2010 Catherine & Gilles Vergé L'ecart

WINEMAKER: Catherine & Gilles Vergé
REGION: Burgundy, FR
VARIETY: Chardonnay
VITICULTURE: Organic

Chardonnay grown on a mix of clay and limestone. 2010 - From an even, high-acid vintage, resulting in a straight, fine and long structure, with lots of minerality. Not handled oxidatively.

Catherine and Gilles farm 3 hectares of old vine Chardonnay around the village of Vire. Serious and passionate campaigners for natural wine, they are driven by their commitment to producing wines with zero additives and farming with with as much sensitivity as possible. They've been farming here since the '80s and the vines for the Vieilles Vignes parcel are now over 135 years old. The soils here are a mix of active clay and limestone.

In the winery, fruit is sorted, pressed, racked after 24 hours, fermented and watched diligently for at least 4 years before being run in to bottle. Catherine and Gilles are very firm believers in allowing a wine to go through several seasons of elevage, therefore allowing active bacteria to perform all natural conversions, before the wine goes to bottle. These wines are very stable and are of unbelievable quality. The palate length and balance are quite extraordinary.

Walking through the vineyards and discussing bio-diversity and nitrogen levels with Gilles is a true education. Such is his preference for slow fermentations and the maximum possible expression of terroir, he avoids managing the flora amongst the vines in a way that encourages higher nitrogen levels in the soil. He explained to me on a visit in 2016 that while he, of course, wants his topsoil to be as healthy as possible, he prefers to have less natural compost by way of grasses lignifying so that the roots have no choice but to descend vertically - thus extracting more minerality and being more expressive of the (phenomenal) terroir. He is happy for his fermentations to take two years and he refuses to put any wine to bottle or on to the market before it's ready.