Chambolle-Musigny Les Athets 2022

Village. Les Athets, Chambolle-Musigny. Pinot Noir from 0.33 ha, bought in 1984, the first parcel Jean bought outright. Two plantings: 1929, a third of the vines, averaging 80 years in 2016, so 97 this year, and 1975, the other two thirds. Guillaume’s own description: “a third of the vines average 80 years, two-thirds about 45.” Guyot simple on SO4 rootstock. Clay and silt over limestone. Lowest part of the village, on the flat toward the road. About 36 hl/ha. Sixteen months in barrel, a quarter new.

Chambolle is the smallest of the great villages and the one with the reputation for lace: thin soils, a lot of limestone, the most perfumed Pinot on the Côte.

Les Athets is not on the slope. It’s at the bottom, east of the village on the flatter ground below Les Beaux Bruns and Aux Échanges, where the clay and silt thicken, the part of Chambolle that gives weight rather than lace. Two things make it early. The site, low and sheltered, ripens ahead of the hill. And the rootstock: SO4 is a vigorous, early-ripening stock that brings the fruit in four or five days ahead of the rest, so this is often the first parcel picked. Guillaume calls it his enfant terrible, the wine he is never quite satisfied with. “C’est une danseuse,” he says, a dancer, not a lumberjack. The oldest vines in the book, and a Chambolle with more flesh than the village usually gives, from a parcel that was never meant to be delicate.

Fully de-stemmed with two thirds of the berries kept whole, a week cold before fermentation starts on its own, warmed slowly with few punch-downs. Aged sixteen months in barrel on the fine lees under CO₂, sulfur added late, racked once before bottling.