2022 Nuits-St Georges, Aux Saint-Juliens, Domaine de Montille, Burgundy

The 2022 Nuits Saint-Georges Aux Saint-Julien has a very perfumed bouquet of red cherries and blueberries with a light rose petal touch coming through. It’s almost dainty in style, but there’s plenty of fruit here. The palate is medium-bodied with supple tannins, slightly savoury in style, with brown spices appearing towards the nicely structured finish. Maybe short-term, but it should be quite delicious.Head winemaker Brian Sieve describes: “We had an uneventful 2022,” he explains in their barrel cellar in Meursault. “We didn’t have any employee or tractor problems. The “noise” you have during a vintage didn’t happen. The biggest problem was finding good wood to prune after the frosts in 2021, which was early in the season. We had quite a bit of rain in June to sustain us through the dry periods, especially on the limestone soils. The Côte de Nuits, particularly Clos de Vougeot, seem to get more rain than the Côte de Beaune, 40mm there compared to 10mm down here. I believe the anti-hail canons in the Côte de Beaune ‘push’ the storms northwards. Marsannay and Gevrey get heaps of rain. You get more stress on more calcareous soils that are porous but free-draining. We had no heatwave or ‘canicule’ when the vines shut down. It was a warm season, but the stats are skewed because of the hot temperatures in February and March. It wasn’t like 2018 when maturity was advanced and progressing very fast. In 2022, the maturity came slower. We started with the kosher wines on August 26 and finished around September 8. We cropped at around 45hL/ha for the reds. The whole cluster percentages were based on whether it fitted into the vats. The wines underwent one extraction per day, pigeage rather than pumping over, which is just done at the beginning, whereas in his day, Hubert de Montille was doing three or four. Extraction happens by itself more than it used to. We found that we had very high-quality lees in 2022.”Drink 2025 - 2034Neil Martin, Vinous.com.com (January 2024)

50% whole bunch vinification, then immediate malolactic, so racked early. Medium deep purple with a delicious and quite heady bouquet, plenty of energy, some refinement. I love the juicy quality of the fresh raspberry fruit, with a perfect fruit-acid-tannin balance.Drink 2028 - 2034Jasper Morris MW, insideburgundy_com (December 2023)