Wine & Spirits - October 2016 - 45

his Echezots vines in 2016. Back across the courtyard in his tasting room, next to a display case of fossils from his top vineyards, Fournier pours some of his 2014s, including a few micro-cuvées that developed out of his tinkering. He tells me that before he joined his family's estate, he worked in Switzerland and Argentina, then in Bordeaux, with Christian Moueix at Trotanoy and La Fleur-Pétrus. As he pours his Trois Terres Vieilles Vignes, he explains that it comes from vines planted in the 1930s and 1940s in La Charme aux Prêtes, Grandes Vignes and Grasses Têtes. "When I started with my father in 2000, he was making the entire harvest with machines, so it was impossible to preserve the stems. I wanted to produce wines with whole bunches. My father said, 'Okay, you can make connerie, but not in Clos du Roy or Langeroies. We have other old vines you can use for this foolery.' So those vineyards became my laboratory to try organic viticulture. "I started to make wines with full whole-bunch fermentations," Fournier says, "but I didn't like it because I could only smell the technique-the whole-bunch character-and it covered the terroir. I also regularly had problems with fermentations-if they were difficult or went on too long, we had Brett problems. So now I mix destemmed grapes and whole bunches. I like the complexity, the spicy floral character-more aerien (of the air). When you destem, you have [only] the fruity character." His 2014 Trois Terres has two-thirds whole bunches in the fermentation. The yields on the old vines were low: 25 hectoliters per hectare, providing 2,000 bottles of a dynamic wine with red fruit energy and gravitas in the tannins. He also pours his 2014 Langeroies and the 2014 Version Original from the same old vines. While the Langeroies is fragrant, floral and earthy, with bright acidity and fruit that darkens to blackberries, the tannins in the Version Original have more detail and complexity, making the tannins of the straight Langeroies seem monolithic by comparison. The two wines are the same proportion of the vineyard lots, but he makes the Version Original without sulfites, only adding 1.5 grams at bottling: It seems naked, the vineyard's true character exposed. "Sulfites are an acid," he explains. "They attack the skin of the berries and extract much more from the tannins." So he's working to find other ways to protect pinot noir from oxidation, to not lose other elements of the wine as it ages. Perhaps his experiments inform the more traditional wines he makes, like the 2014 Clos du Roy, a wine with gentleness and lasting fragrance, without any excess weight in its tannins. And if there is a grand cru in Fournier's holdings, it may be a small sector of Clos du Roy, in the middle of the slope, at the north end of the vineyard. "There is a part of the vineyard richer in limestone-the hard rock. In August, the color of the leaves is light green and yellow: the vines suffer from chlorosis. There is too much limestone; the calcaire blocks the vine from eating iron." Fournier uses this parcel to produce Pur Pôt, a wine he ages in 50 percent new oak, without diminishing any of the precision or the direct limestone expression of the site. It's his most brilliant 2014, a wine with stature that seems to live above the earth and deep in the earth. "La ChampagneHaute was one of the best vineyards for my grandmother. She said it was the better place for the white. Now it is all houses." -Laurent Fournier WINE & SPIRITS OCTOBER 2016 45

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