2021 Domaine Theulot Juillot Mercurey 1er Cru Les Champs Martins

Even if the modern standards of viticulture and winemaking have more widely failed to do justice to its soils, Mercurey has a terroir pedigree to match its status as the engine room of the Côte Chalonnaise. The landscape is a southerly continuation of the Côte d’Or, with the rock structure dominated by Jurassic limestone of the Bathonian and Oxfordian ages. Like her grandparents before her, Nathalie always had higher aspirations for a region which in the late 1980s was trading on a reputation as poor-man’s-Gevrey. No sooner had she taken the keys, Theulot immediately boosted the domaine’s replanting program to replace all her remaining ill-fitting clones with massale selections, even though vine genetics has never been a strong suit of the Côte Chalonnaise (especially since the 1960s when an ambitious planting program flooded Mercurey with high-yielding clones that failed to ripen their stems).

Preferring to farm the soil, not the vines, Theulot then began to steer the domaine down the organic path, eschewing herbicides and insecticides. Although maximum yields for Mercurey are the same as village wines in the Côte d’Or (unlike the other appellations of the Côte Chalonnaise), she crops even lower to ensure the greatest intensity of flavour possible. Vineyards are ploughed, with grassing-over between rows and all harvesting is done manually. Countless other details and techniques have been refined over the years. Regarding the winemaking, all the grapes are destemmed, fermentation is wild, and the use of new oak is capped at one-quarter.  

In Inside Burgundy, Jasper Morris MW notes that “the red wines of Mercurey can be the deepest, firmest and richest reds of the Côte Chalonnaise”. You can certainly feel that intensity in Theulot’s wines. Yet all her reds carry the vibrancy, elegance and precision that clearly conveys what makes Burgundy the promised land for Pinot Noir. Respect. And all this at a fraction of the cost you pay for wines of similar quality just half an hour to the north. 

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