Wine & Spirits - October 2019 - 35

FRANCIS EGLY OF EGLY-OURIET IN AMBONNAY

does, it only makes up five percent of her production. She
focuses her red wine on several parcels of old vines, including Le Clos, where some of the vines date to 1902, and
Les Brousses, where the average age is reaching 65 years,
the vines planted by her grandfather. Her father chose to
vinify the wine without oak barrels, and she decided to
continue with that style. "I'm a little afraid if I put it in
wood, I would lose the cherry-stone flavor, which is very
particular to Bouzy," she said, offering me a taste from the
vat of the most recent vintage. She captures that delicate
character by destemming her grapes and macerating the
bunches for four to five days in cold tanks. She warms
them up for fermentation, then, after malolactic conversion, the wine rests on its fine lees in tanks for four or five
years. Even without the support of oak tannins, Vesselle's
old-vine fruit has the stamina to age, as witnessed by the
freshness of her 2008.
That's nothing new. Long ago, the elegance and stamina of pinot noir grown in Bouzy appealed to Lily Bollinger, who favored Bouzy Rouge in the 1920s, even as her
husband, Jacques, bought up parcels of a vineyard high up
the côte in Aÿ, Bollinger's hometown farther west, in the
Vallée de la Marne. By 1933, the family owned all 9.9 acres
of that vineyard in Aÿ, the Côte aux Enfants, noted for its
steep slopes as well as for its active limestone-called out
on a map in 1901 for the particularity of its soil, as locals,
replanting after phylloxera, worked to find rootstocks that
were sustainable in the chalk.

DELPHINE VESSELLE OF JEAN VESSELLE IN BOUZY

efore they switched to Aÿ, 1928 is the last vintage
Bollinger has on record for their production of
Bouzy Rouge. Gilles Descôtes, the cellarmaster,
poured the wine at lunch several years ago to mark
the inauguration of Bollinger's Galerie 1829, an underground
library of vintages. It was among the most memorable wines
of the day, along with some astonishing Champagnes from
the 19th century that still held a memory of their bubbles. At
lunch, the Bouzy Rouge was an ethereal dream of pinot noir,
more than a ghost in its haunting presence of fresh fruit-
hinting at yellow raspberries-and in the precision and
silken depth of its structure. The dappled light on the white
tablecloth showed off the glint in the color of the wine; the
naked feel of that 1928 has stayed with me, as there was no
excess of flesh or bone, just a young spirit in an ancient wine.
Denis Bunner, the assistant cellarmaster, knew these
wines well, having spent several years assessing a cache of
old bottles an intern had discovered in Bollinger's cellars.
Tasked with cleaning up an alcove deep within the winery's
3.7 miles of limestone caves in Aÿ, the intern found an archway where a false wall hid a library of wines. The cache dated
back to 1829, when the company was founded. It had been
secreted away sometime before the Nazis invaded and was,
eventually, forgotten. Bunner's first job at Bollinger was to
inventory and restore that wine for Bollinger's Galerie 1829;
more recently, he spent a May morning opening bottles of
Coteaux Champenois, some from that pre-war stash, along
with other more contemporary vintages.
WINE & SPIRITS

OCTOBER 2019

Wine & Spirits - October 2019

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