a few of them but too many can loose you some fruits and also, by damaging the ripe fruits, they can bring in some acetic bacteria (which is never a good thing for quality if you’re not careful with fermentation). Depending on what we see this week we might try to spray some repellent plant extract (fermented fern could be an option). ![[stirthepothal.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f40faec63ca1018898a40805efbf9f0066a3d205.gif "[stirthepothal.gif]"){kind=small}
All in all, for now we have a pretty good season on our hands but I’ll keep my fingers crossed as long as the wine is not in the bottle… ![[berserker.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/8600bbd4810d342b8fbd4ffb62b4f0026275fd37.gif "berserker"){kind=small}
Note to myself: let’s talk a little about what’s happening in the cellar next time. 
Thanks for the update! Keep 'em coming, always interesting stuff to read!
So, about the cellar!
First about the still wines.
As said before we don’t do much in between vatting and bottling but a lot happen in the tank nevertheless. We currently have our 2019 Quintaine, Retour à la Terre and Charleston respectively in cement tank, terracotta jar and demi-muid and to the exception of Charleston, everything went through alcoholic fermentation pretty smoothly: most of the fermentation finished around the first days of December and 2 finished in February (3-5 months fermentation, pretty standard for us). Charleston 19 is currently at 3.95g RS and is loosing 0.5 every three weeks so we’ll get there…
The Malo seems a little more complicated as only on tank (out of three, half vintage due to April’s 11 nights of frost) and Charleston are done. However we have hopes as with spring fermentation always tend to start again and we can see both by the bubbles getting out of the tank and by the chromatography we do on a regular basis that the malo is happening.
If you didn’t major in chemistry during high school and wonder, chromatography is a simple analysis method in which we dry some wine in a single spot on a paper then let the base of the paper soak in a special solution (acetic acid, butanol and Bromophenol blue). The solution rise along the paper through capillarity, carrying the wine’s acids. The larger acid move slower than the smaller acid so the tartaric stays at the bottom, the malic acid move to the middle and the lactic (which is derived from the malic through malolactic fermentation: malo=>lactic, hence smaller) reaches the top. When the solution reach the top of the paper, we take it out and let it dry. Thank to the bromophenol blue that act as a pH indicator, the acid appears as yellow (the rest of the paper is colorod blue thanks to the… bromophenol “blue”). By looking at the yellow spot, we know what’s happening:
-1 spot at the bottom + 1 in the middle: malo didn’t strt
-1 spot at the bottom + 1 in the middle + 1 at the top: malo is happening, the spots deep or light color being an indicator of the % of completion
-1 spot at the bottom + 1 at the top: malo is done.
We usually bottle in July so the big question right now is, do we order cork and how many? Will we bottle tank 2 alone? Will tank 1&3 finish malo soon enough to be bottled with tank 2 or will we harvest with full tank (that wouldn’t be a first so we have plenty of tank space for that reason) and bottle tank 1&3 later in a separate lot? Schedule is tight and we need to know soon, so I’m looking at my tank morning and evening and doing chromato every few days. ![[worship.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/9/99a8907a1d5b3c023582052741dc72dc9823c044.gif "worship"){kind=small}
Similar issue with our Terracotta jar but there one completed malo and 2 didn’t start so we mixed all three in order to kick-start malo. This works in two ways. First by doing so you “inoculate” the malo bacteria from your jar that completed malo into the jar that didn’t start malo. Secondly you raise your pH, this probably necessitate a little deeper explanation:
Malolactic fermentation raise the pH of wines because the lactic acid is a weaker acid than malic acid. That’s why some, mainly in warm areas or areas with lots of potassium (NZ for one) block malo with sulfites. BUT the lactic bacteria that do the fermentation are killed and inhibited by acids. So the more acid you have (and the more you want to raise your pH though malo) the more difficult it gets to actually go through malo (opposite is also true). A few days ago, one of our largest importer (both by volume and stature, the man is a living giant) who couldn’t travel to France as he usually do to book a quantity of the future vintage asked me to send a tank sample with some analysis. Among the analyses was pH and I was impressed with the number :3,00. This number will change slightly before bottling through CO2 leaving the wine (yep CO2 is an acid and that’s surprising but if you know enough chemistry to find it surprising you probably know enough to understand why) and tartaric natural precipitation so I expect us to have a final wine pH around 3.5/3.10 which is not unusual for the estate (generally in the 3.10-3.20 range) as 2015 was 3.07, but still impressive for such a warm year.
I do believe that the low yield (frost) really concentrated the extract on the grapes and wine and that this is one of the reasons (together with our cultivation methods that allow us to retain a great acidity in our wines but that’s every year). So 2019, low pH, malo don’t want to start.
My skin contact 60L trial also won’t go through malo but I can bottle this one whenever I please and I don’t plan to use sulfites at any point with this one so I’m not really troubled by it.
Yes, when the malo is done we’ll use a little sulfur to stabilize the wine. For a vintage with such beautiful healthy grapes and low pH we’ll use around 1.5g/hL (that could go up to 2-2.5 depending on the vintage). We’ll want not to use any at bottling but if necessary we’ll add a little more to ensure bottle stability but also to help protect from the oxygen we’ll necessarily get at bottling (even-though a lot of progress have been made thanks to neutral gas filling the bottle before we put any wine in). We don’t use commercial sulfites but rather source volcanic sulfur, a yellow mineral you find on volcanoes (if you’ve ever been to a hot spring you probably saw some), and burn it in a small device, creating S02 gas that we bubble directly into the wine. We find this alchemy-style method to be more natural, more efficient, and gentler on the wine. It is however a little dangerous if you’re not careful (flame + oxygen bottle…) and a much less handy than ready-made, industrial metabisulfites solution.
Ok, I’ll tell you about sparkling and spirits next time.
Ok, so here is something a little special about the estate, since 2012 we are the last Burgundy estate to own and operate a still to distillate our own Marc and Fine.
This might not last long however as we can really fell a new wave of quality Burgundy spirit after decades of rotgut.
In France, winemakers had an obligation to give back a certain quantity of alcohol to the state. This was meant partly as a tax and partly as a quality control: if you need to give some alcohol to the state, you better not over-press your grapes, make “piquette” (adding water to the marc after pressing) or filtrate your lees but just give away these distilled residues. But one had a choice to either give the alcohol to the state or sale it himself, paying heavy alcohol duties that would compensate for the undelivered alcohol. Most choose to deliver the alcohol though as consumption trends drove consumers toward the big brands and away from the local, traditional spirits (drinking whisky and exporting Cognac… don’t ask me why.)
Nowadays, the state has less use for neutral alcohol and the concerns of the time have changed so winemakers still have an obligation to transform their residue but the focus is more on sustainability and we can also methanize or compost, etc.
Large distilling company are slowly closing due to the state lower alcohol buying price and Europe lower handouts (we still see some crisis distillation measure, as in 2020, a lot of wine will probably be distilled in Europe this year due to Covid) and many itinerant stills are closing as distiller retire. However a new generation of craft distiller appears, often focus on organic, local products, supported by new consumption trends (white spirits like gin, micro-brewing, etc.). Moreover a young generation of (mainly organic) producers is more and more concerned about “wasting” their residue to industrial alcohol.
I believe very few (if any) will go all the way to distilling themselves as we decided to, as the paperwork is maddening and the extra work is heavy especially compared to the financial benefits. However the quality benefits are immeasurable.
So first, let’s see why most Marc and Fine have been of dubious quality (to say the least) these past decades:
1/Contract distilling
Even if contract distillers are good distillers, it should be obvious that contracted work is never as good as work you do yourself. It’s especially true in the distilling world fr several reason. The first is that a Marc should be distilled as soon as fermentation is over. (If you wonder Marc is the leftover from the press). Either white or red, a Marc doesn’t contain much liquid and is hence very susceptible to oxidation, acetic fermentation (vinegar) and other terrible stuff. But in a given region, more or less everybody press at the same time so the Marc has to wait for the contract distiller to be available, hence spoilage. Secondly, contract distillers are paid by the volume. Hence they are prone to keep most of the distillate in the final product when a good chunk of it should be set aside (heads and tails). This is especially true of the Marc that can be quite rustic if you are not extremely precise in your cuts. Of course you could make a special deal with the contract distiller for a different payment structure, to my knowledge, nobody yet went to this extent to make a quality, contract-distilled Marc. Third, to make this job a profitable one (we are speaking basic level of making a living) they need efficient, large still. Most contract distiller use vapor injection still with three boiling pots, and often replaced the copper parts with easier-to-clean stainless. With this kind of still you can’t get the result you’d have with a smaller, time-consuming, pot or hybrid still.
2/Laziness and cost control
Ideally, Marc should be made from de-stemmed white grapes (stems give the Marc an harsh, dry profile and white marc produce slightly more elegant spirits). But most Marc is made with red grapes as you don’t need to re-ferment them (red ferment with the marc so you just need to distill it while white marc need to be fermented as it’s just pressed fresh gapes) and in Burgundy, red often means stems in. Also, if you want to press a quality white wine, you should press with the stems, that mean that if you want to make a de-stemmed marc afterward you need to destem after pressing, which is quite cumbersome.
Almost no-one bother to make this extra-work as spirits are such a small part of their business and what’s more, a non-profitable one.
For the same reason, the spirit aging is seldom managed. The new make spirit is barrel down in new or recent wood and let for aging until bottling, when sales permit. However in order to get a nicely integrated aging, many elements need to be fine tuned: barreling proof, age of the barrel, aging time, barrel topping, cellar conditions etc. needing time, attention and focus that are seldom provided (again, small, unprofitable part of the business).
3/Negoce
In quantity, most of the spirits that reached the market are bottled by negoces, either specialized in spirits or wine negoce who sale a few barrels of spirits. Here, in addition to the first two issues, we have a third one: raw material quality. As this negoce don’t own a still nor vines, they just buy the new make spirit to large distillery whose main job is to produce industrial alcohol. You can imagine the care given to the raw materials in those places. Add to that the fact the raw material is the one given to the state in payment for the alcohol tax and you can guess the quality and care given by the producers to said materials.
All this is pretty gloom but fortunately, as I said it’s changing. So when my wife came back on the estate, the craft distilling movement hadn’t really reached France yet. But Sophie worked for Hennessy and I interned for Remy-Martin Louis XIII, so distilling grapes was something we were not foreign to. It seemed like a good way to make something new without changing what worked at the estate so we bought a first still in 2012 and a second one the next year. Actually both came from the same itinerant distiller who retired and we bought the second one once we got more confident with the concrete aspects of the project.
With all the above in mind we set out to do something different, and buying our own still was the first step toward that goal. Our two stills are old, burgundy-style copper still. They were built respectively in 1932 and 1952 on the same model. They are small (500L) and wood-fired. The burgundy still is an hybrid still: a pot still with a small rectification colum. This mean that out of the pot, the vapor enters a small column with two platters that force it to take detours, condensing the heaviest vapor that contain more water. With hybrid still we obtain a new make at 55% ABV with only one distilling when if using a simple pot still we’d get a 35% new make that we’d need to re-distill to get a 70-80% new make.
Simply put, double distillation will give you something “purer”, simple distillation will give you something more complex (as long as you don’t have a huge column with 10+ platter that give you 80+% ABV new make) while preserving the raw material (heating twice can deteriorate some finer aromas).
(To be continued)
Quick update on the vintage.
Weather has been really great, actually so far we can say it has been almost perfect. The vines are super healthy, the bunches are loose (lost some fruits at flowering, which is great for quality) and currently closing down.
We have a rather high heterogeneity between blocks and even inside blocks but this is something we actually appreciate as it will bring some complexity to the final wine (as long as it’s not too much…).
We stopped using copper, might stop spraying totally from this week on (one small dose of sulphur on Friday early morning to avoid burning damages with the current hot weather) or just plants to keep black rot at bay.
With the heat comes storms, we escape the first wave yesterday, we’ll hope the pattern will repeat itself as your main concerns from now on will be hail (and finding harvesters…).
Excited to have a great vintage for my son birth year 
Sounds like you’re having a great growing season Gautier. I hope the weather continues to be helpful for you and your son’s first harvest! Thank you for the continuing updates.
Aloha!
No surprise, of course, but William Kelley gives warm reviews to all of Guillemot-Michel’s 2018 wines in his Mâcon roundup.
Just checked the release. Always a pleasure to see that a year of work in the vineyard transformed into happiness in the glass ![[dance-clap.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/835ce082e2fa9c96c4b7f96406bf6e9a0db882ff.gif "[dance-clap.gif]"){kind=small}
I also see that William’s palate and mine align on Denogent Les Cras 2017, great bottle in my opinion, my box of 6 is already down to 4…
Thanks, Gautier. Kudos on your 2018 “Une Bulle” also. As I think I’ve said in person, if only more Crémant de Bourgogne tasted like that…
Thank you William, I’ll take that as an invitation to tell you all a little more about the production process of “Une Bulle”!
So first of all we started making this cuvée in 2014 from our Lie-Monin block.
This block has always been part of the estate but Pierrette and Marc rented it to a neighbour for almost 30 years. There was 2 reasons for that, first this block is slightly further from the estate, but the main reason is that this small block (0,2ha) had 2 conventional farming neighbour who’s spraying tended to cover the totality of the block… not ideal. When Sophie came back to the estate in 2012 the neighbour’s practices had improved and tenant was kind enough to renounce his lease so Sophie could take the block back.
The tenant was farming conventionally so 2012 and 2013 were the first 2 “conversion” year. It so happened that those years were very very low yield and combined to our agricultural changes and “rejuvenation” pruning, there was barely enough wine there to make a few bottles of “harvesters wine” that I believe we finished drinking during 2017 or 2018 harvest.
Nevertheless those two years allowed us to get better acquainted with the block specificity. As I said above:
“The Lie-Monin with its soil rich in red clay (ferrous) is the plot from which our “Bulle” (sparkling) comes. Its subsoil is made up of a kind of limestone arena: limestone being eroded like coarse sand with pieces ranging from a few millimeters to a few centimeters.” Being lower on the hill, and with a clay-rich soil, it keeps water well which is great in dry vintage, and not so great during the wet ones (hello 2013…) as downy mildew pressure is then much higher. This specific terroir also offer ripe grapes with lower sugar content (this is also something we witness in the clay-rich soil of our “Retour à la Terre”) which is always a good thing for sparkling, however it’s still unripe at 10,5-11% ABV potential which would be ideal for cremant.
Here you’ll note that too many, either in Burgundy, Champagne or other parts of the world don’t really seem to care about ripeness when making a sparkling, explaining the aromatic-mute, super acidic stuff you can commonly find at your family get-together. ![[swoon.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f425e8dac3e7344bee264da02e55428971be23a9.gif "swoon"){kind=small}
Yet, Sophie mainly drinks bubbly and I’m a big Champagne lover so we wanted to make a sparkling out of this block (also for our incoming wedding…). The traditional method (used both for Cremant and Champagne) didn’t really appealed to us first of all because we never chaptalised our wines (you needed added sugar in this method, see below) and secondly as said above we felt we wouldn’t get a satisfying maturity at 10,5-11% ABV potential so the result would be a disappointing, classic, high-acid low-aroma cremant…
Quick reminder here, to make a cremant or champagne, you first make a still wine, then bottle it with added sugar (24g/L) and yeasts, wait for the secondary fermentation to happen, then age it on the lees (fancy name for “do nothing and wait”) for some time, riddle (move the bottle to put the lees in the bottleneck), disgorge (open the bottle, forcing out the lees) the top up, generally with some sugar “dosage”). Because you gain 1,5%ABV with the added sugar, you need to harvest at 10,5-11% ABV potential (a 14% sparkling isn’t a great idea).
So we decided for the “Ancestral method”, traditionally (actually if you go back to Champagne’s origin, this was also the method used but anyway…) used to make low-alcohol, sweet sparkling (cerdon, clairette de die, banquette de limoux, etc.) but more recently popularised under the term " pet’ nat’ " (short for “pétillant naturel” / natural sparkling). Our issue with pet’ nat’ however was that they are generally sold right after bottling, with the lees still in. They can be rather unstable, cloudy and develop notes of sesame, the whole “natural wine” array of pleasures.
Hence we decided to take the “best” of both world (ioho), and use the ancestral method with added time on the lees (minimum 15 months as per Champagne legal requirement) and disgorgement.
2014 was the first year we tried it. I gathered my memories from my Champagne’s internships and Sophie contacted Vincent Carême whom we knew used more or less the same technique. We harvested the Lie-Monin block on the first day of harvest (which we now do every year), and started with our usual process: slow pressing, settling and tank fermentation. But this time we checked density twice a day. When the density got closer to our goal, we started doing Fehling (sugar analysis) up to the point we got 34g/L sugar, accounting for 10g/L residual sugar we were hoping for (a classic “Brut”, no risk taken on year 1). When we got there, we cooled down the tank a bit and started bottling with our faithful 6-nozzle filer and a brand new crown capper. (We were smart enough to use a second-floor tank so we could bottle with just gravity, pumping fermenting must can be a pain). We just had to wait.
Fermentation in the bottle went smoothly and we disgorged one bottle here, one bottle there to taste and follow. Nice but there was just one thingy, it tasted damn sweet…!
Fifteen month later it was good but still sweet… more than 20g/L! Yet it was fully bubbling, with a standard 6 bars of pressure, it didn’t make any sense.
Turns out, we forgot to account for the bubbles already in the wine at bottling. When you bottle a cremant/Champagne, the wine is totally or almost totally still. Us, we had a full fledge fermentation happening so we easily had already 2 bars of pressure. ![[oops.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/1/1f129ddad071ffe5db6c99817c3cab666035a70a.gif "oops"){kind=small}
Good news is, sweeter sparkling goes great with wedding’s brioche. 
Anyway, we got some small second-hand equipment: “pupitres” and manual “gyropalette” for the riddling, boucheuse-museleuse (cork and muselet), doseuse (to top up bottles) and a semi-automatic disgorging machine (like an automatic beer opener with a plastic finger-like part that close the bottleneck swiftly after opening, preventing the loss of half the bottle, race-winning style), and went on to make our first disgorgment!
Being small scale, we don’t freeze the bottleneck beforehand. Using the ancestral method we don’t top the bottles with sugar (“dosage”) but with just the wine from one sacrificed bottle of sparkling, and a little sulphites (10mg/L). We tried 0 sulphites on year 1, but after 1 year, the wine, while still good, needed to be drunk. With this small dose, I can say that the wine hold for at least 3 years (maybe more, I haven’t tried, but if you knew our “Une Bulle” I hope all of your stock would be drunk much much faster than that ![[thumbs-up.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f84c5acc11486ee4baba6dee6cf61dbd133abb18.gif "[thumbs-up.gif]"){kind=small}
).
Nowadays, our initial mistake being taken into account, we’re back to the initial goal of around 10g/L or residual sugar (Brut) and we try to slowly lower this number. We disgorge small lot by small lot so you can fin in the market bottles that stayed on the lees in between 16 and 30 months. I’m considering limited releases of “late disgorged” bottles. I have 2015 in the cellar that are still on lees for trial and personal use. You might find very very limited quantities of magnum, all with the maximum lees ageing.
I fell I said plenty and I ought to be in bed so, that’ll be it, but fell free to ask any question on the subject (or any subject for that matter).
This is such an informative post!
I’m probably in the boat of many who haven’t had a pet-nat that’s been aged on the lees for any length of time - and while many are refreshing I find that a lot of people just make insipid bubbly wine that tastes faulty and call it “natural” - so I’ll just ask - does it also develop a little bit of that yeasty/bready character? What do you notice about the aging process that’s different from “regular” sparkling?
Bonjour Gautier. Thank you very much for participating here and for sharing your thoughts and experiences. It’s content like this that makes Wineberserkers so special. (and thanks also to you, William - your posts are awesome)
And, as a direct result, I’ve just bought some of your wines (Quintaine, specifically) so I can taste the efforts you and your family have put into making them. I can’t wait to try a bottle (but need to wait for cooler shipping weather first)!
Hello Blair and thank you, do not hesitate to taste our wines over the course of a few days after opening the bottle, especially if it’s a recent vintage like 17.
Hello Sean, if by yeasty/bready you mean what I personal call sesame which is maybe close in a way to the “mouse” fault found in “natural” wines, no we don’t get that. If you think more of the bready character that I personally associate with (good) vintage champagne, yes, we can get a little of that in the longer ageing but I think we would need to go over 36 months of lees ageing to really get it. I need to check these 2015 I kept, but I have 24 bottles to open at once so I’ve been waiting for an occasion where I’ll have enough people at hand to drink the leftovers.
Over the course of the one year that we have between the first and the last disgorgement I see that our “Bulle” goes from whiter, fresher, crisper aromas (pear, white flower), to more yellow, juicy fruit (plum) to more autumn like flavours (quince, chestnut).
I believe there are two major differences between our sparkling and as you say “regular” sparklings.
First, we don’t have a temperature controlled room in which to store our sparkling during bottle fermentation. It stays with the rest of our wines and thus the temperature goes down quite soon after bottling. As a result, fermentation doesn’t really stop but rather pause or continue at a very very slow pace and we do see that a our sparkling tend to loose some more sugar every additional spring/summer spent in the cellar (as I said in an earlier post, just like in Puligny-Montrachet we have underground water in the village so our cellar is only partially underground thus our temperature range is a little wider). I believe this very (1,5 to 3years) long fermentation add to the aromatic profile of our sparkling. Not using selected yeast also tend to slow down fermentation and provide a more complex aromatic profile.
Another unique feature of our technique is that our sparkling stays on the lees WITH sugar in the bottle (in a cremant/champagne, the yeast finish the sugar swiftly and so most f the ageing is done dry). This open a wide new array of chemical reactions: the Maillard reactions that happen between sugar and amino acids (in the lees). Maillard reaction give us all the good brown things in life: roasted, toasted meat, chocolate, coffee, caramel, etc. If you ever tried a very old champagne (60’s or 70’s) this were usually rather sweet and spent enough time in the cellar so you could get these quite characteristic aromas. Of course it’s not as obvious in our case as our sparkling don’t age for so long but that can give you an idea.
I just want to say sesame is quite an accurate descriptor for mousiness, especially when one comes across it in whites or bubbly wines.
I did mean the autolytic, “good” yeasty/bready aromas!
Really fascinating, Gautier, thank you. I remember reading somewhere that some winemakers in Burgundy a while ago were using chaptalization not to increase alcohol levels but to extend their fermentations because of the perceived benefits you mentioned - more complexity and stability. Definitely not over a few years, though - that’s really interesting.
Right, de Montille still do it every year on the reds, it does raise the alcohol level a little though.
Gautier, I have a question for you if you happen to see this. Did you separately bottle Viré-Clessé and Quintaine in 2017 as distinct wines, or are these the same wine with different labels for different markets? I finally got around to trying this - am in NC like Nathan and Fred and ended up having to order from VA, bottles imported by Kysela. These are labeled as Viré-Clessé, whereas folks like Chambers St that presumably import themselves have had 2017s labeled as Quintaine.
Not Gautier, but the AOC is Viré-Clessé (you will see this on the back label) but the hamlet whence the wine derives is Quintaine. On a legal level, the back label, which has the AOC on it, it actually the “front label”.
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Lucky William, the man who post faster than his shadow (I realize this is a french reference most of you won’t get…).
So to complement William’s answer, Kysela historically had a specific label for our Quintaine. The exact reasons are unclear, I think a mix of legal matters, marketing and misunderstandings. We changed that from vintage 2018, all of our Quintaine is labeled under the same “Quintaine” label whether you buy it in France, US, or anywhere else.
So If you buy a pre-2018 vintage, it can be labelled “Viré-Clessé” under the Kysela label or “Quintaine” under our standard label, it’s the same wine (of course “Retour à la Terre” and “Charleston” are different wine, Viré-Clessé AOC too)
And as William stated,we jam all the legal information in a back label (that is the official label) so we can have a nice, elegant label.
Hope this is understandable!
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